Counterexamples and Outliers

An exception to a universal generalization is a counterexample that refutes the generalization. All you need is one. Generic statements cannot, however, be similarly refuted. 'Nuns don't smoke cigars' is a generic statement. If you turn up a nun who smokes cigars I won't take you to have refuted the generic statement. I'll dismiss the exception as an 'outlier.' 

Memo to self: develop this line of thinking and then apply it to 'hot button' issues such as race. Is Candace Owens representative of black females or is she an 'outlier'? And to which generic statements is she an outlier?  You won't touch this question, will you? Not with an eleven-foot pole, which is the pole you use to touch questions you won't touch  with a ten-foot pole. 

See my aptly appellated entry, Generic Statements, for more on generic statements.

Don’t Talk Like a ‘Liberal’

When you do, you validate their obfuscatory and question-begging jargon.
 
For example, leftists believe in something they call 'hate speech.' As they use the phrase, it covers legitimate dissent.
 
It is foolish for a conservative to say that he is for 'hate speech,' or that 'hate speech' is protected speech. Dennis Prager has been known to make this mistake. We conservatives are for open inquiry and the right to dissent. Put it that way, in positive terms.  
 
If leftists take our dissent as 'hateful,' that is their presumably willful misapprehension. We shouldn't validate it.
 
Don't let leftists frame the debate. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

De Anima

David K. writes,

I need some help.  I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review.  I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings.  Presently, I am in the middle of two works:  The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones and Soul Machine by George Makari.  I am looking for a contemporary philosophical treatment of the topic.  I have searched the categories on both your blogs but wonder if there is a direction you can point me to as well.   

With pleasure, David.

For a high-level contemporary treatment by a distinguished philosopher of religion, I recommend Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019.  The Soul Hypothesis, eds. Baker and Goetz, Continuum 2011, is a collection of essays by analytic philosophers. For a hard-core old-time  Thomist treatment, one that is probably not quite in line with your current interests as a medical doctor, but still highly relevant given your Catholic upbringing, take a gander at  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul (no bibliographical details in my copy!).  More relevant to your biomedical interests is Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Cambridge UP, 1988. 

Directly relevant to your concerns is  the mercifully short Were You a Zygote? by G. E. M. Anscombe. Also of interest is Erich Klawonn, Mind and Death: A Metaphysical Investigation, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.

I'll add further titles if they occur to me. Comments are enabled  if anyone wants to make suggestions.

Finally, here is a review by Thomas Nagel, no slouch of a philosopher, of the Swinburne volume mentioned supra.

Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America

Ordered yesterday, arrived today. That's what I call service. Only in America, but then what's with the 'wokery' of Bezos and the boys?  Turn the USA into a Soviet-style shithole and then what motive would anyone have to innovate? A bit of a paradox. Did the US defeat the SU to become SU 2?

By Zbigniew Janowski.  I found the reference in Political Ponerology.  Afterword by Ryszard Legutko, the author of The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Encounter Books, 2016, 2018. It entered my library on 14 February 2021, a gift from Brian Bosse.  

Should we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable be supporting Amazon with our purchases? I started a post on that question a while ago.  It languishes in the queue. 

Delivered!

Addendum. Dave Bagwill recommends Alistair Elder, The Red Trojan Horse: A Concise Analysis of Cultural Marxism, 2017. Also available via Amazon.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

An explanation by James Lindsay that goes to the heart of the matter in less than three and one half minutes.

I add the following which is an excerpt from my Substack article, Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical.

A key word in the CRT arsenal is 'equity.'

'Equity' sounds good and so people are thoughtlessly for it. It is like 'social justice' in this respect. They don't realize that leftists, semantic distortionists nonpareil,  have hijacked a legitimate word so as to make it  refer to equality of outcome. Being uncritical, people don't appreciate that there is an important  difference between equality in its formal senses — equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality in respect of political/civil rights, etc. — and equality of outcome or result. Formal equality is an attainable good. Material equality is unattainable because of group differences.  To achieve material or non-formal equality, equality of outcome, the means employed would be worse than the supposed cure.

