Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Why Typos Don’t Matter Much and the Musical Watershed that was the ‘Fifties

    This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me.

    Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater, the English language, our dear mother, mistress and muse, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.

    Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.

    …………………………..

    An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

    I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together

    Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical or spelling hang-ups here.  My friend is an old Kerouac aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives.   Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen?  My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.

    A curious watershed era it was in which  the sweet and tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse.  Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music.  "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call."  That was actually played on the radio in the '50s.  To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing.  And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."

    I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic.  The prime example?  Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.  One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!'  Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Aptronym of the Day: ‘Jason Rantz’

    RantzI've seen the bearer of the name several times on Tucker Carlson's show, and I am impressed. He talks sense and his head is screwed on Right.  His appearance is odd with his pompadour and his thick and possibly cosmetically enhanced eyebrows. But we conservatives 'celebrate diversity' too.  And not just the politically correct variety.

    Could 'Rantz' be his real name?  Is this a case of nomen est omen?

    Nominative determinism anyone? 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Great Articles at American Greatness

    Gorka, Hanson, Kimball, et al.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Was Jesus a Socialist?

    No way! He actually fed people.

    …………………..

    I came to this witticism via Karl White who got it from someone unnamed.  It is too good not to repeat and propagate.  So do your bit and spread it around.

    You can't battle the Left effectively with just one weapon: the whole arsenal has to be brought to bear.  Sweet reason has its uses with some, and the hard fist of unreason with others. Mockery and derision can be effective. And throw in some contumely for good measure.

    Don't forget: it's a war. If they win, we lose. They never rest, and so we must be ever-vigilant. Right now the bastards are doing their best to deploy the Chinese virus against Trump and his supporters.  Their nefarious actions are legion. One is the exploitation of the crisis to empty the prisons. They had that goal all along; now they can use the Chinese virus as an excuse.  Another is to use the crisis to close down the gun stores.  

    Typically leftist: take the side of the criminal element, and violate the rights of the law-abiding. There is nothing progressive about leftists: an appropriate appellation is 'transgressive.' Open the borders; empty the prisons; violate the Constitutional rights of citizens.

    Anyone who identifies as liberal, left, progressive, Democrat must be met with the (defeasible) presumption of scumbaggery: they are to be presumed morally obtuse  and intellectually self-enstupidated until they prove otherwise.  They bear the onus probandi.

    But the presumption is defeasible. Allow those under scrutiny the opportunity to defeat it. Be tough, but fair.

    I call this the political burden of proof.  My previous formulations of it have been too polite.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Arizona Governor Issues Stay-at-Home Order

    Here:

    Gov. Doug Ducey on Monday issued a statewide "stay-at-home" order to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, preventing Arizonans from leaving their residences except for food, medicine and other "essential activities."

    The directive, which also allows for outdoor exercise, will take effect upon close of business Tuesday [3/31] and apply through at least April 30.

    You extroverts will suffer, and it will be a moral challenge for us introverts to contain our Schadenfreude.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Break Contact with Political Opponents?

    Should one break off contact with those whose social and political views one finds abhorrent?  

    Let me mention one bad reason for not breaking off contact.  The bad reason is that by not breaking off contact one can have 'conversations' that will lead to amicable agreements and mutual understanding. This bad reason is based on the false assumption that there is still common ground on which to hold these 'conversations.'  I say we need fewer 'conversations' and more voluntary separation.  In marriage as in politics, the bitter tensions born of irreconcilable differences are relieved by divorce, not by attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable.  

    Let's consider some examples.  In each of these cases it is difficult to see what common ground the parties to the dispute occupy.  Lack of common ground makes interaction pointless, time-wasting, and disruptive of peace of mind.  The less common ground, the stronger the reasons for the political equivalent of divorce, or at least mitigation of contact.

    1. Suppose you hold the utterly abhorrent view that it is a justifiable use of state power to force a florist or a caterer to violate his conscience by providing services at, say, a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony.  

    2. Or you hold the appalling and ridiculous view that demanding photo ID at polling places disenfranchises those would-be voters who lack such ID.

    3. Or you refuse to admit a distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

    4. Or you maintain the absurd thesis that global warming is the greatest threat to humanity at the present time. (Obama)

    5. Or you advance the crack-brained  notion that the cases of Trayvon Martin and Emmet Till are comparable in all relevant respects.

