Chelsea Chucklehead the Orwellian

According to Chelsea Clinton, who is self-avowedly "deeply religious," to stem the slaughter of the pre-natal would be "unchristian." But of course one cannot expect the child of Bill and Hillary to have a functioning moral compass. 

Mockery and derision are essential weapons in modern political warfare for the simple reason that our enemies, bereft of moral sense, cannot, most of them, be engaged on the plane of reason. We do well to turn their Alinskyite tactics against them. 

But if there are a few lefties still in possession of a modicum of moral sense, I offer the following argument, sincerely meant and free of invective.

Suppose I want to convince you of something. I must use premises that you accept. For if I argue from premises that you do not accept, you will reject my argument no matter how rigorous and cogent my reasoning.

So how can we get through to those liberals who are willing to listen? Not by invoking any Bible-based or theological premises. And not by deploying the sorts of non-theological but intellectually demanding arguments found in my Abortion category. The demands are simply too great for most people in this dumbed-down age.

Liberals support inclusivity and non-discrimination. Although contemporary liberals abuse these notions, as I have documented time and again, the notions possess a sound core and can be deployed sensibly. To take one example, there is simply no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting. The reforms in this area were liberal reforms, and liberals can be proud of them. A sound conservatism, by the way, takes on board the genuine achievements of old-time liberals.

Another admirable feature of liberals is that they speak for the poor, the weak, the voiceless. That this is often twisted into the knee-jerk defense of every underdog just in virtue of his being an underdog, as if weakness confers moral superiority, is no argument against the admirableness of the feature when reasonably deployed.

So say this to the decent liberals: If you prize inclusivity, then include unborn human beings. If you oppose discrimination, why discriminate against them? If you speak for the poor, the weak, and the voiceless, why do you not speak for them?

 

Is Talk of ‘Possible Worlds’ Wholly Dispensable?

I made a bold claim earlier:

If I am right, the patois of possible worlds is a dispensable manner of speaking: we can make every [modal] point we want to make without engaging in possible worlds talk.  What I just said is not perfectly obvious and there may be counterexamples. 

Here is a candidate counterexample that I borrow from Barbara Vetter, 'Can' Without Possible Worlds, 22:

(CC) Someone can see us.

This is an alethically or as Vetter would say "dynamically" modal statement. It is modal but not expressive of either epistemic or deontic modality. Interestingly, (CC) is susceptible of being read either de re or de dicto:

(DR) There is a person who can see us.

(DD) It is possible that someone see us.

(DR) commits us to an actual person who is able to see us.  (DD) does not. The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first. So the two readings are non-equivalent.  Suppose that no actual person can see us. Suppose, that is, that no actual person has both the ability to see us and is positioned in such a way that he can exercise his ability. Even so, it is  'surely' possible that there be such a person. There could have been a person, distinct from every actual person, who sees us. 

So (DD) is a true alethically modal statement whose truth is not grounded in, or made true by, a power or ability of any actual item.

(DD) would thus appear to be a counterexample to Vetter's "potentiality semantics" according to which "all dynamic modality is de re . . . ." (22)  It seems that (DD) expresses a 'free-floating' possibility, one not grounded in any actual concrete thing's power or potentiality. If so, then 'possible worlds' talk might not be wholly dispensable.  

One response to the putative counterexample is rejectionist: Vetter toys with  simply rejecting (DD) as a statement of dynamic modality by suggesting that it is really an example of epistemic possibility (23).

I fail to see, however, how (DD) could be construed as epistemic.  The idea is not that, for all we know, someone can see us, but that it is really possible, apart from our knowledge and ignorance, that there be someone who can see us.  In the actual world, no one can see us now. But 'surely' there is a possible world, very much like the actual world, in which someone can see us now.  If there is this possibility, it is real, not epistemic. 

But there is another line of rejection that Vetter does not clearly distinguish from the first.  And that is simply to say that her topic is dynamic modality, the sort of real modality that we encounter in actual changing things, and not real modality in general.   'Dynamic' is from the Greek dynamis which in Latin is potentia, whence our 'potency' and 'potentiality.' The second way of rejection, then, is to dismiss (DD) as simply off-topic.

But then her thesis is less interesting: it is not the thesis that all alethic modality is de re, but that only the modality of actual concrete things subject to change is de re.  If this is her thesis, then it seems we need possible worlds to accommodate such de dicto possibilities as (DD). 

