Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Erasure of the Historical Record

    The erasure of the historical record via alteration of documents, book burning, iconoclasm, shadow-banning, and the like is common to totalitarian systems whether Communist, National Socialist, Fascist, Islamist, or  'woke.'


  • Rod Dreher

    Dreher's right about a lot of things despite his TDS.  But who among us is wholly free of faults, foibles, and fatuities? Read on:

    The United States is a country where we castrate young males and cut the breasts off of young females, and call it liberation. We are a country where it is considered moral progress to bring in deviant men who dress like women, and have them read to children modern fairy tales teaching them to question their bodies and their sexual identities. We are ruled by an elite class that treats LGBT culture as sacred, and that celebrates its way of life in commerce, in advertising, in education, and everywhere it can possibly be inculcated into the rhythms of daily life. Our ruling class and its dominant value system now celebrates racism, and calls it "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Our young people are suffering a horrible mental health crisis. Millions of our people, especially poor and working class people, are succumbing to "deaths of despair" via drug and alcohol addiction.

    Our young are going to live with less material, social, and emotional security than their parents and grandparents, while our liberals are tearing down all sources of solidarity outside of radical politics, and our conservatives mostly don't care. The United States is busy destroying its higher education system, which used to be the envy of the world, all for the sake of ideologizing it. We are also destroying the capacity for excellence in science and nearly every other field of endeavor, for the sake of DEI ideology. The rich are getting richer, and the numbers of the economically precarious grow daily. And for the past two decades, Washington has not seen a war it didn't want to fight, even as the woke war machine understandably struggles to convince young Americans that serving in the armed forces is worth doing. Respect for God is in collapse among American youth. Violent crime is up. American pop culture celebrates what is most violent, sexual, and degraded in the human experience, and exports that baseness globally. Over and over, as I travel through Eastern Europe, I hear the same thing from beleaguered parents, teachers, and religious leaders: that there is no way to resist American pop culture and its effect on their young. A high school teacher in Poland once told me that there is nothing at all in his country remotely as powerful as Western pop culture in forming the moral sensibilities of young Poles. What we Americans have done and are doing to our country, we are training the next generation of young people abroad to do to theirs.

    And on and on.

    Try being a normal conservative outside of the US bubble, and you'll see how America, which used to be a beacon of hope to others, is now seen with ambivalence, and even hostility, by people who see how the United States is destroying its own society, and is also trying to export its corruption abroad. It's a challenge to love your country when you listen to older people in the former Soviet bloc ask you, one way or the other, what happened to the Shining City on a Hill that they used to love?

    Excellent, Rod, excellent! But then why the hell do you attack Trump? Did you listen to his announcement speech? WTF is wrong with you?


  • Neither Angel nor Beast

    I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea. 

    Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than the angels, but a man who follows lust is lower than the brutes.

    The angels face no ongoing battle with sensuality; so we who after long struggle master ourselves are greater than angels in self-mastery. We humans have both the vices of the flesh (lust, greed, gluttony) and the vices of the spirit (pride, envy, anger, and sloth)  to combat whereas the angels are tempted by only the latter four. The man who empties himself into the diaspora of the sense pleasures, however,  has degraded himself, reaching  a nadir inaccessible to any mere animal. While we, in our present state, cannot reach the celestial zenith, we can all-too-easily 'achieve' the sublunary nadir.

    Such is man, a strange hybrid, amphibious as between the realms of spirit and matter. Some will say that he is a sick animal, sickened by spirit (Ludwig Klages, Geist als Widersacher der Seele. Others that he is a fallen spirit. 


  • The Religion of Archeological Preservation

    If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation.  Modus tollens or modus ponens?

    Images here.


  • Hatred of Apostates

    Hatred of apostates is another similarity between leftists and radical Muslims. 


  • Servility Will Cower to Force

    How ovine are you? Substack latest.


