Is Trump Still the TACO Man? Or is he now THE HAMMER?

VDH, Ten Iranian Questions:

Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.

And die it did. To hell with the American Left with its Tampon Timmies, its Joyless Behars, its cortically-challenged Cortezes, and its Kamalian clowns.   (It should be clear that I am no longer quoting my man Hanson.)

Some fear that Midnight  Hammer will lead to a wider war. It might. The world, led by  the USA, will then have the opportunity to rid itself once and for all of the current Iranian Islamist theocracy. That would be a good thing, and easy to accomplish: destroy the oil refineries first, and see if that gets them to back off, and "build back better," to coin a phrase.  If they remain recalcitrant, destroy their power grid.  No more pussy-footing around with these evil-doers. It's not 1979 any more, or the Carter administration.

Their  particular brand of Islamist insanity would then be finished forever. Do you doubt that? It would be finished in its concrete exemplification just as Nazi ideology was finished in its concrete exemplification in 1945. By 'concrete exemplification of an ideology' I mean its existence in an actual State.  Once the current Iranian Islamist theocracy is concretely at an end,  it is not likely to come back.  I will fire off two more points and you guys can have at me in the combox.

First. A great power such as the USA cannot be wholly non-interventionist, although it ought to be as non-interventionist as it can be consistent with self-preservation and the defense of its allies.  No nation-building! Non-interventionism is good, but it has limits. One limit is reached when anti-civilizational savages pose an existential threat to we us  the (more or less) civilized.  I call our enemies 'anti-civilizational,' but you ought not call them  'medieval' as some pundits do unless you want to advertise your historical ignorance and slam an entire epoch.

An existential threat is a threat not merely to one's physical existence or biological life, but to one's way of life.  The radical Islamist trilemma: conversion, dhimmitude, or death is radically unacceptable — which is why I call it a trilemma: three prongs, each of which is unacceptable.  If one has been nuked out of physical existence, then one has been 'nuked' out of cultural existence as well.   

This is why Khamenei and the boys cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. We do not yet know the extent or efficacy of Trump's bunker-busting despite Trump's typical boasts and exaggerations. (Trump is a builder, a promoter, and a bit of a carnival barker, but still vastly superior to any of the electable Democrats.) The Iranian nuclear program has, however, surely suffered a major set-back.  If they get it going again the IDF and the USAF will kick the mullahs' collective ass one more time.

Second. The Iranian people have a right to any system of government they choose so long as it poses no existential threat to any other State.  Who the hell are we to tell them how to live when our Western societies, dripping with decadence, are hanging by a thread?  (Leastways, until Trump came along.) If the Iranians want a theocracy, that is their business.  Is it objectively certain that our classically liberal system is better than a theocratic system?  No, or so say I, even though I firmly believe that our system is better than any theocracy. What if they want an Islamic theocracy? No problem with that either, so long as the Islam in question is moderate and wields no such trident as the one lately described.  I wish Zuhdi Jasser the best of luck in his quixotic quest to reform Islam.

Ann Coulter a while back said that we should invade the Muslim lands and convert them to Christianity.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Convert Muslims? Sheer madness. Coulter is a very intelligent woman, but sometimes intelligent people say stupid things.  Of the Abrahamic religions, Islam is the worst. Schopenhauer describes it as "the saddest and poorest form of theism."  It is the religion of terror at the present time. An inferior religion, it gives rise to an inferior culture, downstream of which is a benighted politics.  But Islam is their religion and it is better than no religion. Try barging into people's lives to convince them to renounce their parents, their hometown, their region, their religion, their folkways.  Try that down in Hillbilly Holler or anywhere.

