Why Tulsi Gabbard is Leaving the Democrat Party and Why You Should Too

Here at Substack. HT: Anthony Flood. Full text follows. Please propagate. Do your bit to restore some sanity to this country and to the world. 

Why I'm leaving the Democratic Party

Tulsi Gabbard
 

I love our country. Our God-given rights of freedom, life, and liberty enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are my inspiration. I answered the call to duty and took an oath, dedicating my life to supporting and defending those freedoms, both in uniform and in public office.

Growing up in Hawaii gave me a special appreciation of our home, water, and precious natural resources.  So when I was 21 years old I decided to run for Hawaii State House so that I could be in a position to protect our environment.  I wasn’t politically affiliated before that, but as I was about to file my election papers, I had to choose which party to affiliate with. 

As I did my research, I was inspired by Democrats who stood up against the war in Vietnam, and those who fought for Hawaii’s plantation workers who were being abused and exploited by wealthy landowners. I was inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and drawn to the ideals of a big-tent Democratic Party that stood up for working men and women — the little guy.  In contrast, the Republican Party seemed like one that stood for the interests of big business and warmongering elites.  So I became a Democrat and remained one for over 20 years — an independent Democrat to be sure, but a Democrat nonetheless. 

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.

Here are some of the main reasons I’m leaving the Democratic Party, in brief. I’ll be tackling each of these in more depth in the coming weeks.

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Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

Substack latest.

The spirit of the Left is the spirit of negativity. Any intellectually honest person following current events can see that the tendency of leftists is mindlessly to destroy for the sake of destruction what it has taken centuries to build. Transgressive of tradition and its wisdom, these 'progressives' are both hobbled and enabled by their presentism. Hobbled, because they know nothing of the past. Enabled, because their ignorance allows them to imagine themselves to be free of the moral limitations of humanity. Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marital Advice

Before you even think of getting married, make sure you have plenty of money.

Then shop around.

Consider who will become your mother-in-law.

If you want to be happy,  don't worry too much about physical beauty. 

If she has a cheatin' heart, hit the road, Jack.

But then again you might be better off without a wife.

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Bonus cut: Lauro Nyro, Wedding Bell Blues

Leftist Omni-Politicization

For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot be politicized. There is nothing political about the Poisson distribution or Rolle's theorem.
 
Will the leftist back off? Hell no, he will deny that anything has a nature, and affirm that everything is subject to social construction. For example, a typical leftist will state that a conservative black is a traitor to his race. Now that makes no sense. 'Traitor' is a political notion; 'race' is not. Race is not like political affiliation. You can quit your party, and if you are a Democrat you should; you can't, however, quit your race. Not even Rachel Dolezal could pull it off.
 
Being a leftist, however, means that you don't have to make sense. Herewith, a case of 'leftist privilege,' to give it a name.
 
You say you've forgotten who Rachel Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.  The Left is all about the erasure of memory, collective and individual, except for what serves their agenda. To refresh your memory, see Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman.
 
I make a mistake at the end that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!

Maxims and Meta-Maxims

1) Live now: resist the tendency to bring the past into the present.

2) Beware of viewing yourself through the belittling eyes of others.

3) Avoid negative and weakening thoughts.

4) Avoid comparisons with others.

5) Keep socializing to the minimum necessary to maintain one's sanity and humanity.

6) Do not associate with those beneath you except as duty and necessity require.

7) Guard the mind, the tongue, the heart.

8) Abide in the here, the now, the self.

9) Aspire.

10 Strive and persevere.

11) Begin the day with a review of these and other maxims.

12) Maxims ought to be part of one's 'everyday carry.' Don't leave home without them.

13) Age quod agis!

14) Indulgence weakens; resistance strengthens.

15) Coin new maxims.

16) Carpe diem et noctem! 

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism with Bread and Circuses

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption. A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.
 
Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of Big Government and its leftist enablers and shills in mainstream media, the so-called 'universities,' the churches, the courts, and horribile dictu, the military!
 
The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left Big Government by 'woke' elites. There is nothing democratic about them.