Given undeniable group differences, 'equity' does not naturally arise; hence the only way to achieve 'equity' is by unjustly taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive.  The levelers would divest the makers of what is rightfully theirs to benefit the undeserving takers. 'Equity' is unjust!  It is unjust to deny a super-smart Asian or Jew a place in an MIT engineering program because of a racial/ethnic quota.  Judging candidates by merit and achievement, however, naturally leads to the disproportional representation of Asians and Jews in such programs. That is a consequence that must be accepted. Candidates must be judged as individuals and not as members of groups.  Indeed, the superior black must take precedence over the inferior Asian or white, but not because he is black, but because he is superior. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

I post what I like, and I like what I post. It's a nostalgia trip, and a generational thing. There's no point in disputing taste or sensibility, or much of anything else. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, stop thinking, and FEEL!

Traveling Wilburys, End of Line, Extended Version

"The best you can do is forgive."

Who, Won't Get Fooled Again. Lyrics! 

Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick Six. Sorry, Bob, but not even you can touch this version.

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes  a Train to Cry.  Cutting Edge Bootleg version.

Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman.  This Cutting Edge take may be the best version, even with the mistakes. I'll say no more, lest I gush.

Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. The Bard never loses his touch. May he die with his boots on.

Bob Dylan, Corrina, Corrina. And you say he can't sing in a conventional way?

Moody Blues, Wildest Dreams. Nostalgia City.

Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere, Man

Soggy Bottom Boys, Man of Constant Sorrow

Ex-Leftist Tells All

I have mentioned Michael Rectenwald (yes, that is how he spells his name) here and here. Tom Woods today tells the story of Rectenwald's move from Marx to Mises. I thank Tony Flood for the link. 

Michael Rectenwald, formerly a professor at New York University, spent his life as a leftist — a self-described Marxist, in fact.

When on Twitter he began to turn against the tactics and behavior we see routinely on the left, particularly on college campuses with their win-by-intimidation tactics, you know what happened: his leftist colleagues took it as an opportunity to examine that behavior carefully and open a dialogue with people of different views.

Just kidding.

You know that’s not what happened. That’s never what happens.

Instead, they completely isolated him on campus. Out of one hundred colleagues, perhaps two would say hello to him. People would not even get in the elevator with him.

They exiled him to the Russian department — where, he told me, people were told he was a bad person who was not to be spoken to.

But would he necessarily abandon leftism, just because of bad treatment by leftists? After all, even under the Soviet Union there were plenty of cases of communists condemned to death by the Party who nevertheless continued to believe. “The Party is always right,” they said.

Rectenwald is different.

He spent his career writing in left-wing journals about left-wing ideas. He knows everything there is to know about postmodernism, deconstruction, and all the rest of it. He knows these folks and their ideas inside and out.

And what happened to him at NYU caused him to reexamine all of it.

He’s since been reading Ludwig von Mises and describes himself as a libertarian.

“Three years ago I was writing critiques about the terminal decadence of capitalism,” he told me in one of his appearances on the Tom Woods Show, “and now I’m talking about the terminal decadence of Marxism from a libertarian perspective.”

In response to the Marxist slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” Recentwald observes: “We know what that means: if you need a bullet in the head, you’ll get that.”

Spencer Case Reviews Dissident Philosophers

At Quillette. The fair and thorough review concludes:

Together, the essays collected in Dissident Philosophers offer a fascinating and valuable glimpse into the lives and minds of marginalized thinkers. The contributors explore some of the social pressures that enforce official and unofficial orthodoxies, and give some indication of the interesting research proposals that aren’t being pursued as a result. This timely volume should give thoughtful readers of all political persuasions a lot to chew on, even if they can’t swallow everything.

A pdf of my contribution to the volume is available here.

Biden as Fitting Symbol of our Nation’s Decline

Some of Joe Biden's personal attributes have national analogues in our general moral malaise, our infrastructural breakdown, our lunatic embrace of race-delusional 'critical' race theories and their noxious, anti-civilizational outgrowths such as 'ethno-mathematics,' our economic dependence on geopolitical adversaries for essentials . . . .

Biden is corrupt morally, a brazen liar, a serial plagiarist, a grifter, and a political opportunist rooted in no discernible principle except that of self-promotion. Physically decrepit, he is also quite obviously  non compos mentis, not of sound mind. Even his supporters now admit his cognitive decline. Manipulated by others, he is a puppet on a string, many strings, pulled by unseen deep state operatives. Told what to say, he is more one dictated to than a dictator. But from time to time the puppet comes alive, goes off script, and blurts out something both stupid and dangerous, as when he recently spoke what is left of his mind: "Putin cannot remain in power!"

This senile outburst has exacerbated the grave danger we and the whole world are now in. I shake my head as did Sean Hannity and Dan Bongino last night when Geraldo Rivera came to the fool's defense.