Of Gasoline, Oil, and Masks

I gassed up the Jeep Wrangler at Costco, Mesa yesterday to the tune of $2.899 per gallon for regular. Shell and other distributors were charging $3.18. Those of you who live under Californication are paying a lot more. Please take no offense, but you should really consider your complicity in allowing leftist termites to undermine a great state, once golden, now brown as you-know-what.
 
And then I entered the vast warehouse to buy six quarts of Mobil 1 Advanced Synthetic for my annual oil change. I've been doing it myself for a number of years, having been ripped off by some local grease monkeys. I do the job and I do it right and by the book. Do you think the low-paid mechanic will replace the O-ring on the filter housing and lubricate it properly or at all? The grease monkey reasons, "This rube is not going to check, and even if he did he would not know whether I had replaced the O-ring, and if I had replaced it, whether I used dirty or clean oil to lube it."
 
To my delight Costco has relaxed its draconian mask rule. Half of the shoppers were walking around with no masks. Last time I was there, I was reminded (in a friendly way) that my bandanna had slipped or been pulled down. A man has to breathe. (Which puts me in mind of George Floyd who drew his last breath on this date one year ago.) Damned near every time the bandanna came down, the enforcers of 'woke' conformity were on my case.  And then a week or two later I received a polite letter telling me if I didn't comply I would be banned from Costco. I was on camera the whole time and it was no big deal to identify me. Welcome to Sino-style surveillance!
 
How many years until we are a full-on police state? Perhaps you have noticed that 'woke' capital is in cahoots with Big Government. Bill Clinton's "The era of big government is over" was of course bullshit in Professor Frankfurt's sense, as one would expect from a Clinton.

The Way Forward

It seems we are condemned helplessly to watch our country be destroyed. The drift of events is ever downward. To turn things around would require something most of don't want to talk about — and for good reason. Angelo Codevilla ends his analysis with talk of "rebuilding the Republic" but he offers no concrete proposals. What he and almost everyone else on our side offers is just more talk, more analysis. Our enemies are impervious to reason and appeals to reason. There can be no reasoned discourse with people who maintain absurdities — e.g., that mathematics  is racist — and subvert language with their Orwellian innovations.  To attempt to engage with them on the plane of reason in search of the truth is to fail to understand that it is power, not truth that they seek.  

So what do you do? You secure your own little space and live the best life you can within it. That's the main thing. Retreat within your physical citadel, but even more importantly, retreat within your inner citadel to cultivate the soil therein. Properly cultivated, it should bring you to the insight that this world is a passing scene, a vanishing quantity, and nothing worthy of the full measure of your love and attention. But we ought not give up on it entirely. We watch and we wait. If there is an opportunity to make a difference, we do so. We may have only one night to spend in this bad inn, but it is a long night, and it is better to be warm than to shiver.

It Pays to Publish, but Don’t Pay to Publish

This came over the transom a while ago:

Dear Colleague,

British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science (ISSN: 2278-0998) is an OPEN peer-reviewed INTERNATIONAL journal. We offer both Online publication as well as Hard copy options. Article Processing Charge is only 100 USD as per present offer. This journal is now publishing Volume 10.

Only 100 semolians?  Get out of here, and take your crappy journal with you.

Publish PerishIf you need to pay to publish, then you shouldn't be publishing.   It is not that difficult to publish for free in good hard-copy outlets.  If I can do it, so can you.  Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications.  My passion for philosophy outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places.  When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work.  But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals such as Nous and Analysis.

Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head. 

1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it.  Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you to refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 60-90 % that get rejected. 

2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic. 

3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.  Adhere to the format guidelines. Check for typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.

4. Advance a well-defined thesis.

5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for.  Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a  philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referees.

6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal.  Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.

7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof.  Never protest editorial decisions.  You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink.  You have no right to have your paper accepted or even reviewed.  You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys' network.  In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.

Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.

Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle

It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.

………………………

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Tennyson Strikes a Chord

The bolded passage below is a beautiful poetic summation of  my philosophical position.

IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5
As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 10
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 15
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,
Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,
Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.
And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 20
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

‘And since—from when this earth began—
The Nameless never came
Among us, never spake with man, 25
And never named the Name’—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 30
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 35
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith
She reels not in the storm of warring words, 40
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 45
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

The Ancient Sage

Student Relativism

From my first weblog, dated 28 September 2004:

Student relativism  is not so much a philosophical theory as a form of psychic insulation. An outgrowth of adolescent rebelliousness, it says: "You can't teach me anything because truth is relative; we all have our own truths."

Not being a philosophical theory, Student Relativism cannot be refuted in the usual ways. It is a pathology that must be outgrown. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which adolescence in many extends into the twenties, thirties, and beyond. Some remain life-long adolescents in their mentality. Many if not most of these characters are found on the Left.

Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics

I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a matter of the here and now alone. The moral life is ultimately meaningful only in a theological setting. There has to be a Ground of morality with the power to effect a final adjustment of virtue to happiness beyond the grave.  And we have to be more than these miserably indigent bits of the Earth's fauna. None of this obvious, of course, and will remain forever in dispute, or at least until such time as we are replaced by robots.

While  the appeal of religion as morality is strong, and such metaphysics as must be presupposed to make sense of religion as morality, I cannot say the same about the appeal of religion as systematic metaphysics. It is difficult to understand, let alone believe, such doctrines as that of the Trinity and the Incarnation, let alone those more specific doctrines of Ascension, Assumption, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, and Transubstantiation.