    6. Or, showing utter contempt for facts, you insist that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an 'unarmed black teenager'  shot down like a dog in cold blood without justification of any sort by the racist cop, Darren Wilson.

    7. Or you compare Ferguson and Baltimore as if they are relevantly similar. (Hillary Clinton)

    8. Or you mendaciously elide distinctions crucial in the gun debate such as that between semi-auto and full-auto. (Dianne Feinstein)

    9.  Or you systematically deploy double standards.  President Obama, for example,  refuses to use 'Islamic' in connection with the Islamic State or 'Muslim' in connection with Muslim terrorists.  But he has no problem with pinning the deeds of crusaders and inquisitors on Christians.

    10. Or you mendaciously engage in self-serving anachronism, for example, comparing  current Muslim atrocities with Christian ones long in the past.

    11. Or you routinely slander your opponents with such epithets as 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'xenophobic,' etc.

    12.  Or you make up words whose sole purpose is to serve as semantic bludgeons and cast doubt on the sanity of your opponents.  You know full well that a phobia is an irrational fear, but you insist on labeling those who oppose homosexual practices as 'phobic' when you know that their opposition is in most cases rationally grounded and not based in fear, let alone irrational fear.

    13. Or you bandy the neologism 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon when it is plain that fear of radical Islam is entirely rational. In general, you engage in linguistic mischief whenever it serves your agenda thereby showing contempt for the languages you mutilate.

    14. Or you take the side of underdogs qua underdogs without giving any thought as to whether or not these underdogs are in any measure responsible for their status or their misery by their crimes.  You apparently think that weakness justifies.

    15. Or you label abortion a 'reproductive right' or a 'women's health issue' thus begging the question of its moral acceptability.

    16. Or you think biological males should be allowed to compete against biological females in sporting events.

    And on, and on, though the entire litany of leftist lunacies. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • National Breakup?

    At First Things, a podcast in which F. H. Buckley discusses his book American Secession. A little less than 32 minutes.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Presentism and Truthmakers: A Reply to David Brightly

    I first want to apologize to David Brightly for not paying more attention to his ongoing gentlemanly critique of my ideas at his weblog, tillyandlola: Comments on the Maverick.    Although our minds work in very different ways, this is scant excuse for my not having engaged his incisive and well-intentioned critique more fully.  I shall make amends in this Lenten season and beyond. On 28 April 2019, he posted the following:

    Presentism and Truthmakers

     
    Bill runs through the truthmaker objection to presentism:  truths about the past are truths now and hence need present truthmakers yet under presentism there don't seem to be any.  Let's consider a variant of Bill's example: 

    S. Kennedy commanded PT109.  

    That's true.  But what in the present grounds this truth? On the face of it, that's a rather weird question.  Why should we expect there to be something about the world now that grounds a truth about the past? But Bill has a point I think: we say that S is true, now.  Bill rightly dismisses Ed Feser's half-hearted attempt to reconcile presentism and truthmakerism.  So what should we say about this puzzle?

    Consider this sentence:

    T.  Kennedy commands PT109.

    In 1943 T was true and we may suppose that in 1943 the world was in some way that made it true.  But now in 2019 that way has long since ceased to be and T is no longer true.  How then do we express the way of 1943 from the vantage point of 2019?  We can't just use T as that is false.  Instead, the rules of English, unchanging over the intervening period, tell us to use S, a modification in tense of T.  The past way, once expressed by T is now expressed by S.  S is not a brute truth.  It's a rule-governed transformation of a made truth.  

     
    ………………………..
     
    Brightly appreciates that it won't do to say that (S) is just true.  As a contingent truth, (S) needs something external to it to explain its being true.  It needs a truthmaker. David also appreciates that, while the past-tensed (S) is true at present, on presentism  nothing that exists at present  could serve as the truthmaker of (S). Brightly's theory seems to be that because the past-tensed (S) is a rule-governed transformation of the present-tensed (T), and because (T) was a "made truth," i.e, was a truth having a truthmaker, (S) has a truthmaker too, namely the truthmaker of  (T).
     
    But note that (T) WAS made true in 1943 by something that existed then, but does not exist now. So it is difficult to see how the truthmaker of (T) that DID exist, but does not now exist, can serve as the truthmaker of S.  (S) is true at present, and such a truth, if it has a truthmaker, has an existent truthmaker, a truth maker that on presentism presently exists. Equivalently, although (T) WAS true in 1943, it is false now.  Being false now, it has no truthmaker now. So if the truthmaker of (S) now is the truthmaker (T) had then, then (S) has no truthmaker now.  
     
