Category: Wokery

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Languishing in the archives of one of the early versions of this weblog is a post bearing the above title. I shall have to resurrect, refurbish, and re-post it.  An excellent recent example of misplaced moral enthusiasm is well-described in Spring the Felon, Kill the Squirrel.

This short article may help you leftists understand why you lost big yesterday.  Some forms of leftism are border-line respectable, but the wokeassery of Kamalism is not one of them.

Related:  From Gunman to Squirrel Man: Bernie Goetz Thirty Years Later

You do remember Bernie Goetz, don't you?

William James had a squirrel problem. You are aware of it, are you not?

If you like to think, you'll like my blog. If you don't like to think, you need my blog.

Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

Brooks again:

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and never will. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, I have read with care.  I rate him higher than Roger Kimball does, who is more of a public intellectual (a very good one!) than a philosopher. (PhilPapers lists only seven works of his.) I consider Adorno worth reading and evaluating, as I do in Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy.

Kimball:

Whatever Professor Jameson’s personal commitment to Marxist doctrine, there can be little doubt that his habits of thought were deeply tinged by the gnostic contempt for everyday experience and faith in a secular apocalypse that has characterized Marxism from the beginning. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted in the third volume of his magisterial study Main Currents of Marxism, this is the ultimate source of Marxism’s Utopian dreams and its great seductiveness for suitably disposed intellectuals. “The influence that Marxism has achieved,” Kolakowski wrote,

far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. … In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

That the Marxist apocalypse is declared to be the inevitable result of inscrutable “scientific” laws only means that its partisans are potentially as dangerous as they are mystifying: the revolutionary is one whose possession of “the truth” is impervious to experience. For him, “History” speaks with a voice beyond contradiction or appeal.

By the way, 'magisterial' is exactly the word to describe Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. It is the work of a master, a magister. But would it have killed Kimball to provide a page reference? If he had, the editors would probably have deleted it.  Why do you think that is?

Diversity = Cultural Enrichment

California, Colorado, and now Ohio. As a former resident of Ohio, this got my attention:

Welcome to Springfield, Ohio. It’s a nice town of about 60,000 that the administration decided needed about 20,000 Haitians – flown in directly from Haiti, mind you. Injecting this wonderful diversity from arguably the worst place on the planet into a nice little Midwestern town has had the predictable effect. Remember all those swans and ducks that used to swim in the park? They’re gone. The Haitians ate them. They’ve also eaten pet cats and dogs. Yeah, they’re eating peoples’ pets, slaughtering and butchering them, and turning them into lunch. I guess the cash they’re getting from all of us for the privilege of being here illegally isn’t enough – they have to chow down on Fido. Naturally, the American citizens of Springfield are disgusted by this, as well as the other crime and pathological behavior they’re seeing. What does the government say? “Shut up, racists. Also, you’re probably transphobes.”

Cats safe

Arendt on lies

Defensive Gun Use Without a Shot Fired

Texas man defends family from machete-wielding home invader with his 9mm semi-auto.

A quartet of questions.

How would you repel a home invasion?

Would you vote for a political party they leaders of which intend to violate your right to self-defense?

Would you lay money on the proposition that the miscreant depicted in the article is an illegal alien?

Is it wise to vote for a party that stands for open borders?

Related:  An Abuse of Language: 'Gun Buy-Back'

The Integrationist Fantasy

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, although not perfectly. But no longer. Whether a One can be made of Many  depends on the nature of the Many. 

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many. 

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy.  This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

To integrate is to bring together into a whole.  But a functioning whole, whether political, social, or of any sort, cannot be assembled from any old assortment of parts. In terms of an outworn metaphor from yesteryear, there have to be some constraints on the range of ingredients thrown into the melting pot. Your stew will not be improved by the addition of ground-up spark plugs or enhanced by a liberal dose of WD-40.

Keeping with the gustatory metaphor, wide-open borders is a recipe for disaster.  

J. D. Vance on Kamala the Chameleon

Under three minutes. 

Look, Dana, she's not running a political campaign. She's running a movie. She only speaks to voters behind a teleprompter. Everything is scripted. She doesn't have her policy positions out there. She hasn't answered why she wanted to ban fracking, but now she doesn't. She wanted to defund the police, but now she doesn't.

She wanted to open the border, but now she doesn't. She should have to answer for why she presents a different set of policies to one audience and a different set of policies to another audience. And I think that's what President Trump is getting at. This is a fundamentally fake person. She's different depending on who she's in front of.