  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Merton, Baez, Dylan, and Ry Cooder

    Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist – all of it.  The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966:

    Borrowed  a record player and  played Joan Baez over again — and now really know "Silver Dagger" (before I had the melody confused with "East Virginia"). One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan's Highway 61 [Revisited].  

    On p. 324, Merton references Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. YouTuber comment:

    One of the greatest songs ever written. I just love it. It describes so accurately the feelings we had back in the 60s. Everything was strange and new and brilliant. Music was everywhere, all with different sounds and lyrics. Dylan was right in the middle of it. There are so many good songs on his albums. If you aren't familiar with him you should listen to some of his stuff.

    In the same volume of Merton's journal we find "A Midsummer Diary for M" and on p. 305:

    All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez's song, "Silver Dagger." I can't get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.

    Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. The old 1960 Jim Reeves country crossover hit.

    Ry Cooder, Good Night Irene.  Leadbelly.  Eric Clapton's rendition at a 1982 English Christmas party. 

    Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses. The old Hank Snow tune.

    Ry Cooder, Maria Elena. An old standard from circa 1932.

    Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas. Excellent evocative video.  Great YouTuber comment:

    Man I have been gone way too long. I miss America, the open road, the wild west. I remember staying in hotels with just a dozen rooms or so, and only maybe four of them in operation. Twenty seven bucks and bed springs so squeaky we had to make love on the floor. Walking out to the pay phone, a billion stars in the sky, I need to try and find my way back again.


  • Bestiality, Rape, and Consent

    Bestiality in the sense relevant here is sexual intercourse of humans with lower animals. Is there anything morally wrong with it? Some say that there is because lower animals cannot be consensual partners in bestial relations.  Here is one form the argument might take. 

    Argument from consent against bestiality 

    1) It is morally wrong to do anything to a sentient being without that being's express consent.
    2) Bestiality is the initiation by a human of sexual relations with a non-human sentient being without that being's express consent.
    Therefore
    3) Bestiality is morally wrong.

    Is (1) true? Here are some putative counterexamples.  a) Raising, killing, and eating animals for food. ('Turkey Day' is coming!) b) Killing animals (and humans) in self-defense. c) The majority of cases of punishment from the obviously legitimate and necessary disciplining of children to the obviously legitimate and necessary incarceration of some criminals to capital punishment. 

    Surely (1) is false given (b) and (c). Suppose we substitute for (1)

    1*) It is morally wrong to do anything to a sentient being capable of granting consent without that being's consent. 

    This change blocks counterexample (c), but not (a) or (b). So (1*) is false too given (b). Because (b) is false. the following argument against rape  unsound:

    1*) It is morally wrong to do anything to a sentient being capable of granting consent without that being's consent. 
    4) Rape is the initiation of sexual relations by a human being with a human being capable of granting consent at the time at which the sexual relations are initiated without that being's consent.
    Therefore
    5) Rape is morally wrong.

    Now people who are not morally obtuse 'know' that there is something deeply immoral about bestiality and rape. What then makes these actions morally wrong? My tentative conclusion at the moment is merely negative: it is that considerations of consent do not contribute to sound arguments against these actions.  


    2 responses to “Bestiality, Rape, and Consent”

  • So Long, Nancy

    I bid Madame Speaker a fond adieu on Substack.


  • Is Reason a White Male Euro-Christian Construct?

    I lay into John D. Caputo in my latest Substack article.