Polarization and Flotation in Politics

Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is.
 
A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen. He will know that in the end "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no life left for 'penmanship.'

A Common Mistake in the Abortion Discussion

It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.
 
Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.
 
The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.

The Affinity of Philosophy and Madness: David Stove on the Logos

From an interview with a philosopher of madness who is also a mad philosopher in the sense that he has experienced severe psychotic episodes requiring hospitalization,  Wouter Kusters:

JB: So, to paraphrase again, the ‘mad person’ is grappling with the very same profound questions as the philosopher, but is doing so in more chaotic, ‘uncontained’ and perhaps, as a result, confusing way. The content — i.e., preoccupations with philosophical, spiritual, religious matters common in those so diagnosed — is not a ‘symptom’ of a disease process but indicative of a radical immersion in these immense conundrums of existence. I also take you to be saying that the mad person may have gone a little too far into this and has entered a sort of philosophical freefall. The key difference between the mad person and the philosopher, then, is not one of biology or pathology, but of the context and container in which this exploration is taking place. Is that right? 

WK: Yes, that is absolutely right. But with this caveat: it could also be argued that both philosophy and madness are themselves symptoms of a disease process, the logical outcome of our endowment, since prehistory, with a consciousness that can reflect on its own emptiness. But the key difference between the mad person and philosopher still lies where you place it, yes. 

As a philosophical maverick, I am neither analytic nor Continental, but someone who,  conversant in both idioms, has published in both types of journals. I chop logic and engage in close analysis and argumentation, but I am also no stranger to such existential moods as Heideggerian Angst, Sartean nausée, and Camusian absurdité. Not only have I had these feelings, I am also open to their possibly revelatory value as disclosing deep truths about our predicament in this life. I am  thus  interested in the question of the relation of philosophy to topics the 'well-adjusted' are apt to consider border-line mad or 'pathological' and thus of no objective significance.  What follows is something I wrote years ago about and against the spiritually superficial Australian positivist David Stove who has no sympathy whatsoever for the mad and mystical depths of genuine philosophy.  What I wrote is perhaps too polemical. But I persist in my conviction that Stove was a deeply superficial fellow, a philosophistine, a term I will define below. 

……………………………..

Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,

That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says ’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)

A few comments are in order.

1. Let’s start with the parenthetical claim at the end. To say that two statements are (logically) consistent is to say that they (logically) can both be true, that there is a (logically) possible world in which both are true. But a statement cannot be true or false unless it possesses meaning: meaningfulness is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition of having a truth-value. Now to be meaningful and to be intelligible are the same. It follows that Stove is wrong and that it is not the case that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible. Consistency is defined in terms of truth, and truth requires intelligibility.

2. Are The Word was with God and The Word was God, taken singly, unintelligible? Not unless you are a positivist who ties intelligibility to empirical verifiability. But the principle of cognitive significance that positivists employ (according to which every cognitively meaningful statement is either logical/analytic or else empirically verifiable in principle) is itself empirically unverifiable. And since it is neither a truth of logic nor an analytic truth or logical truth, it is itself meaningless by its own criterion. Stove is hoist by his own petard, or cooked by his own stove.

3. To say or imply that no concrete thing in the world could have a proposition-like structure, and that anyone who thinks this is a lunatic, is itself a lunatic thing to say. I maintain that the world’s basic particulars are concrete facts and thus have a proposition-like structure, and I am no lunatic. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002). Closer to Australia, atheist David Armstrong, no slouch of a philosopher, and sane as far as I can tell, argues, quite sensibly, that contingent truths require truth-makers and that the latter are states of affairs, proposition-like entities. Stove’s suggestion that a view like this is insane shows that there is something deeply wrong with Stove. 'I am seated’ is true in virtue of the fact of my being seated. My being seated is a proposition-like entitiy. Insanity? Or common sense?

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh.  What justifies it?  The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level. 

For more on Kusters, I refer you to the NDPR review of his book, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, Nancy Forest-Flier (trans.), MIT Press, 2020, 738pp., $39.95, ISBN 9780262044288.