The discursive intellect is flummoxed by such teachings.  (But it is also keenly stimulated by them, a topic for another occasion.)

But in the end, which is more important: orthodoxy or orthopraxy?  The latter.  Better to practice compassion than to write a book about it.

Morality needs a metaphysical underpinning, but must such an underpinning be rationally transparent to us? And if it cannot be rendered rationally transparent, how much ought that bother us?  Not so much that it causes us to stop living by the Ten Commandments and avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins. 

You will never be able to prove the immortality of the soul, but it is well within your power to live in such a way as to be worthy of it.  So live and you live well, no matter what the outcome. If death should prove to be annihilation of body and soul, what have you lost?

Presentism and Actualism: Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

The analogy between presentism and actualism has often been noted.  An unpacking of the analogy may prove fruitful if it doesn't perplex us further.  Rough formulations of the two doctrines are as follows:

P. Only the (temporally) present exists.

A. Only the actual exists.

Now one of the problems that has been worrying us is how to avoid triviality and tautology.  After all, (P) is a miserable tautology if 'exists' is present-tensed.  It is clear that the typical presentist does not consider the thesis to be a tautology. It is also clear that there is a difference, albeit one hard to articulate, between presentism and the various types of anti-presentism.  Consider the difference between presentism and eternalism. The presentist holds that only present items exist whereas the eternalist holds that past, present, and future items exist.  The disagreement obviously presupposes agreement as to what is meant by 'exists.'   There is a substantive metaphysical dispute here, and our task is to formulate the dispute in precise terms.  This will involve clarifying the exact force of 'exists' in (P).  If not present-tensed, then what?

A similar problem arises for the actualist.  One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual.  If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology.  But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean? 

We seem to have agreed that Disjunctive Presentism is a nonstarter:

DP.  Only present items existed or exists or will exist.

This is equivalent to saying that if x existed or x exists or x will exist, then x presently exists.  And this is plainly false. Now corresponding to the temporal modi past, present, and future, we have the modal modi necessary, actual, and merely possible.  This suggests Disjunctive Actualism:

DA.  Only the actual necessarily exists or actually exists or merely-possibly exists.

This too is false since the merely possible is not actual.  It is no more actual than the wholly future is present.

We must also bear in the mind that neither the presentist nor the actualist intends to say something either temporally or modally 'solipsistic.'  Thus the presentist is not making the crazy claim that all that ever happened or ever will happen is happening right now.  He is not saying that all past-tensed and future-tensed propositions are either false or meaningless and that the only true propositions are present-tensed and true right now.  The presentist, in other words, is not a solipsist of the present moment. 

Similarly with the actualist. He is not a solipsist of this world.  He is not saying that everything possible is actual and everything actual is necessary.  The actualist is not a modal monist or a modal Spinozist who maintains that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world which, in virtue of being actual and the only one possible, is necessary.  The actualist is not a necessitarian.

There is no person like me, but I am not the only person.  There is no place like here, but here is not the only place.  There is no time like now, but now is not the only time.

In sum, for both presentism and actualism, tautologism, disjunctivism, and solipsism are out! What's left?

To formulate presentism it seems we need a notion of tenseless existence, and to formulate actualism we need a notion of amodal existence (my coinage).   

We can't say, on pain of tautology, that only the present presently exists, and of course we cannot say that only the present pastly or futurally exists.  So the presentist has to say that only the present tenselessly exists.  

What do I mean by amodal existence?  Consider the following 'possible worlds' definitions of modal terms:

Necessary being: one that exists in all possible worlds
Impossible being: one that exists in no possible world
Possible being: one that exists in some and perhaps all possible worlds
Contingent being: one that exists in some but not all possible worlds
Merely possible being: one that exists in some possible worlds but not in the actual world
Actual being: one that exists in the actual world
Unactual being: one that exists either in no possible world or not in the actual world.

In each of these definitions, the occurrence of 'exists' is modally neutral analogously as 'exists' is temporally neutral in the following sentences:

It was the case that Tom exists
It is now the case that Tom exists
It will be the case that Tom exists. 

My point, then, is that the proper formulation of actualism (as opposed to possibilism) requires an amodal notion of existence just as the proper formulation of presentism requires an atemporal (tenseless) notion of existence.

But are the atemporal and amodal notions of existence free of difficulty?  This is what we need to examine.  Can the requisite logical wedges be driven between existence and the temporal determinations and between existence and the modal determinations? If not then presentism and actualism cannot even be formulated and the respective problems threaten to be pseudo-problems.

To speak the truth, one must be free to speak

Here:

One of the two men who had joined us for the conversation shared an anecdote from a family member in America. The family member’s little girl came home from school after receiving the standard antiracist indoctrination in whiteness and white supremacy. The child said, “I don’t understand this. Don’t all lives matter?” The child’s mom told her not to ever say those words — “all lives matter” — outside the home, because she could get in trouble.

Bishop Istvan nodded. Those who grew up under Communism know exactly what’s going on here. His interlocutor continued, saying that he is hearing that the phrase “white silence is violence” is a thing in America. He’s right:

The idea is that your silence — that is, your failure to affirm the ideology — is evidence of your guilt. One thinks of the story Solzhenitsyn tells in The Gulag Archipelago:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

You begin to see why the Soviet-bloc emigres are so panicked about what’s happening in America today, don’t you?