I haven't done any cat blogging in a righteous spell. Call me a slacker. Friday is the official cat blogging day here at MavPhil and elsewhere in the blogosphere, but this Friday is Good Friday. Cat man Dave Bagwill sends this:
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Cat Blogging!
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Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?
On 11 January 2017 I wrote a post that begins:
Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal? Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics. This won't be easy. I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws. And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony. Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay. And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.
The post attracted some very good comments. The consensus was that I flunked.
Four years have past since I made that entry. That is a long time in this age of social, political, and technological hyperkineticism. If I were to rewrite it today it would have to reflect the increasingly delusional quality of leftist 'thought' as we jerk, not merely accelerate, toward our cultural collapse.
Jerk?
Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.
From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.
If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.
The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction: the end of civilization as we know it.
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A Tribute to Dallas Willard
My study of a fine article on Gustav Bergmann's assay of the act this afternoon led me to look up its author, Greg Jesson. Among other things, I found this tribute to Dallas Willard. My own little tribute to Willard is here.
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Is it Wise to Speak Out?
To focus the question: is it prudent for conservative dissidents to speak out against 'woke' madness? That depends. This will help you think it through. I wrote below:
In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it. This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right. For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated. Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion. Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list. After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'
On the other hand, if you don't exercise your rights, you may as well not have them.
There are ways between the horns of this dilemma but they will vary from case to case.
Try to become financially independent as soon as possible by a combination of hard work, frugal living, and wise saving and investing. Then the tyrants won't be able to 'cancel' your livelihood so easily. They can, of course, still 'cancel' your life. Would they? Well, if they have no problem stripping you of your livelihood because of the exercise of your rights, what is likely to stop them from going all the way?
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs
"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)
Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody. YouTuber comment: "Late 1959. I was in 4th grade, listening to KFWB Los Angeles." Same here. Same year, same grade, same station, KFWB, Channel 98! Color Radio! My favorite deejay was B. Mitchel Reed. I learned 'semolian' and 'mishigas' from him. His real surname is 'Goldberg,' which means mountain of gold. I will say no more lest I provoke my alt-Right correspondents.
Timi Yuro, Hurt. When I first heard this I was sure she was black. I was wrong. She's Italian, and her real name is Rosemarie Timotea Auro. What pipes!
Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You
Roy Orbison, In Dreams
Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon
Ketty Lester, Love Letters
Etta James, At Last
Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You
Sentimental you say? What would life be without sentiment? You say it's overdone? You suffer from an excess of cool. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, and feel. Tonight we feel, tomorrow we think. About sentimentality and everything else under the sun.
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Gerontocracy, Paedocracy, Xenocracy
Are the first two, in cahoots, pushing us toward the third? Run with it, bloggers!
Here, Thomas Sowell does a number on our favorite paedocrat.
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When Does Life Begin?
A brief Substack entry which makes a very simple point that, amazingly, is not appreciated by vast numbers in this country 'thanks' to the erosion of standards of thought and behavior caused by so-called 'liberals.'
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Another ‘Too Late’ Story: Elizabeth Wolgast
Long-time reader Dave Bagwill wrote to tell me that he tried to contact his old professor at Cal State, Hayward, Elizabeth Wolgast, but was too late. "She was a very fine woman with a penetrating intellect and a warm heart," Dave recalls. From Wolgast's obituary:
Elizabeth H. Wolgast
Feb 27, 1929 – Oct 13, 2020
Elizabeth Wolgast, died October 13 from complications following a stroke on October 1: she was 91. Elizabeth was born in Dunellen, NJ in February 1929. In 1936 her family moved to a farm outside Philadelphia run by her mother (a degreed nutritionist) while her father worked in business. She studied water-color painting as a young woman which became a life-long passion for her. She met her husband, Richard, at a drawing class at Cornell University and they married in 1949. Elizabeth went on to earn a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington and had a long, distinguished career teaching at the Cal State University at Hayward. She was a trailblazer in her profession being the first tenured female professor in that department. She was still the only one there when she retired. She enjoyed visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, Cambridge (England), West Point, and Abo (Finland). She authored four philosophy texts and numerous journal articles.Read the rest. Here is her PhilPapers page.