Convert the benighted Muslims for the sake of their immortal souls because Jesus claimed to be via, veritas, vita? "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6, KJV. I was brought up on Douay-Rheims, but I love that old English.)   Why not make it more specific: extra ecclesiam salus non est, where the ecclesia in question is the Roman Catholic Church? That won't sit well with our Protestant or Eastern Orthodox pals, and it shouldn't. I go a step further: paths to salvation are many. I won't argue it out, leastways not now; I'll just refer you to the work of Frithjof Schuon. See, for example, The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

How about converting the Jews? Another form of folly. Here is an instructive short piece by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Brian Wilson and Phil Spector

Luis Sanchez:

The drift of influence between Brian Wilson and Phil Spector was fraught with one-sided expectation and imbalance of respect. It played out to mortifying effect when Brian offered one of his own songs, “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” for the wall of sound treatment, pitching it as an arrangement for Darlene Love in the summer of 1964. Spector took the gesture as an opportunity to embarrass his eager admirer. At first he humored Brian by taking the time to record an instrumental backing track for the song, even coolly inviting him to participate in a recording session for it. Brian was somewhat taken aback by Spector’s acknowledgment, but he agreed to play piano for a number of takes, nervously, expectantly, before Spector cut him off abruptly and sent him on his way, thanks very much. Later, he told Brian that his piano playing just maybe wasn’t up to snuff and he had no plans to ever finish the record, so don’t ask. An official American Federation of Musicians paycheck was drawn and sent to Brian for the exact time he put into the session. If such a slight even fazed Brian, he didn’t acknowledge it publicly, and “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” eventually wound up on The Beach Boys’ "Today!" album, sung from the perspective of a protective older brother.

The force of Spector’s studio craft can be heard in the way it subsumes the materials of its process. For all of its magnificent impact, the music he envisioned, committed to tape and put out into the world, is possessed of self-aggrandizement, where a density of sound is dominated by the force of personality. A record like the 1963’s “Be My Baby” is practically impenetrable. The double boom, boom-boom, thwack! drum pattern that bursts the song open sounds like thick slabs of concrete stacking together, setting up a chamber with an opening just big enough for The Ronettes to sing from. Veronica Bennett pleads with such conviction and it seems like it has enough power to devastate Spector’s wall. But the architecture the song erects is too constrictive. As hard as Bennett’s wail pushes, it always echoes back on to itself; and when the music was no longer enough to keep it contained, Spector eventually made the song a grim fact, turning his marriage to Bennett into her real-life prison well into the 1970s.

Of all of Spector’s work, “Be My Baby” etched itself the deepest into Brian’s mind. In its own way, this recording is a gaping enigma in the story of Brian’s journey as an artist. Throughout the years, it comes up again and again in interviews and biographies, variably calling up themes of deep admiration, a source of consolation, and a baleful haunting of the spirit. Author David Dalton tells a particularly evocative story about spending time at Brian and then-wife Marilyn’s Bel Air home in the late ’60s aftermath of "Smile." While the couple is away, he discovers a box of tapes inside their bedroom one day. “I assumed they were studio demos or reference tracks and threw one on the tape machine. It was the strangest thing,” he wrote. “All the tapes were of Brian talking into a tape recorder. Hour after hour of stoned ramblings on the meaning of life, color vibrations, fate, death, vegetarianism and Phil Spector.” Dalton sketches Brian’s preoccupation with “Be My Baby” in terms of a spiritual seeker assiduously attempting to penetrate the mysteries of an occulted object. Brian kept copies of the song available everywhere inside his home, in his car, at the studio, for constant immersive listening. The final result of the story and the variations of it that accumulate from an array of biographies and documentaries is an image of wretchedness: Brian locked in the bedroom of his Bel Air house in the early ’70s, alone, curtains drawn shut, catatonic, listening to “Be My Baby” over and over at aggressive volumes, for hours, as the rest of The Beach Boys record something in the home studio downstairs.