    Brightly might simply be denying that past-tensed contingent truths such as (S) need truthmakers. But if present-tensed contingent truths need them — and they obviously do — then it it is difficult to see how the mere passage of time can absolve them of this need when these present-tensed truths become past-tensed truths by that "rule-governed transformation" that David spoke about.  For example, 'I am blogging' is now true, but in an hour it will be false. An hour from now 'I was blogging' will be true.  Now abstract from tense and indexicality. The result is BV blogs. The bolded expression picks out the tenseless propositional content that is common to the present-tensed 'BV is blogging' (or 'BV blogs')  and the past-tensed 'BV was blogging' (or 'BV blogged.')
     
    It is the contingency of that propositional content, and its reference beyond itself, that requires that there be a truthmaker for said content.  The tense of the content is irrelevant to the requirement.  So if present-tensed truths need truthmakers, then so do past-tensed truths.  The mere passage of time cannot abrogate the requirement.
     
    If so, then the truthmaker objection to presentism is up and running. For on presentism, the present alone exists. But if so, then there are no past-tensed contingent truths: there is nothing in reality to ground their truth. The upshot would appear to be a denial of the reality of the past.  
    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Presentism and Truthmakers: A Reply to David Brightly”

  • Sweet Solitude

    Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence is an introvert too, not that I am surprised:

    Our time has come – introverts, that is. We who are happiest with our thoughts, who shun the mob, for whom “social” is code for “tedious,” who never exchange high-fives or fist bumps, who remain in our rooms with Pascalian contentedness, who are stubbornly unclubbable, who have the good taste never to be the life of the party – we are fulfilling our civic and ethical obligations simply by being ourselves. Social distancing is second nature, old hat, the common sense of sensible people. Extroverts, we’ve always known, are dangerous. 

    He then goes on to quote a guy I know.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Islam and Civilization

    The following just over the transom. I thought I was being appropriately critical of what is undoubtedly the worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), but apparently I haven't gone far enough for one of my  readers.   Balanced and reasonable positions don't have much of a chance in this age of polarization and extremism.  There are people to my Right who think that women should not have the right to vote, and there are people to my Left who think that children and illegal aliens should have the right to vote.  I am tempted by the self-serving thought that I am one of the few sane people left.
     
    ………………………………..
     
    You write: "Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course."
     
    This strikes me as extremely doubtful. About a year ago, I read "Mohamed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy" by Emmett Scott, and it was eye-opening. Islam conquered a peaceful, highly civilized Christian civilization in Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and absolutely destroyed them, to the point where there is virtually no history of those lands from 650 to 950 AD–no writing, no archaeological signs of building or commerce. The devastation is so complete that some historians argue that the years did not exist at all–that it is a mistake in the calendar (I get the impression this is largely considered a crank theory, but the fact that it has any currency at all gives evidence to the devastation of the Muslim conquests). There are stories of the great Muslim cities built during that time, but archaeology has not been able to find evidence of them.
     
    As to civilized behavior: In Roman times, the harshest punishment Christians usually doled out to heretics was banishment. Then they interacted with the Muslims for several centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition was born to copy Muslim practices. There is strong evidence that the Viking raids which ravaged the coasts of Europe for nearly a century were inspired by Muslims who were paying a premium for blonde-haired blue-eyed girls (and probably boys). There were a tiny number of Muslim scholars worth reading, but primarily by Muslim converts, non-Muslims living in Muslim lands, or Muslims copying the work of non-Muslims in other non-Muslim lands.
     
    The legacy of Islam is war, devastation, piracy, cruelty, totalitarianism, and slavery. Every large-scale culture must have a few innovations, but as far as I can see, all the evidence says there is nothing like a systematic improvement of the human condition that comes out of Islam.
     
    Regards,
     
    David Gudeman
    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Islam and Civilization”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sweetheart of the Rodeo

    We may credit Bob Dylan with inventing both folk rock and country rock. A major contribution to latter genre was The Byrd's 1968 Sweetheart of the Rodeo, their sixth album.  Where there's country, there's Christianity.

    The Christian Life

    I am a Pilgrim

    You're Still on My Mind

    HIckory Wind

    You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

    Pretty Boy Floyd. The old Woody Guthrie tune.

    Life in Prison

    Blue Canadian Rockies

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Great Blizzard of ’78 and How I Got my Dissertation Done

    Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it.

