Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal, if not greater, claim on our respect.
 
Example. ONE language only in the public sphere makes possible MANY voices to be heard and understood by all. To communicate our differences we need a common language.
 
Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other. Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.
 
I predict more shooting and less talking as the nation declines 'thanks' to the destructive leftists who have infiltrated the once-respectable Democrat Party.
 
Gun and ammo are flying off the shelves, even in the toniest enclaves of the bien-pensant:
 

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear,  which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

You know things are getting bad when the super-rich who can easily afford the best in private security are buying firearms. 

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

________________

*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Americana

Buffy Sainte-Marie, I'm Gonna be a Country Girl Again

Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

16 Horsepower, Wayfaring Stranger

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo. Have you heard this version?

Bob Dylan, As I Went Out One Morning

Highwaymen, The City of New Orleans

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo, 1963

A Socialist Argument for Border Control

Three years ago on this date on my Facebook page.  Redacted and improved.
 
………………..
 
Suppose you want a massive expansion of the welfare state. You want, among other things, a college education to be free to anyone who wants one. In addition, you want free health care for all, and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Suppose further that you want your socialist government to work and not go bankrupt. To will the end is to will the means. Among the means:  A stemming of the tide of illegal immigration. So here you have the makings of a socialist argument for border control, an essential component of which is a physical barrier at the southern border. An essential component, not the only one. Mirabile dictu: A socialist argument for a conservative conclusion.
 
You can't have both open borders and socialism. I say to the libertarians: You want open borders? Go for it, but ONLY AFTER you have stripped the government down to its Lockean functions and instituted something like a Nozickian 'night watchman' state. (See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) But of course that strip-down is not in the offing: the libertarian dream is u-topian. It's like Nowheresville, man, as Maynard G. Krebs might have said.
 
The welfare state in the USA is here to stay.  The only question concerns its size and scope. Will it metastasize unto the collapse of the nation?
 
An equal but opposite utopianism to that of the libertarians is the utopianism of the Green New Dealers.  To them and their democratic socialist fellow travellers, I say: you are going to have to become what you call 'xenophobes' and 'racists' if you want to implement a workable socialist scheme. You are going to have to become like us conservatives: 'nativists' and 'white supremacists' who hate the Other simply in virtue of his being Other.
 
Of course, none of these epithets apply to us. You only think they do in your perversity, ill-will, and deliberate self-enstupidation.

Krauthammer’s Fundamental Law Repealed

"To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." (Charles Krauthammer)
 
Cute and clever, the oft-quoted saying is a nice piece of journalese, but not quite right, although it gets at part of the truth. Krauthammer's 'law' conversationally implies that conservatives do not think that contemporary liberals or leftists are evil. But surely many of us do. Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and others. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil.
 
It is important to face the fact  that many if not most so-called liberals are not good people. You are not a good person, for example, if you routinely dismiss legitimate concerns for the rule of law in the matter of immigration by accusing conservatives of having an irrational fear of foreigners. That is a bare-faced lie and a vicious refusal to take conservatives seriously as rational beings and address their numerous and powerful arguments.
 
A second problem with Krauthammer's 'law' is that intelligent conservatives do not think of most liberals as stupid but as having the wrong values, or, when they have some of the right values, not prioritizing them correctly. Generally speaking, political differences reflect differences in values and principles and presuppositions, not differences in intelligence or 'information.'
 
And that is why the phrase 'low information voter' is asinine. Beloved by 'liberals' it suggests that if the deplorables had more 'information' they would vote Left. That is a conceit risible in excelsis. 

Above the Urinal at the Chess Tournament

Urine check!

I didn't make that up. It was at some cheesy Knight's Inn or similar venue in Phoenix in the early-to-mid 'nineties, when Myron Lieberman presided in his inimitable manner over well-attended tournaments and Ed Yetman, bandanna around his neck and sidearm strapped to his hip, manned the book concession. Say what you want about the chess scene, it is chock full of colorful characters.

……………

I posted the above on 21 October 2009. I received an e-mail message from Yetman today informing me of Lieberman's passing on Christmas Eve. Hats off to Myron and to Ed too for their services in promoting chess and organizing tournaments in Arizona.  

LiebermanMyron Lieberman (left) with former US Chess Presidents Harold Winston (center) and Don Schultz in an undated photo. US Chess archival photo

Anent the Yetman reference supra, the record will show that I am against open carry. Are You a Gray Man? explains.

Can it Happen Here?

It is happening here. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we haven't been for a long time. Most Americans are now willing to give up their birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage. Safety and security are their main concerns. The orchestration of fear by the powers that be is a primary tool for forcing us into political dhimmitude. The masked masses, complicit in their own cancellation, are proving easy to control.

Dreher explains in under six minutes.

While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' — while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist — plays right into the hands of the enemy.