Spot on. The fatuous fem is a fake, a phony, a fraud.  Almost everything out of her mouth is either incoherent or vacuous.  Have you ever heard her say anything that was neither? Tell me what it was.

Dem-Fems for Kamala

Miranda Devine:

As polls show America’s young men are lurching rightward at a rapid pace, the Democratic brand has finally evolved into the party of scolding shrews, nagging Karens and “preachy females,” as Dem dinosaur James Carville calls them.

Its image is tied to a type of unserious, self-involved, neurotic, dogmatic Dem-fem who insists on telling you her pronouns and whose highest goal is abortion on demand right up until the moment of birth. 

She is terrified of men unless they are transgender or submissive “white dudes for Kamala” with man buns. 

Now that Scranton Joe is out of the picture and Kamala is at the helm, the feminizing trend is accelerating the party into certain electoral oblivion (with the obvious caveat for election fraud). 

I am glad that the astute Miranda threw in the caveat. After all, we know a priori that the Dems will cheat their  asses off come November. If the end justifies the means, why not? It worked last time, so they figure it will work again. Compare the race card. The Dems have been playing it for years despite all the respectful, careful, and eminently sane explanations by conservatives that our positions are in no defensible sense of the term 'racist.' Why then don't the lefties listen to sweet reason and stop playing the card? Why don't they be nice and play fair? Because it works for them in attaining and maintaining power and control, which is what they are out for first, foremost, and forever. Power to do what? To tear everything down, so that, somehow, by some magic, utopia will arise. 

For the same reason they can be expected to cheat in the upcoming election.  You need to wake up from 'woke' and realize that our political enemies are just that enemies. They are enemies not just of us, but of the attainable good. They are not good people. I am mainly referring to the cadre Left (the core or skeletal drivers of the movement comprising the true believers, in Eric Hoffer's sense, and the cynics) and not the much larger group of useful idiots, who are morally and intellectually obtuse mediocrities.

It is foolish to underestimate the Kamala crazies, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out.

…………….

If any Kant aficionados are lurking about, my use of a priori above is the relative sense of the term Kant refers to in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) at B2:

. . . it has been customary to say , even of much knowledge that has been derived from empirical sources, that we have it or are capable of having it a priori, meaning thereby that we do not derive it immediately from experience, but from a universal rule — a rule which is itself, however, borrowed from experience. Thus we would say of a man who  undermined the foundations of his house, that he might have known a priori that it would fall, that is, that he need not have waited for the experience of its actually falling. But he still could not know this completely a priori. For he first had to learn through experience that bodies are heavy, and therefore fall when their supports are withdrawn. (NKS tr., p. 43)

Death by DEI

Politicians are especially in danger, although we are all  at risk.  Christopher Rufo:

To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president’s security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That’s just reality.

It’s a reality that the Secret Service is determined to circumvent. The agency itself has published its fitness standards in two parts: one for men, and a separate, less rigorous one for women.

And who is involved in "assassination prep?" Quite obviously, the Left:

The June issue of The New Republic is explicitly devoted to comparing Trump to Hitler, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. It’s full of essays about how grim life will be under Dictator Trump. The editors justified this by saying, “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”

Chicago under Democrat ‘Control’

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago  

I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.

True then, truer now. 

And you still be ridin' with Biden? How stupid can you be? How self-destructive? How willfully self-enstupidated? And of course the scourge is not upon Chicago alone but upon every Dem-'controlled' city, county, state, and jurisdiction.

Chicago shooting gallery

The humorous meme is now a reality:  ammo vending machines are coming to stores.  That's no joke.

I'm a staunch supporter of 2A rights, but this cannot be a good development. What's next? Ammo sales at drive-through liquor stores? "Would you like a box of ammo to go with your bottle of Hornitos tequila?  Today's special is Federal 115 gr FMJ 9 mm hollow point."  

To vote Democrat is to vote for more crime and the defunding of professional law enforcement  The more crime,  the more the burden of personal defense is placed on the citizen. But the average citizen is unlikely to get the proper training and to devote the time needed to become proficient in the use of firearms.  The upshot is more accidental negligent discharges. In a well-functioning society, the laws are enforced and the criminal element is kept in check so that the citizen can go about his business without the need to, and the grave responsibility that comes with, 'packing heat.'  

And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you?

Related: Shooting Up Chicago