    ……………………………………

    I had an odd schedule in those days.  I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight.  I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station.  I got off and hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass.  Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment mate,  Quentin Smith,  and was in bed by four again.  That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78 every single day holidays included.

    That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential.  I told  one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense."  She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation."  Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours."  True enough.  And I still do.  I don't get up at midnight any more.  I get up at 2 AM.  I've become a slacker.

    One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night.  The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog.  A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open.  But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged.  I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

    Blizzard 78

    Addendum.  An excerpt  from Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday:

    So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Christianity has Civilized Us. But Islam?

    Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course. But when we consider Islamic penology, it is positively barbaric compared to that of the West.  Of the five great religions, Islam seems to have had the least civilizing effect. 

    Here:

    Iran’s judicial system remains among the most brutal in the world. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country and carries out more total executions than any nation but China (whose population is over 17 times the size of Iran’s). Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution. Capital punishment can be—and often is—carried out against juvenile offenders and for nonviolent crimes.

    Here:

    In Somalia, a 13-year-old girl was buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men in a stadium with 1000 spectators. After her death it was revealed she had been raped by three men and she was arrested after trying to report the rape to militants who control the city.

    Here:  A graphic that details how people, including women and children, are stoned to death.  Imagine a death by stoning that takes two hours. Physicians (under duress) are on hand to determine when enough stoning has taken place. You wouldn't want to waste good stones on a dead girl.

    Gruesome video of amputation. The actual amputation of a hand begins around 1:30.  Watch it, especially you leftist reality deniers.

    LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Islamic fundamentalists want to impose sharia law on the entire world, not just where they live. They believe the law is sacred and just and the best way to preserve order.

    In the video, two thieves are condemned, and they each provide a taped confession. Finally, their hands are cut off in a semi-medical environment. During the procedure the men are awake and fully conscious. Each forced amputation takes nearly a minute and there's blood and bone, naturally.

    These are not Islamic extremists, but rather this is how Islam is practiced in many parts of the world with the full sanction of the law. This is the face of Islam. Although this punishment has been carried out under a militant force, it also happens in sharia countries with the police as opposed to a local militia carrying out the sentence.

    In Islam, the right hand is cut off. This is because in that culture the left is unclean, reserved for sanitary reasons. Without their right hand, these people will be compelled to handle things with their left, including their food. It's a subtle form of permanent psychological punishment that goes beyond the simplicity of amputation.

    Just as these people punish their neighbors, imagine how they might treat you, the non-Muslim. You are an atheist in their eyes and worthy of far more gruesome punishment.

    WARNING: VIDEO IS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC

    Is every Muslim a terrorist? No, but most terrorists are Muslims. Islam is the main source of terrorism in the world today.

    Are there Buddhist terrorists? Yes, a few. But their terrorism is accidental to their being Buddhists: it does not flow from Buddhist teaching. Quite the contrary is the case with Islam.

    Were cruel and unusual punishments ever inflicted by law in the West? Yes, of course.  But to bring this up is anachronistic and irrelevant.  

    Is every Muslim a barbarian who supports the practices detailed above? No, but Muslim lands are lands where these barbaric practices take place. And the good Muslims have had no effect in reversing them.  (Turkey under Ataturk's influence an exception.  But did you ever see Midnight Express? I saw it the night before leaving for a year in Turkey!)

    Is every leftist an apologist for radical Islam and its barbaric practices? No, but leftism is the main source of support of radical Islam in the West. The "unholy alliance" — to cop a title from a book by David Horowitz — between leftism and Islam is explored in my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam and What Explains the Left's Toleration of Radical Islam?

    Are some Muslim immigrants to the West willing to assimilate and accept the West's values? Yes, but they are in a small minority.

    Is there a right to immigrate? No. Immigration is at the discretion of the host country and must benefit the host country.

    Is there any net benefit to the West of Muslim immigration?  I'll leave this question for the reader to ponder. As you ponder it, bear in mind that immigrants bring their culture with them.  (Sicilians brought the mafia.) You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Moods

    There is an analog of contagion in the spread of attitude. Moods are socially transmissible.  Which do you carry? Which do you avoid? Voluntary social self-quarantine is something to consider.

    Thus spoke the introvert.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Better R.E.D. than Dead!

    Remove every Democrat!

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  4. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  5. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

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  8. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  9. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

  10. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

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