  • The Militant Defends Trump and Our Civil Liberties

    I never thought I'd be quoting from The Militant! A tip of the hat to Tony Flood who writes,

    I could consider making a tactical alliance with one who signs off with "The fight to defend constitutional liberties is at the center of the class struggle today." This is classic Marxism, not Antifa terrorism.
    Populist democracy makes for strange bedfellows. This is true democracy, not Orwellian 'democracy' which is the wokester's name for oligarchy. Why then am I not a socialist? Two reasons. First, socialism does not work economically. Second, because socialism runs counter to human nature and will not be freely adopted, socialism must be enforced. Enforcement  requires a massive state apparatus inimical to individual liberty. It would be interesting to do a comparison between totalitarian state socialism and 'woke' capitalism. Both are totalitarian, anti-populist, and suppressive of individual freedoms such as freedom of speech and thought. (See fourth quotation below.) How then do they differ? Excerpts:

    Throughout the final days of the 2022 campaign, Democrats centered their fire on former President Donald Trump. They claim “democracy itself” is threatened if he ever holds office again. Before Trump was even elected in 2016, Democrats unleashed the FBI against him — and against constitutional freedoms working people have won in blood and sorely need. They’ve used congressional witch hunts and launched a cascade of legal cases against him, his family members and political allies.

    Speeches by prominent Democrats make abundantly clear they will continue on this course whoever wins control of Congress. The real culprits responsible for Trump, they insist, are the millions of working people President Joseph Biden calls “semi-fascists” and believes can’t be trusted to make political decisions.

    The entirety of Biden’s prime-time Nov. 2 speech — his main address prior to the election — was to attack so-called MAGA Republicans as a “threat to democracy.”

    [. . .]

    Then in the Nov. 2 speech, Biden said Trump supporters threaten the rule of law, not because of what they do, but because of what they think and say. This is an attack on freedom of speech itself.

    [. . .]

    The only other issue Democrats campaigned around is abortion, built on false claims that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer outlawed it. But that isn’t true. It held abortion had no basis in the Constitution and returned the debate over the issue to the people and their elected representatives.

    [. . .]

    Smear opponents as ‘foreign agents’

    From the beginning, one key theme of the Democrats’ assault on Trump and his administration was the utterly disproven charge that they were hooked up with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They got the FBI to put forward the Steele Dossier, a collection of gossip and smears paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to try and impeach Trump.


  • Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path

    I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.

    Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it.  They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as  war, and if we don't, we lose.  

    Brian and I are a couple of patzers, which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner. 

    That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins. With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.


  • Newsflash!

    I just beat a 1221 player in a 3-minute Internet Chess Club game. His handle: cosmiccondomrum. Cute, eh? My current 3-min rating is 1028. Of course, that is nothing to crow about. 


  • Hegel on History: Another Case of Misattribution

    Misattributed to Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Close, but that's not what he says. 

    I haven't checked the following quotations, but they look good to the eye of one who has read his fair share of the Swabian genius. HT: Seth Nimbosa

    Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben. (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte)

    What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (1975))

    I'll leave it to the reader to ponder the internal coherence, or rather incoherence, of the Hegelian observation.

    Related:

    Misattributed to Socrates

    A Misattribution [of mine] Corrected

    If you can show me that I have made a mistake, I will admit my error.  How many people do that? Am I now 'signaling my virtue' or setting a good example? You decide. 

    Of course, it is easy to admit minor errors.  It is the big ones that we are loathe to admit.


  • Relativism and Dogmatism

    Substack latest

    My Substack snowball is getting bigger and bigger. Time to monetize? Well, it's a labor of love and I've got enough loot to last me my sublunary tenure, assuming the Dementocrat destruction of the economy is kept within certain bounds. 

    I believe that Enough is Enough when it comes to material stuff. Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pile up loot and land. You have heard it said that in the end a man needs only six feet. And not even that if the crematorium is his body's last stop.

    On the other hand, as foibled as we are psychologically, people tend to value more what they pay for. And if they are paying, then they may pay closer attention 'to get their money's worth.'

    Or maybe they think like this: "This guy gives away his content for free; he must not think it is worth much."

    On the third hand, If I sell a product, then I am in thrall to my customers and must cater to their wants and desires. This thrall thwarts my independence. I'm big on the latter. 

    So you can expect my articles to stay free, free for me and free for thee.



Latest Comments


  1. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  2. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  3. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  4. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  5. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

  6. https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email



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