The woeful irony here is that years before Brian retreated impetuously to the safety of a real or manufactured catatonia, he not only mastered the keyed-up instrument combinations and high-stakes Wagnerian sensation of Spector’s sensibility, but he also worked out a way to breach its ferocity. While putting together material for The Beach Boys’ spring 1964 album, the stupidly titled "Shut Down Vol. 2," Brian wrote “Don’t Worry Baby,” a song that he hoped would convince Spector after “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” failed to. For Brian, the allure and power of creative proprietorship never compelled him the way it compelled Spector; the satisfaction of having one of Spector’s girl groups be the voice of one his songs was in itself more than enough of a reason to pursue collaboration. Fortunately or not, Spector never expressed an interest and Brian recorded “Don’t Worry Baby” with The Beach Boys and released it as the B-side on the single for “I Get Around.” Despite the title’s obvious reference to “By My Baby,” the overall effect of The Beach Boys record is radically different from anything Spector could have achieved with it.

The lyrics of the Beach Boy songs were puerile and 'puellile' but the melodies, harmonies, and production job were outstanding.  Brian's "Wave of Sound" (a Mavphil coinage!) stacks up well against Phil's "Wall of Sound." 

Compare Then I Kissed Her with Then He Kissed Me.

Are Catholics Christians?

A fellow philosopher writes,

While reading Clarence Thomas’s opinion in Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services (2025), I came across this sentence: “Americans have different views, for example, on whether Catholics are Christians.” I’ve heard it said, before, that Catholics aren’t Christians, but never knew what to make of it. (The same thing is said about Mormons.) Have you written about this (about whether Catholics are Christians)? What must one think Christianity is in order to believe that Catholics aren’t Christians? Strange.
I haven't written about this topic because it is perfectly obvious that (Roman) Catholics are Christians.  Proof: The Catholic Apostle's Creed. Every Catholic is a Christian, but not conversely.  Calvinists, for example are Christians but not Catholics. Similarly for all the other Protestant sects. No Protestant is a Catholic. That too is obvious.  
 
Did Justice Thomas, for whom I have great respect by the way, cite anyone who claimed that Catholics are not Christians?  Who would say such a thing?
 
People say the damndest things. There are people who say that math is racist. Now that does not even begin to make sense, involving as it does a Rylean category mistake. Not making sense, it cannot have a truth value, that is, it cannot be either true or false. Mathematics does not belong to the category of items that could sensibly be said to be either racist or non-racist.  Compare: 'How prevalent is anorexia nervosa among basketballs? More prevalent than among footballs?' Those questions involve category mistakes.  Other examples: What is the volume of the average thought? What is the chemical composition of the number nine?  What size shoes does God wear?
 
People who assertively utter 'Math is racist' are using those words to say something else, although it is not clear what. Perhaps they  mean to say that since blacks as a group are not good at mathematics, giving them math tests is a way of demeaning or oppressing them and can have no other purpose. Or something.  Speaker's meaning in this case strongly diverges from sentence meaning.
 
Can this distinction help us explain what people mean when they say that Catholics are not Christians?  Going by sentence meaning, the claim is obviously false.  But one might use those words to express the proposition that Catholics are not true Christians, where a true Christian is defined in some narrow and tendentious way, as, for example, someone who refuses to accept the Hellenically-tainted doctrines emanating from a magisterium (teaching authority)  that interposes itself between the individual soul and God as revealed in Holy Writ.
 
We are now in the vicinity of No True Scotsman.  Among the so-called informal fallacies is Antony Flew's No True Scotsman. Suppose A says, "No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge." B replies, "But my uncle Angus puts sugar in his porridge." A responds, "Your Uncle Angus is no true Scotsman!"
 
Similarly, A says, "No Christian is a Roman Catholic." B replies, "But my Uncle Patrick is a Roman Catholic."  A responds, "Your Uncle Patrick is no true Christian!"

Noisome Newsom, Legal Know-Nothing, Rebuked

California's obstructionist crapweasel and narcissistic pretty boy was handed a massive loss, to the delight of the sane and reasonable and to the dismay of hate-America Dementocrats. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom just got a brutal lesson: the president of the United States is the commander-in-chief, not the governor of California. Second, he doesn’t need your permission to federalize your state’s National Guard units. It’s insane that a district court even entertained this wacky notion. 