More Proof that ‘Progressives’ are Morally Obtuse

Re: Twitter's Content Blockage:

Some examples of this supposedly offensive content include pictures of children developing in the womb and even simple ultrasound images of babies — like the ones that expectant parents hang on their refrigerator doors. 

Twitter's actions suggest it’s OK for Planned Parenthood to tweet that a woman has a right to an abortion, but when I tweet and try to promote that a baby has a right to life, Twitter considers that inflammatory. 

Twitter's actions suggest it's fine for Planned Parenthood to tweet that taxpayers who don’t want to fund the nation’s largest abortion chain are "extremists," but when I tweet that there are alternative options to Planned Parenthood, Twitter calls that an offensive violation of policy.

And you are still a Democrat?  Please be aware of what you are voting for when you vote Democrat.

Kavanaugh is in Like Flynn

And what little credibility the Dems had left is out like Stout. (G. F. Stout?)

Here:

Opponents of Kavanaugh lost the fight when they lost their marbles. His foes on the Senate Judiciary Committee and allied activists ensured that opponents to the nomination appear to be a pack of wild cranks. 

[. . .]

Not only did the outbursts seem uncivil and destructive of Senate decorum, they may have violated federal criminal laws — including 40 U.S.C. 5104 — against disrupting congressional proceedings. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), instead of criticizing the criminal bedlam, called it “the noise of democracy.”

There's that word 'democracy' again! The chuckleheads need to define it or drop it. What do the Dems mean? Mob rule? The rejection of all procedural rules? The treating of the Constitution as if it were a tabula rasa?

Do Dicky Durbin and his ilk think the word has a talismanic power? Please do tell us what you mean, Dicky. 

Then Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made his contribution.  With great fanfare, Booker announced his “Spartacus moment,” daring to disclose committee confidential documents that revealed Kavanaugh’s opinions about racial profiling. Of course, breaking rules appeals to the disruptive gang in the gallery, so Booker’s play seemed well-designed.

Yet, in execution, Booker’s plan was a disaster for Kavanaugh foes. Not only did Kavanaugh not support racial profiling, the documents were not subject to committee confidential restraints in the first place.

And then there is an important point I make in a very fine entry that I warmly recommend for your perusal, namely, that there is no such thing as racial profiling.

The Mueller Assault on a Duly-Elected President

Roger Kimball:

Stepping back and looking at Mueller’s campaign against the President as a whole, it is clear that Mueller’s activities are meant primarily to intimidate, pressure, and co-opt associates of Donald Trump in order to convince them to bear witness against him.

As I have observed many times, I believe this is part of the biggest political scandal in US history. It involves the mobilisation of deep state actors in the Obama administration and the weaponisation of the FBI and other parts of the Department of Justice.

As Lee Smith noted in a superb summary of the case so far in RealClear Investigations, this sprawling campaign had two phases, an offensive phase to discredit Trump and help elect Hillary Clinton during the campaign of 2016 and then the ongoing defensive phase, which is intended to discredit the Congressional investigation into criminal misconduct by people in the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, and the FBI.

And you are still a Democrat?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats

Before we get on to tonight's feature presentation, a little tribute to John McCain. Here he is in Bomb Iran. But the old neocon needs a history lesson. The Regents did it first, in 1961, before the Beach Boys covered it in '65. The Regents in their dotage, live. "I tried Peggy Sue, but I knew she wouldn't do."

……………………….

Loving Spoonful, Nashville Cats, 1966. They's playin' since they's babies.

Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle. For you fathers out there. Bond with your son when he's five. Wait till he's 50 and he won't give you the time of day. Harry Chapin was a major talent who died young.  Here is his great Taxi. We Boomers are damned lucky to have the greatest popular music soundtrack.

What Happened to Harry Chapin?

Tokens, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, 1961 

Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962. Bent fabric can be said to have a kink  in it. Therefore,

Kinks, Phenomenal Cat

Tom Jones, What's New Pussycat? 1965. 

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog.' The queen of the one-hit wonders?

Mongo Santamaria, El Pussycat. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a pussyhat and a watermelon. While we have Mongo Santamaria cued up, here is his rather better-known Watermelon Man, muchachos.

