. . . is probably not in the offing, the wave not the dream, but we of the Coalition of the Sane must not become complacent.
Here is good advice from Hugh Hewitt.
You might think that the fate of the Dems will be sealed by the appeal to morons of chuckleheads like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But take no chances. Charles Cooke comments on the Ocasionalist here.
If the blue wave should materialize, then Trump has only been buying us time, and the U.S. will continue its death spiral.
The trouble with the Tucker Carlson show is that the host is insufficiently judicious as to the number and type of leftists he invites onto his program. No doubt he is striving to be "fair and balanced," but what typically happens is that Carlson asks some reasonable question of the leftist guest, which the latter evades in order let loose with his reliably incoherent canned spiel, about, say, all those thousands of people roaming around without photo ID who are 'disenfranchised' — sneer quotes! — by reasonable ID requirements at polling places. Tucker tries without success to bring the knucklehead back to the topic, voices are raised, they talk over each other, and I surf away to a Seinfeld re-run.
These shouting matches are totally unproductive. Besides, they elevate my blood pressure. But when I return from Seinfeld to hear the brilliant and consummately witty analysis of Mark Steyn, or the less brilliant, but solid, contribution of my favorite gun-totin' lesbian, the charming Tammy Bruce, then it is all worthwhile and the old B.P. returns to 'within range.'
Of course, there are people who like to watch unproductive shouting matches. They like to see people fight. So it may well be that ratings would decline if my suggestion were followed.
Tucker needs to realize that the age of productive dialog with political opponents is over in American politics. Ours is the age of post-consensus politics. Destructive leftists don't need talk, they need defeat. Let's hope it can be achieved politically without resort to, God forbid, the 2A solution. But as every patriot knows, the 2A ain't about hunting.
I now hand off to Bruce Thornton, Ridicule, not Reasoned Debate, is the Best Medicine for Political Cults.
The problems associated with time are the toughest there are. I need a break from breaking my head against them. I'm nursing a Jack and Coke and on the prowl for some 'timely' tunes.
Chad and Jeremy, Yesterday's Gone
New Christy Minstrels, Today
Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows. "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream . . . " This one goes out to Vlastimil V.
Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll
Chicago, Does Anybody Know What Time it is?
Cyndi Lauper, Time After Time
Billie Holliday, As Time Goes By
Glen Campbell, By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Beatles, Any Time at All
Beatles, Things We Said Today
Allman Bros., Ain't Wastin' Time No More
Marty Robbins, Cryin' Time
Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a' Changin'
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slowest one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
The first one now will later be last
For the times they are a'changin'.
If this anthem's Biblical lines move you then you were not only in the 'sixties, but of the 'sixties.
To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lens that makes it difficult for the person to see what is happening now.
The foregoing insight may help us understand why people remain in the Democrat Party. People born in the 'twenties are many of them still living in the 'forties. For them the Democrat Party is the party of FDR. They haven't noticed the changes, or haven't wanted to notice the changes. They haven't noticed that their interests are no longer served by the party of this name. Or perhaps they are just attached to the label, or in the grip of misplaced piety: they are attached to a family tradition. "My pappy was a Democrat and my grandpappy afore him was a Democrat; we McCoy's have always been Democrats, and we don't see no reason to change now."
People born in the early 'forties are many of them still living in the early 'sixties, those heady days of Camelot when the young and vigorous Jack Kennedy and his charming wife occupied the White House, and society was all in a ferment with necessary reforms being made or about to be made. They thrilled to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and other anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Those worthy battles were fought, and they were won, and progress was made. Jim Crow bit the dust. The liberals of those days can take pride in their accomplishments.
But soon enough the rot set in: the legitimate struggle for civil rights gave way to affirmative action as we now know it, which involves reverse discrimination, race-norming, preferential hiring, and minority set-asides. Martin Luther King, Jr. was soon followed by such race-hustlers as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who cleverly cashed in on white liberal guilt. People were precisely not judged by "the content of their character" but by the color of their skin. Equality of opportunity was confused with equality of outcome; the quota mentality replaced the concern for justice. Justice gave way to the unconcept 'social justice' which either means nothing or is code for socialism. If you believe hiring should be based on merit you are now called a racist. Liberals transmogrified into leftists whose calling card was and remains the race card. 'Racist' and 'white supremacist' became all-purpose smear words used even by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In the '60s , Democrats were progressive and liberal in respectable senses of these terms. But it is no longer the 'sixties, and if JFK were alive today and held the views he held then, he would be classed with conservatives. If you are living in the past, however, fixated on the glory days of youth, you may have missed the changes. You may not have noticed the difference between Jack and Teddy, the difference a brother can make.
