I'd say the following is pleonastic: 'the example of Kant's.' Write either 'Kant's example' or 'the example of Kant.'
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Pleonasm
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Word of the Day: Witzelsucht
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Socializing and Idle Talk
Some good comes from socializing if only as a concession to our ineluctable social nature. Only a beast or a god could live without it. But even I do too much of it. In society one is apt to talk too much about too little. Review the previous day's unnecessary conversations. On balance, did they profit you or not? Did they enhance your peace of mind, or damage it?
You might think that intellectual talk is better than talking about the weather. But it can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worse still is ‘spiritual talk’ which can distract us from both action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.
There is a deep paradox here. It is speech that elevates man above the animals and makes him god-like. And yet it is speech by which he debases himself in a way no animal could, not that the above examples are the most debasing.
Compare MT 12:36, "But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." (KJV)
Whether or not Christ was God, he was one of humanity's great teachers. One does well to ponder the above verse, and in particular, its harshness. Just why should every idle word get one in trouble with the Moral Authority of the universe?
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The Decline and Fall of the American Civil Liberties Union
An account of how it came about. I have heard it said that classical liberalism is unstable, and that in the fullness of time it collapses into hard leftism. A case in point.
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU's actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn't actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, "Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?"
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU's long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation "promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused." Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections "inappropriately favor the accuse."
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
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Welcome to Finitude
You are largely stuck with the guy you are and you have to make the most of it. There are things you don't like about him, but some of them just can't be helped. Change what can be changed; accept what can't.
Neither god nor beast, a man is a being in-between.
Our predicament is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Not to mention a source of endless blog fodder.
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Is it Wrong to Doubt When the Evidence is Sufficient?
Some say it is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence. Is it also wrong to doubt or even disbelieve when the evidence is sufficient?
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The Human Predicament
Part of what makes the human condition a predicament is dispute over whether it is a predicament and whether, if it is, it has a solution, and if it does, what it is. This is just what one would expect if our condition is indeed a predicament.
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In the Dark
They dispute whether we are in the dark and whether, if we are, there is away to the light, and if there is, what it is. All of which goes to show that we are — in the dark.
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Is C. P. the Cure for P.C.?
No, not capital punishment or corporal punishment, but Camille Paglia. From a recent interview:
Do you believe that politics and in particular social justice (i.e., anti-racism and feminism) are becoming cults or pseudo-religions? Is politics filling the void left by the receding influence of organized religion?
Paglia: This has certainly been my view for many years now. I said in the introduction to my art book, Glittering Images (2012), that secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.
But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.
My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite. I take Marxist social analysis seriously: Arnold Hauser’s Marxist, multi-volume A Social History of Art (1951) was a major influence on me in graduate school. However, Hauser honored art and never condescended to it. A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.
That's very good, except for the bit about art substituting for religion.
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Why Are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself.
How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot? You have otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.
Or take the Enron employees. They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries! Now how stupid is that? But they weren't stupid; they enstupidated themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.
The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature. Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt? A lack of money? No, a lack of virtue. People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, and pursue truly choice-worthy ends.
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The Divine Job Description
What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God? I proffer an answer at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.
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Of ‘Shit’ and ‘S**t,’ Type and Token
How many words immediately below, two or one?
cat
cat.
Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they can't both be right. There can't be both two words and one word. The obvious way to solve the problem is by distinguishing between token and type. We say: there are two tokens of the same type. One type, two tokens. That's a good proximate solution but not, if I am right, a good ultimate one. But that's a long story for another time.
Some write 's**t' to avoid writing 'shit.' Aren't they two tokens of the same word type? How then can one token be offensive and the other not? Or one more offensive than the other?
Here is a dilemma for your delectation:
Either we have two tokens of the same type or we don't. If the former, then both are offensive, and nothing is gained in point of politeness by writing 's**t' instead of 'shit.'
If, on the other hand, the inscriptions are not two tokens of the same type, then 's**t' cannot substitute for 'shit' in a manner that conveys the same meaning that 'shit' conveys to the English speaker.
We seem to have sunk into some really deep shit/s**t!
(Crossposted at my FB page where I expect some discussion to erupt.)
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Paradox and Contradiction
A form of words can be paradoxical but not contradictory, e.g., "Most people want to become old, but few want to be old."
The expression is paradoxical, and therein lies its literary charm, but the thought is non-contradictory. The thought, expressed non-paradoxically, is: Most want to live a long time, but few if any want to suffer the decrepitude attendant upon living a long time.
One logic lesson to be drawn is that a paradox is not the same as a contradiction.
It is therefore a mistake to refer to Russell's Antinomy as 'Russell's Paradox.'
Thus spoke the Language Nazi.
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Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?
I argue the case over at MavPhil StrictPhil.
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Tony Flood is Back in the Groove
Hi Bill,I hope things are good with you (and that you'll tell me if not).I've finally crawled out from under the covers. My new site https://anthonygflood.com/ is mostly autobiographical vignettes, but one day I'll return to the questions that brought us together years ago. The main thing is that I practice in public consistently. (I've also hung out my copyediting shingle to bring in the shekels.)If you like it, please subscribe.Thanks.All the best to you,Tony
Lotte Lenya sings September song, very smokily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc4oBnu_fw&list=RDrdc4oBnu_fw&start_radio=1