Buck Owens, Tiger by the tail. This one goes out to Kathy P.

Stray Cats, Stray Cat Strut

Sue Thompson, Paper Tiger, 1965. This one's for Barack "Red Line" Obama.

Elton John, Honky Cat, 1972

Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941.  An influential song in the history of the blues.  

Rooftop Singers, Tom Cat.  From those far-off and fabulous hootenanny days. 

UPDATE (9/16). 

Mendocino Joe wisely recommends Ring-Tail Tom.

UPDATE (9/17),

Monterey Tom, displaying good taste, as usual, reminds me of Laura Nyro's Tom Cat Goodbye.

‘Nonconsensual Choking’

I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:

I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.

As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.

From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head,  there is nothing wrong with it?

I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed. 

I'll leave it to you to work out why.

Related entry: Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy

UPDATE (9/16)

A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite. 

A Letter from Ronald Reagan to his Dying Father-in-Law

Here:

Loyal Davis, Reagan’s father-in-law and a pioneering neurosurgeon, was just days away from death.

Something else worried Reagan: The dying man was, by most definitions of the word, an atheist.

“I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or hell as places,” Davis once wrote. “If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward.”

Reagan, on the other hand, believed everyone would face a day of judgment, and that Davis’s was near. So the most powerful man in the world put everything else aside, took pen in hand and set out on an urgent mission — to rescue one soul.

This provides further insight into why the Left so hated Reagan: he was a man of faith.

I can't help but point out that what Loyal Davis says about "our heavenly reward" is disgusting nonsense. Why disgusting? Because it twists words to mean what they can't mean.  There is nothing heavenly or rewarding about being the merely intentional object of a few flickering and intermittent memories of a few mortals soon to bite the dust themselves.

Memo to atheists: if you are a hard-assed naturalist, hoe the row to the bitter end and issue no claptrap about a heavenly reward. Man up, accept the consequences of your doctrine, and show some respect for the English language.

Corruptio Optimi Pessima

The corruption of the best is the worst.

The evidence mounts. An Irish correspondent sends use here.

Following the dark revelations of the McCarrick scandal, former seminary formator, Father David Marsden, decided it was time to go public on the real reason he resigned from Maynooth and why he remains deeply concerned about the presence of a powerful gay subculture in the national seminary.

The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church

The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, such luminaries as Plato, Augustine, and Blaise Pascal:

There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God. (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110)

Has anyone pointed out that this is the real root of the rot in the Roman church? The depth of the corruption is hard to fathom, both in the sense of understand and in the sense of measure the depth of. R. R. Reno reports: 

From 1990 until 2010, I taught at a Jesuit University and was privy to insider gossip. The Irish philosopher William Desmond recounted some of his experiences as a young scholar visiting Fordham in the 1970s. The main debate in the Jesuit dining room concerned whether or not sodomy constituted a violation of the vow of celibacy. Some priests took the line that celibacy concerns the conjugal act, not sterile sex between men. A friend who spent time as a Jesuit novice during that slouching decade told me that novice masters regarded homo­sexual relations as healthy, even necessary for proper priestly formation. Sometimes the novice masters insisted that they be the agents of this “formation.”

This shows that the post-Vatican II church has become a thoroughly corrupt joke that deserves no support from the laity. Or am I being too harsh?

Imagine ordained priests — not horny freshmen at a supposedly 'Catholic' college — debating whether or not sodomy is a violation of celibacy. This is not something that can be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching.  Here:

The Code of Canon Law requires that “Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy which is a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity” (No. 277).

The key word here is 'continence.' Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint).  One of the main reasons that celibacy is enjoined is because spiritual realities cannot be descried by those enslaved to their lusts. Can you imagine Begoglio talking like this or your parish priest?

Now ask yourself whether the practice of sodomy is an expression of continence.  The question answers itself. Not only is the act a violation of continence, but planning and entertaining the act in thought is also a violation of continence, even if the act is never committed. For either way there is a failure to contain the 'outward flow' even it is merely on the intentional plane.  Cf. MT 5:28: "But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." (KJV) That holds a fortiori if the object of lust is a man.  As I interpret the teaching, it is not the passing desire that is sinful, but its elaboration in thought, its hospitable entertainment, the scheming of a sodomite like McCarrick, for example, as he plans his seduction of an innocent and trusting boy.