So if you are still a Dem, you need to ask yourself: Are you living in the past? When the Dems become indistinguishable from the CPUSA will you still call yourself a Dem?
. . . there seem to be no limits of logic or sanity on what a 'liberal' will maintain. The latest lunacy is the politically correct prohibition of the phrase 'as you know.' You must not say this because it might make a snowflake feel inadequate.
Permit me to explain why some of us use the phrase in question.
We use it out of civility and because we understand human nature. People don't like to be told things. If I tell you that the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution are called the Bill of Rights, you might think I am talking down to you or lecturing you or suggesting that you are ignorant. The prefatory 'as you know' gives you the benefit of the doubt. You either know or you don't know. If you know, he you may respond, "Of course." If you don't know, you may admit that you were ignorant of the point or you may remain silent.
'As you know' is a phrase that contributes to civil discourse. But civility is a conservative virtue and it is perhaps too much to expect a leftist to understand it or its value.
Civility demonstrated. Comity enhanced.
To feel slightly inadequate for not knowing something is not bad but good. But persuading people of this in this Age of Feeling may prove difficult. The purpose of life is not to feel good about oneself. The purpose of education is not to inculcate in students self-esteem but to teach them something so that they will have legitimate grounds for self-esteem.
The Left is destructive in many ways and on many fronts. We of the Coalition of the Sane must oppose them in many ways and on many fronts.
On the language front we must never bow to their foolish innovations but must proudly speak and write standard English.
If they take offense, then point out to them that their offense is inappropriately taken. If a black person objects to 'black hole' or 'niggardly,' then explain their meanings and how any offense taken is wrongly taken.
Say this to leftists: "You are free to speak and write in any silly way you like, but only so long as you allow us to speak and write standard English."
But leftists are a hostile and vicious bunch, unteachable and impervious to reason. So keep in mind my 2010 aphorism:
It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone. Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason. The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.
Herein the germs of yet another argument for Second Amendment rights. Those rights are the concrete back-up to all the others.
In Memory of a Great Philosopher
It is just at this point that we find the most enigmatic and significant contribution of Husserl's philosophy. For here the question arises: Why did Husserl demand with such extraordinary insistence that I read Kierkegaard? For Kierkegaard, in contrast to Husserl, sought the truth not in reason but in the Absurd. For him the law of contradiction – like an angel with a drawn sword, stationed by God at the entrance to Paradise – bears no witness to the truth and in no way defines the boundaries which separate the possible from the impossible. For Kierkegaard, philosophy (which he calls "existential") begins precisely at that point where reason sees, with the force of self-evidence, that all possibilities have already been exhausted, that everything is finished, that nothing remains but for man to look and grow cold. Kierkegaard here introduces into philosophy what he calls "faith," defined as "an insane struggle for the possible," that is, for the possibility of the impossible – clearly alluding to the words of Scripture: Man's wisdom is folly in the sight of the Lord.
Men fear folly and madness more than anything else in the world. Kierkegaard knows this; he repeatedly asserts that human frailty is afraid to look into the eyes of death and madness. To be sure, we read in the Phaedo that philosophy is "a preparation for death," that all men who have genuinely devoted themselves to philosophy, although "they may have concealed it from others, have done nothing else than prepare themselves for the act of dying and the fact of death." It seems likely that these extraordinary ideas were suggested to Plato by the death of Socrates. Plato did not return to them; he was wholly absorbed in the Republic and the Laws, even in his extreme old age – thus fulfilling, like ordinary mortals and gladiators, the age-old demand: salve, Caesar, morituri te salutant. Even in the face of death men cannot tear themselves away from "Caesar," from what everyone accepts as "reality." And this is "natural"! For how are we to understand the "preparation for death"? Is it not a beginning of, and preparation for, the struggle against the demonstrative character of proof, against the law of contradiction, against reason s claim to unlimited rights, its seizure of the power of arbitrary definition of the point at which possibility ends and impossibility begins – the struggle against the angel who stands with drawn sword at the gate of Paradise? It seems to the inexperienced gaze that this measureless power rightfully belongs to reason, and that there is nothing dreadful or threatening in the fact that it does.
Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1859), depicting gladiators greeting Vitellius
"Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you."
I've loved the great Don Gibson crossover number all my life ever since first hearing it in 1960 over one of the Southern California pop stations, probably KFWB 980 on the AM band.
Here is a very creditable live cover by one Joe Brown which I have just now heard for the first time. But nothing touches or ever will touch the original.
. . . are denied by leftists. Here are five forms of denial.
The universities have become seminaries of leftism. 'Seminary' is from semen, seed. The universities have become seed beds in which the seeds of America's destruction are planted in skulls full of mush. Time to shut them down says philosophy professor Jason D. Hill. You decide whether he has gone too far or is basically on track.
