Never judge a book by its movie!
(Not a MavPhil original, I am sorry to say. Source? Paging Dave Lull.)
Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Never judge a book by its movie!
(Not a MavPhil original, I am sorry to say. Source? Paging Dave Lull.)
A modicum thereof is surely justified, but it is best enjoyed in solitude.
Ultimately, there is no spiritual 'self-help.' Proximately yes, ultimately, no. We need exogenic assistance in beating back the demons, and we need grace.
Between phenomenology and theology.
Stack leader.
It seems to be on the upswing. Expect your personal mood to follow. Assuming you are not a Dementocrat.
Borrowed from Flood's blog. Tony laments that there was no space left for Tulsi and Vivek. But they are there in spirit.
Now that is a picture of true diversity and true inclusion! Add Tulsi and Vivek and you have a veritable Rainbow Coalition. As for equity, it is pure bullshit, as wokester's use the term.
If you are a woke turkey, no turkey for you.
Conservatives are hobbled by their virtues, one of which is civility: we are loathe to "give as good as we get." But now that our side has power, we must not hesitate to use it against our political enemies. The destructive swine will squeal but we should show them no mercy. There must be no compromise with those out to overturn our very system of government and who lie brazenly about their intentions.
Roger Kimball puts the point very well:
“Elections,” Barack Obama told a group of cowering Republican lawmakers early in 2009, “have consequences.” He then drove the point home by reminding them, “I won.”
In truth, Democrats tend to understand this law of the political universe more clearly than do Republicans.
The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.
In Suicide of the West, the political philosopher James Burnham quotes the nineteenth-century French writer Louis Veuillot, who summed up the essence of this political dialectic in one elegant sentence. Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté parce que tel est votre principe; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”
For examples of the latter, I invite you to ponder the behavior of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, especially the behavior of the despicable Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, these last three and a half years.
Had the Democrats won the 2024 election, we would have seen many more examples of this principle in action. Assuming the Dems had kept the Senate, we would have seen them dispense with the filibuster, thus turning that chamber into what outgoing West Virginian Senator Joe Manchin called “the House on steroids.” They would have packed the Supreme Court, adding a few new “progressive” members to the bench to counter the power of Justices like Clarence Thomas. They likely would have imposed term- or age-limits on the Justices as well.
Elsewhere, I endeavored to provide a brief inventory of the “consequences” of a Harris victory. Donald Trump would have been bankrupted and jailed. It is likely that the same thing would have happened to Elon Musk. Just as John Kerry promised, the First Amendment would have been gutted if not discarded altogether in order to further the censorship and surveillance regime of the woke, progressive elite. A virtual ban on fracking and the mining of coal would have been enacted, further depressing America’s prosperity. The trans insanity of the last decade would have been extended, destroying women’s sports and disfiguring, mentally as well as physically, many thousands of confused teenagers.
The country just dodged that fusillade. What now?
Read the rest and do your bit. We can beat the bums into the dirt if we work together. It's a noble fight and it's just beginning. Beat back better!
A very good First Things article by Mary Eberstadt. I have only one comment. She reports, "The nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump."
41 % against?
Why such a large percentage? Are they 'devout Catholics' in the style of Joe Dementia and Nancy the Shredder?
The Democrat Party, besides being anti-democratic, is anti-liberty, and in particular anti-religious liberty. If you haven't noticed that yet, then you are in need of a proctologist who specializes in self-induced head injuries.
Would you like to join my old friend Joe in his catacomb? Or perhaps you are eager for martyrdom.
You need some Nitro.
A neurosurgeon's near-death experience.
Top o' the Stack.
Here (under 5 minutes).
'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest.
It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.
Consider a perceptual illusion. I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake. I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion. (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)
What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another. No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act.
Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.' (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then, is object-directedness. One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not.
Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness may or may not exist. Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.' From 'S is conscious of an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.
In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root — else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving. I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act.
If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.
Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain, and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased and that the patient is 'brain dead.' Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed. The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs. But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real. Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real, and this despite their being extremely vivid.
Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.
Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'? Yes it is. That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience. He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states.
But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's survival of one's bodily death.
For it could be — it is epistemically possible that — it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last experience, even if it turns out to be an experience as of heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.' ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.' Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in a separate post.)
If this epistemic possibility cannot be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.
Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.
Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs. There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.
Bill Ackman on Elon-liberated X:
The business community is giddy with excitement about the @realDonaldTrump administration. I am hearing this from everyone, including from people who didn’t vote for Trump. Business confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Business leaders are becoming more confident about the country and the economy. This means they will be making more investments in our future which will drive the economy and the stock market, reducing the cost of capital and bolstering confidence further, catalyzing more investment and more growth in a self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle.
I say it's 1938. What am I asking? What am I saying?
Would it be 'revenge' or would it be a wholly justifiable upholding of the rule of law? Would success be 'revenge' enough, as Trump has suggested? His enemies accused him of violating 'norms' when they themselves violated the norms that matter, those rooted in the rule of law and the Constitution. Doing so, they engaged once again in their trademark psychological projection. The 'norms' Trump violated were merely those of conventional civility.
Here:
Over the last four years, regime lawyers and government officials have repeatedly ignored the constitution, stretched the meaning of federal and state statutes, and shredded legal norms. They have investigated, prosecuted, and persecuted their political opponents. They did this to suppress those who challenged their rule and to send a message to would-be challengers.
With Donald Trump’s election and pending inauguration (assuming no shenanigans between now and then), unpleasant things will have to be done to hold these people to account. The regime’s aggressive lawlessness will require a response.
The response must balance the immediate need for accountability with the ultimate need for reconciliation. On the one hand, we must hold responsible those whose criminal conduct subverted our constitutional order. On the other, we must prepare to reconcile with the millions of Americans who erred grievously in supporting the regime’s lawlessness — at least with those people who are humble enough to acknowledge their error.
Equal justice under the law, an essential feature of the rule of law, means enforcing the law in an even-handed manner. Violators must be held responsible for their actions. This is not “retribution,” any more than arresting a thief or murderer constitutes retribution. All citizens are expected to obey the law. No one is above the law.
On the morning of November 6th, I wrote, "But this is no time to gloat over the defeat of our enemies. They will not give up or give in." Here is how Peter Boghossian makes the point. (A little over six minutes.)
Now that we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable (my title not Boghossian's) have gained momentum, we must not rest on our laurels, but fight even harder, as Boghossian puts it, "to drive the final nail into the coffin" of our enemies. One drives a nail with a hammer. But hammers have other uses as well.
I am reminded of the subtitle to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, "How one philosophizes with a hammer." Nietzsche's hammer is an icon-buster. (There is a passage, however, in which he likens his hammer to a tuning-fork with which the sounds out the idols for their soundness, and finds them hollow. My way of putting it, not his.)
We patriots have an iconoclastic task before us: the smashing of the idols of the leftist tribe.
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