President Trump federalized California National Guard units to be deployed in Los Angeles to quell the unrest from leftists upset over raids executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The US Marines were also deployed. Newsom tried to block this move via emergency motion, which was denied. Then, Judge Charles Breyer decided to grant this motion, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later stayed. And even these judges were disturbed by how Breyer tried to usurp the powers of the executive in these matters, which are clearly defined. Another hearing was held on Breyer’s order, which is now indefinitely blocked; Newsom won’t get control of the Guard anytime soon. 

I am a native Californian.  California once earned its descriptor, "Golden State." Leave it to leftists with their anti-Midas touch to transform what is golden not merely into something base, but into something feculent. 

Is God a being among beings or Being Itself? An Exchange with Dale Tuggy

Top o' the Stack.

One morning, just as Old Sol was peeping his ancient head over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition range, I embarked on a drive down old Arizona 79, past Florence, to a hash house near Oracle Junction where I had the pleasure of another nice long three and one half hour caffeine-fueled discussion with Dale Tuggy. For me, he is a perfect interlocutor: Dale is a serious truth-seeker, no mere academic gamesman, analytically sharp, historically well-informed, and personable. He also satisfies a necessary though not sufficient condition of fruitful dialog: he and I differ on some key points, but our differences play out over a wide field of agreement.

I incline toward the view that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Dale rejects this view as incoherent. In this entry I will take some steps toward clarifying the issues that divide us. I will conclude in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically.

Trump, Nukes, and Nation-Building

It is blindingly evident that Ayatollah Khamenei and the rest of the  radical Islamists in control of Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Donald Trump has been clear and consistent about this during the ten years he has been in the political spotlight.  He may speak of diplomacy and agreements but he understands that a piece of of paper will not deter such savages. 

Unlike the feckless and demented Joe Biden, Trump has excellent threat-assessment skills. He understands that the greatest threat to humanity is not 'white supremacy' or 'climate change,' but nuclear war. And unlike his impotent predecessors Obama and Biden, he knows better than to make idle threats. He gave Khamenei 60 days. On the 61st all hell broke loose.

So what DJT has to do is supply the Israelis with the bunker buster bombs and delivery systems (B-2s) to annihilate  the infrastructure needed to develop the nukes. [Corrigendum 6/19: I am assuming, probably falsely, that the USA can simply supply the Israelis with the bunker-busting GBU-57s and the B-2s so that the IDF can do the job.]

But there is dissension in the MAGA ranks. I wonder if Tucker Carlson is aware of the distinction between preventing the present Iranian regime from acquiring nukes and forcing the Iranians to adopt a Western form of government. I am for the first, against the second. The Iranians have the right to any government of their choosing, including an Islamic theocracy as long as it does not support such  terrorist surrogates and proxies as  Hamas and Hezbollah, and as along as it does not develop nuclear weapons.

As my respect for Carlson goes down, my assessment of Fetterman goes up. Funny world. 

The Neo-Con mistake was to think that we can teach the peoples of the Middle East how to live by invasion, occupation, and nation-building. Utter folly.  But that is not what Trump is about.  Preventing Khamenei and his gang from acquiring nukes is entirely consistent with Trump's non-interventionist  foreign policy.  [On second thought, a great power such as the USA cannot be purely non-interventionist if it is to succeed in protecting its own interests. Here non-interventionism meets its limit. In the present emergency, an exception must be made: the USA must intervene to prevent the rogue state from acquiring nukes. The preceding sentence smacks of Schmitt: I am currently immersed, critically of course, in his works.] 

"The Romans, foreseeing troubles, dealt with them at once, and, even to avoid a war, would not let them come to a head, for they knew that war is not to be avoided, but is only put off to the advantage of others." (— Nicolo Machiavelli, in "The Prince.")

Applying Machiavelli's point to the present: War to the death cannot be avoided with Khamenei's Iran. So let's get it it over with. Khamenei is stalling; he thinks he can survive the current Israeli onslaught, develop his nukes, and fight later.  (This is essentially General Jack Keane's analysis. Sounds right to me!) So what DJT has to do is supply the Israelis with the bunker buster bombs and delivery systems (B-2s) to annihilate  the infrastructure needed to develop the nukes. [Not right. See my first corrigendum supra.] This may  ignite a popular uprising against the clerical thugs, which could only be good. Trump and Netanyahu have made it clear that the Iranian people are not the enemy.