When the term "Western civilization" is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell.
[. . .]
Cultural Marxism, defined as anti-capitalist cultural critique, is the educational trope that mediates all forms of learning in today's universities – and it is simply a guise under which to politically indoctrinate students into becoming socialists who will do anything to prohibit freedom of speech on college campuses. We are witnessing a generation that will not tolerate other perspectives, students who will not hear opposing ideologies.
Socialism advocates vesting ownership and control of the means of production, capital and land in the community as a whole. Socialism is not a morally neutral system. Any system of governance presupposes an answer to the questions: Are you a sovereign entity who owns your life, work and mind? Is your mind something that can be nationalized and its material contents distributed by the state? Socialists think the answer is yes. They believe the products of one's efforts belong to the community; that the state and society have a moral and financial responsibility to care for other people's children; and that the most successful and productive people should be the most penalized.
[. . .]
You who fund our universities do so with trust that intellectuals will act in your interest and reflect your pro-American values. You are wrong. Your hard work has been financing people who think they are better than your crass materialism, who think that you (but not they) are complicit in an evil system (capitalism).
Withdraw your support and leave them to fund themselves. Let them pit their wares on the free market, where they will be left homeless. The world you desired no longer exists in our universities. It lies elsewhere, in a philosophic system waiting to be discovered or created.
Jason D. Hill is honors distinguished professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, cosmopolitanism and race theory. He is the author of several books, including "We Have Overcome: An Immigrant's Letter to the American People" (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.
A remarkable document.
A former student is fixing to swim the Tiber, and Dale is "mildly discouraged."
Note to Professor Tuggy's students: you are lucky to have such a sharp philosopher and good man as a teacher.
One misunderstanding floated in the Facebook Medieval Logic forum is that presentism in the current analytic philosophy of time is the thesis that 'exists' and 'is present' are synonyms.
Not at all. It is obvious that 'exists' and 'is present' do not have the same meaning or sense. If I say that God exists, I need not be saying that God is present, and this for the simple reason that God, if eternal as opposed to everlasting, is 'outside of time' and therefore neither past, nor present, nor future.
Some philosophers hold that numbers and other so-called 'abstract objects' are timeless entities. If they are, then they are precisely not present. A fortiori, they are not past or future either. If they exist, then they exist 'outside of time.' But then 'exists' and 'is present' can't have the same meaning.
Now suppose there are no timeless entities and that everything is 'in time.' It would still not be the case that 'exists' and 'is present' have the same meaning or sense. The following questions make sense and are substantive in the sense that they do not have trivial answers:
Is everything that exists present? Or are there things that exist that are not present?
But the following questions have trivial answers:
Is everything present present? Or are there present things that are not present?
The answer to the first question in the second pair is a tautology and thus trivially true. The answer to the second is a contradiction and thus trivially false.
Since the first two questions are substantive, 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonyms.
G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good? The point is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure. For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good. Similarly, the sense of 'exists' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of existence and temporal presentness. If a thing exists it remains an open question whether it is present. There exists a prime number between 3 and 7. 'Is it present?' is a legitimate question. It won't be if numbers are timeless. So again we see that 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonymous expressions.
Consider now my cat Max. Max exists (present tense) and he is temporally present. Is his existence exhausted by his temporal presence? Or is he temporally present because he exists? These are legitimate questions. It is not obvious that Max's existence is exhausted by his temporal presentness. It could be that there is more to his existence than his temporal presentness. Since these questions make sense and are substantive, it follows that 'existence' and 'temporal presentness' are not synonyms.
If the presentist is not making a synonymy claim, what claim is he making? One type of presentist puts forth the following equivalence:
P. Necessarily, for all items x in time, x (tenselessly) exists iff x is present.
This is not a semantic claim, but an ontological claim, a claim about what exists. The presentist is saying that a correct ontological inventory of temporal items restricts them to present items. As opposed to what? As opposed to the 'pastist' who holds that the ontological inventory counts both past and present items as existing, and the the 'eternalist' who includes past, present, and future items in the count.
Ed the medievalist writes,
I know nothing about the modern view of presentism, or where the term ‘presentism’ comes from. Is the view that the extension of ‘(temporally) present men’ and ‘men who exist’ could change so that some men could be in the present while no longer existing? Or so that some men could exist while no longer being in the present?
Absolutely not. Presentism implies that every present man exists, and every existing man is present.
And yet another from the pen of the prolific Victor Davis Hanson.
It is amazing how much better conservative commentary is to the stuff churned out by the febrile Left.
Searching the brain to find the mind is like searching outer space to find God.