 

Totalitarianism: Can It Happen in America? | PragerU

Vito Caiati responds with a little help from Winston Churchill:

Your comment on Rod Dreher in this morning’s post (“While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' — while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist — plays right into the hands of the enemy”) brought to mind Winston Churchill’s broadcast of June 22, 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. His words, those of one of the most stalwart opponents of communion of the inter-war years, are worth remembering when dealing with “conservatives” such as Dreher and his kind, who confront nothing comparable to the hard and unpleasant political choice of the British Prime Minister:

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I've spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. . . .

We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke.

Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. . . .

It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.

We have offered to the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them.”

We are indeed in a “war” with an implacable domestic enemy in which the tide of battle has dramatically and rapidly turned against us. What is most frustrating about Dreher is that he spends every day reporting on the assault by the Left on our culture, traditions, institutions, and freedoms, and yet he believes that we have the luxury of waiting for the coming of some pristine conservative leader, someone  più raffinato e puro than Trump. While he waits, the Republic is further undone by its enemies.

Exactly right, Vito. Dreher shares the characteristic referred to in your penultimate sentence with many so-called conservatives. They are waiting for someone "more refined and pure" to come along, a 'true conservative,' in a bow tie perhaps, who speaks and writes elegant English and displays all of the social graces, a clubbable man, a man cut from the same cloth as a George F. Will, or a Bill Kristol, not a boorish, mean-tweeting alpha male from the mean streets of NYC willing and able to slice into such effete  opponents as Jeb! Bush with mockery and derision.  These pseudo-cons are flummoxed and distracted by Trump's style so much so that they cannot pay attention to the deeply American substance of his words and his (not merely promised, but implemented) policies, policies they themselves pay lip service to but lack the cojones to implement. 

What are we to make of people like David Brooks and David French? Human behavior is multi-motivated and these two are undoubtedly complex and many-sided men with much good in them; I can't shake the idea, however, that a not inconsiderable driver of their behavior  is a desire for social acceptance by the elites and invitations to the most exclusive of Beltway soirees.  

French, for example, opposes abortion. A man comes along, a man much lied about and maligned, a patriotic American, who, though something of a sybarite in his personal behavior, yet accomplished much to stop the slaughter.  So what does French do? He throws in with Biden and the pro-abortion gang.  

If the distinction between style and substance were a stick, I would hit these pussy-cons over the head with it in a vain attempt at knocking some sense into them. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Out with the Old, In with the New

Happy New Year, dear readers. I wish you all the best for the coming year. 

Neil Young, Old Man 

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. Does it really soothe the soul? Or does it stimulate something 'south' of the soul? If the soul has a bodily locus or point of attachment, where would it be? But I am done thinking for the day. Time to feel. Balance in all things, including balance.

The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Tom T. Hall, Old Five and Dimers Like Me

John Fogerty, The Old Man Down the Road

Ray Charles, Ol' Man River

Bob Dylan, New Morning

Eagles, New Kid in Town

And many more . . . .

Victor Davis Hanson on Tribalism

I was planning to upload a  batch of quotations from Chapter Three, Tribes, in Victor Davis Hanson's latest, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America, Basic Books, 2021.  But my effort was stymied when the book was recalled. For now, there is this:

The reversion to tribalism that we are now seeing all around us may be inevitable. Collectively, we appear to be 'defaulting' to tribalism. Hanson:

Tribalism is by far the most ancient, natural, insidious, and stronger idea than nonracial citizenship. It is the default state of mankind. Its pedigree dates back to prehistory, and its vestiges were worrisome to later civilized states. (100)

[. . .]

Tribalism is now swiftly becoming a synonym for multiculturalism. It accepts that the strongest human affinities in a society, past and future, must arise from similar and natural racial, ethnic, religious, or clannish ties of blood among like groups. These pre-state bonds properly should supersede the citizen's collective and constructed political and social allegiance  to the nation-state. (100-101)

Hanson rightly distinguishes American multi-racialism with its commitment to a common culture from multi-culturalism and notes their opposition to each other.  A multi-racial society could work but only with a shared culture.  Without the latter, the nation will "unwind" and "revert to pre-state status," issuing in a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.

That is what we are in for, I fear.

Not long ago, tribalism was seen to be backward, reactionary and pre-civilizational, as "innately toxic" and "anathema to any pluralistic democratic society." (101) But no longer.

The Left’s Ingratitude

How ungrateful, and how wrong, to sneer at the very conditions of one's own existence, activity, and well-being! Nature and society, church and state, language and institutions, culture and mores, everything that one finds and was given, that one did not make, cannot make, and can improve only to a limited extent, and only with difficulty, and only with the tools that were handed down, but can easily destroy out of thoughtlessness, ingratitude, and perversity of will.