Addendum 6/19. What I wrote above leaves something to be desired: political theory is not my wheelhouse. It takes a bloody long time to "study everything" as my masthead motto recommends. See the comment thread and in particular the linked articles for a nuanced overview of the entire geopolitical shit-scape.  

Postmarked Utopia

Ed Farrell, a long-time friend and reader of Maverick Philosopher since April 2010, tells me that he has a Substack up and running, entitled Postmarked Utopia.  Please do bring him some traffic. Here is the initial paragraph of his inaugural post:

I've called this site "Postmarked Utopia" not because I live in Utopia but because I live in a wannabe utopia: the progressive western world, which has once again embarked on the great project of destroying its cultural foundations so that some sort of free-and-equal paradise might rise like a phoenix from the ashes. With variations, this is the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try at this. At the moment we're stalled in populist uprisings. Will we get past this? I hope not. If the past is any guide, Utopia is a bitch and delivers only brain-death and servitude. 

 

A Test for Marital Compatibility

Sage Substack advice. Hit the road with your bride-to-be and see if she can take a little hard travelin'.

 

Diner

 

A reader comments:

I tried something similar in the summer of '79. The girlfriend was Juanita, Sicilian by lineage and temperament, a Tae Kwon champion, and a commercial pilot. I proposed a drive to Florida from Pittsburgh. She said you drive, I'll fly and meet you there. You can guess how that relationship went.

If the target mate won't take the bait and stand the test, hand her her walking papers on the spot.

Saturday Night at the Obituaries: 2025 So Far

Contributors to the great Boomer soundtrack are dying on all  sides. Here are just some from 2025 so far.

Brian Wilson, June 11th.  Sloop John B.

Sly Stone, June 9th. Everyday People

Rick Derringer, May 26th.  Memphis

Nino Tempo, April 12th. Deep Purple

Lenny Welch, April 8th. Since I Fell for You

Johnny Tillotson, April 1st. Poetry in Motion

Jesse Colin Young, March 16th. Get Together 

Roberta Flack, February 24th. Killing Me Softly with his Song

Marianne Faithfull, January 30th. As Tears Go By

Gary Grier, January 26th, Do You Love Me?

Barry Goldberg, January 22nd. Killing Floor

Garth Hudson, January 21st. Chest Fever

Peter Yarrow, January 7th. Blowin' in the Wind

Grok on Brian Leiter

I put the question to the Grok bot: Who first called Brian Leiter 'Ladder Man' and why? Grok shot back: 

The earliest identified use of the nickname "Ladder Man" for Brian Leiter appears in a blog post by Bill Vallicella on Maverick Philosopher dated March 13, 2014. Vallicella used the term to criticize Leiter’s perceived obsession with academic rankings and status, particularly through his creation and management of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), a controversial ranking of philosophy PhD programs. The nickname plays on the German word "Leiter," which means both "ladder" and "leader" (as in Gauleiter), suggesting Leiter’s focus on climbing or promoting hierarchical structures in academia. Vallicella’s post describes Leiter as a “careerist” and links the nickname to his reputation for prioritizing professional status and rankings.

 
 
No earlier source is identified, so Vallicella likely coined the term. The context was a broader critique of Leiter’s influence in philosophy, including his academic gossip site, Leiter Reports, and his perceived aggressive behavior, which some labeled as "thuggish." The nickname reflects a satirical jab at Leiter’s role in shaping academic hierarchies.
 
Not bad! But truth be told, I did not coin 'Ladder Man.' The honor goes to John J. Ray. See his blog Brian Leiter (Ladderman). I will check back later to see if Grok does an update. My impression thus far is that Grok crawls through substacks more assiduously than it does through blogs.
 
Hegel wrote about objecktiver Geist.  Your humble correspondent is but one subjective spirit making his contribution to the depositum philosophiae subsisting in the aether of cyberspace.