Another form of "sterile sex" would be 'intercourse' with an inflatable doll or (nowadays) a sexbot. Certainly the rectories of the land should be supplied with such dolls and robots since 'intercourse' with them is surely no violation of celibacy.

And then there is that form of "sterile sex" called masturbation. If buggery is part of healthy priestly formation (see first quotation above), then there could be no objection to masturbation which is of course officially condemned, (See Catechism #2352 or, for that matter, something even worse, bestiality. (About which the disgraced former senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, joked.)

I spoke above of what can and cannot be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching. Here may lie the nub of the problem. These so-called priests don't accept it. Maybe they did at first, but then they became secularized and the Unseen Order disappeared from view (to put it oxymoronically).  In plain English, God and the soul and the whole soteriological point of the Church became unreal to them. But they didn't have the courage to go out into the world and get a real job. So they 'reformed' the Church in their own corrupt image.   After all, their lifestyle is 'cushy' and you can dress up and parade around — in a manner to gives new meaning to "don we now our gay apparel" — and even earn or rather get some respect even if it is only from children, old ladies, and womanish men.  And then there there is that organizational ladder to climb and the power and perquisites that go with it. Hell, you may even get a red hat!

The 'reform' then, takes the form of a secularization, or a temporalization. The Church, which is supposed to mediate between Eternity and Time, analogously as Christ the God-Man mediates between God and Man, is reduced to a purely temporal power or rather a 'hustle' or ecclesial cosa nostra that yet mendaciously continues to promote itself as being true to its tradition with its ultimate anchor in the Eternal. Under Bergoglio the Leftist, the Church of Rome transmogrifies into a sort of environmental protection agency that attacks capitalism (the one economic system that actually works and improves the human lot) and that also advances the cause of 'migrants' no matter how destructive of civilization they might be, a civilization that the Church has built and maintained over the centuries, but is not willing to defend against Muslim iconoclasts and barbarians.

('Migrant' is a marvellously obfuscatory term since it manages to elide two important distinctions at once, the distinction between immigrants and emigrants and the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.)

To sum up. I am pointing to a fact and offering an explanation, or at least part of one. The fact is that the Church hardly exists any longer as she was founded to be. The explanation is that the inordinate raging of our natural concupiscence which has been with us since the Fall and has been kept in check to some extent has now been unleashed and potentiated by our technology of life-extension, birth control, and world-wide communication.  Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon.  But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'

But the point is clear: our incredible technology leads to a super-secularization that makes it impossible except for a few to take seriously the idea that there could be anything beyond the human horizon. The Unseen Order (James) with the Unseen Warfare (Scupoli) that transpires there is no longer believable by modern man under his secularized, sex-saturated blanket, where with a few keystrokes he can bring before him an endless supply of the most vile pornography imaginable. 

‘Democracy’

Are you becoming as sick of this word as I am?

Fareed Zakaria complains of a threat to democracy — from the Left. Conservatives, he notes, are regularly denied a platform. If you have been following the news, you know that Stephen K. Bannon is a recent example of one denied.

But how is this assault on the classically liberal values of free speech and open inquiry a threat to 'democracy'?

That's the part I don't get. If you think about the matter for more than ten seconds you should be able to grasp that majority rule is no guarantee of the classically liberal values just mentioned and other such values that I haven't mentioned. The majority could easily decide that free speech and open inquiry are not values, or are values only if their exercise is not perceived as 'hurtful' by any group of highly sensitive people. 

Democracy is consistent with both the upholding and the abolition of classically liberal values.

It follows that the suppression of dissent (whether from the Left or the Right) is not an attack on democracy but an attack on free speech, open debate, and the untrammeled search for truth.

'Democracy' is treated as an honorific by almost all journalists and pundits. But it does not deserve its high honorific status.

In any case, the USA is not a democracy but a constitutional republic.

Suppose it is true, as Zakaria thinks, that President Trump is attacking the free press, and suppose further that he is out to destroy the Fourth Estate.  (This is plainly not the case, but just suppose.) How would that be an attack on democracy given that the man was democratically and duly elected? 

And how democratic is it when unelected Deep State operatives work day and night to undermine his presidency?

(I am beginning to write like a damned journalist what with the one-sentence paragraphs.  But I have got to get my message out to people corrupted by journalese.)