I just now ordered a used copy of Wolgast's Paradoxes of Knowledge for a paltry $8.34. You may wish to spring for a new copy for a mere 529 semolians.
We best honor a philosopher by reading his work and thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically.
As a general rule, you should never buy a book you haven't read. (That sounds like a bit of a paradox itself.) But the Wolgast volume appeared under the Cornell imprint, so it is probably worth reading in part if not in toto. I sense that it will be heavily Wittgensteinian. But a little Wittgenstein never hurt anybody.
Time was, when I had space for books but no money. Now it is the other way around. I may have to buy a bigger house. Without books would life be worth living?
In these trying times, we who value high culture need to build vast private libraries that cannot be easily marauded by the totalitarian agents of leftist destruction. We also need to lay in righteous supplies of Pb to protect them.
Theme music: It's Too Late, She's Gone
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In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct
The entry below was written on 18 May 2009 and posted the same day. I had meant to send it to Dr. Loretta Morris, Richard's widow, but couldn't find her e-mail address. The other day I discovered her obituary. So here is another case of too late again.
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The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow). I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy." I also took a course in logic from him. The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books. And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I myself taught.
I don't believe Morris ever published anything. The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question. But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.
The moral of the story? Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy. So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.
I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when. The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend. I've done it a number of times. I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher. I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no. What ingrates we are!
So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.
Heute rot, morgen tot.
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Hypocrisy? Double-Standardization?
Accusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.
The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters.
A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.
The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue. In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)
Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada. But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health. When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense. Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.
Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly. Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.
We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences.
What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization. We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.
I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.
I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all. Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:
Win at all costs and by any means!
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Is America Pre-Totalitarian?
Rod Dreher raises the question. The video is less than ten minutes long.
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For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue
'Never' is too strong, but close enough:
Let me explain. As per the graphic, for the Left, the real issues are not protection of children and anti-terrorism. They are but distractions from the real issues. The real issues are suppression of dissent, erosion and ultimate elimination of constitutionally-protected civil liberties such as those guaranteed by the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, expansion of centralized (federal) government control with concomitant violation of states' rights as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment, not to mention institution of an omni-invasive Sino-styled surveillance apparatus and 'social credit' register to further limit dissent, stifle liberties, and 'cancel' livelihoods.
But why do the leftists who now dominate and control the Democrat Party want these things? To insure their gaining and maintaining of power in perpetuity, to be sure. But that is only half the answer. Why do they want power? They want it not just because they exult in its exercise and increase, but because they want it to forward their agenda, which is the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be. Obama announced the goal brazenly: to fundamentally transform America, not to make needed reforms and improvements, but to transform her fundamentally. But conservatives, who in the end conserve nothing, and are content to talk and write and conduct seminars on cruise ships, are slow on the uptake, and, hobbled by their civility and other virtues, cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are political enemies who mean what they say and out for their political liquidation.
So when Tucker Carlson, et al., say that the leftists are out for power, that is not a good answer. After all, we of the Coalition of the Reasonable want power too. Bear in mind that power is good. (If it weren't, omnipotence would not be counted among the divine omni-attributes.) Without power one cannot implement the good. The difference is that we want power to implement constructive ends whereas the Coalition of the Treasonable who bow and scrape before the heads of evil regimes, who open the border during a pandemic, who empower criminals, who undermine the rule of law, want power so as to achieve destructive ends.
Am I alleging that everyone on the Left knowingly promotes evil? No. Some leftists are fools, others are ignorant, still others are useful idiots, others still are suborned by their greed and power-hunger. TDS continues to drive many insane . It's a mixed bag. But there is no moral equivalence here between Left and Right any more than there was between the S.U. and the U.S.
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The Atheist
A Substack rumination over a Brunton observation.
Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…