What’s It All About?

The question makes sense.  Variant: What's it all mean? Ron Crumb's Mr. Natural has an answer for you:

Mr Natural
The answer illustrates the use of' 'shit' as a quantifier, an 'urban quantifier' if you will.  This predicament we are in — call it life — doesn't mean anything.  The 'urban' use of 'shit' is an interesting linguistic bagatelle that I explored some years back in a delightful post entitled Quantificational Uses of 'Crap.' But the meaning, point, purpose of life is no bagatelle, linguistic or otherwise.

I find it unutterably strange that we might die, become nothing, and never find out what it was all about, or that it was never about anything.  We the living do not know what it is all about, and if the curtain doesn't rise at the hour of death, no one will ever know. Or at least no mortal will ever know. How strange that would be!  Could it be like that?

It could be in the sense that it is epistemically possible, that is, possible for all we can legitimately claim to know.  I am using 'know' in that strict and serious way according to which knowledge entails objective certainty. What I know sensu stricto I know without the possibility of mistake. But people are lazy and sloppy and claim to know all sorts of things that "just ain't so" (Ronald Reagan) when in fact that don't know 'jack' or 'squat' or 'diddly squat.'

No doubt many believe both that life has a meaning, point, purpose, and what that meaning is.  But belief is not knowledge. People believe the damnedest things. (A sizable number of leftists believe that one can change one's sex and race, that math is racist, and that Trump is Hitler.) Corollary to belief's not being knowledge is the fact that conviction is no guarantee of truth. 

The most one can attain in this life is a reasoned belief and a reasoned conviction. And most don't even get that far. (My meta-claim of course applies to itself: I do not claim to know, sensu stricto, that it is true. I claim merely that it is reasonably believed.)  

Can we reason our way forward here? Note first that Mr. Natural's claim is just that, a claim. He is merely opining, and indeed blustering. What the hell does he know, or Ron Crumb, his creator? 

You cannot prove that life has an ultimate meaning that overarches the petty and proximate meanings of the quotidian round. But you are within your epistemic rights in believing it, assuming you do so reasonably and responsibly.  And so I revert to what I have said many times before, namely, that in the end we must decide what we will believe and how we will live.  For a deeper dive, see yesterday's installment.

The will comes into it. The decision is free but not arbitrary in the pejorative sense: the decision is reached after due doxastic diligence has been exercised in the evaluation of the various considerations for and against, and the decision is maintained over time by ongoing evaluation as new arguments and evidences surface.  Don't confuse liberum arbitrium with random neuronal swerves. 

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe

My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".
 
Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote  (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking.  [. . .]  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  
 
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc.  But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important.  What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.) 
 
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know  something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise.  In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed.  But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus.  One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.)  With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it.  We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
 
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it.  (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
 
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
 
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew.  I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be.  One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.  
 
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part.  You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days;  if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to  cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc.  You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse.  That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
 
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult. 
 
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this  world is the creation of  an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.'  Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich?  And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil.  You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument'  is one way.
 
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
 
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation. 
 
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens,  I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas.  In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle.  Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness.  We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
 
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now.  "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
 
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is  “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit.  Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.  
 
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."

Artificial Intelligence and the Death of the University

The universities have been under assault from the Left for decades, but now advanced A. I. has its destructive role to play.

A recent article by James D. Walsh in New York Magazine, widely circulated among academics, reported that “just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT [in 2022], a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments”. The use of Generative-AI chatbots for required coursework is, if anything, even more widespread today. At elite universities, community colleges, and everything in between, students are using AI to take notes in class, produce practice tests, write essays, analyze data, and compose computer code, among other things. A freshman seems to speak for entire cohorts of undergraduates when she admits that “we rely on it, [and] we can’t really imagine being without it”. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes multiple students who are effectively addicted to the technology, and are distressed at being unable to kick the habit — because, as an NYU senior confesses, “I know I am learning NOTHING.”

Related: Do You Really Want to Teach at a University?