Maverick Philosopher

Political Circularity

The Democrats, under party discipline, circle the wagons.

The Republicans, with their obstructionist 'mavericks,' form a circular firing squad.

The Libertarians, bent on irrelevance, engage in a 'circle jerk.'

The Democrat leadership knows how to enforce party discipline, and their members toe the line and vote as a bloc. The Republicans, however, include mavericks, the most prominent of them being Senator John McCain of Arizona:

It’s become a cliché to label McCain a “maverick” for his dramatic, and increasingly frequent, breaks with the Republican Party line. But it’s a cliché because the label fits: Over nearly four decades in Washington, McCain has given a master class in maverickism, and it is for this he will be most remembered. So it is fitting, perhaps that the inveterate fighter is taking on Trump—another Republican politician who rose by bucking GOP orthodoxy—in his final battle, and bequeathing to the nation a bookful of advice on how to be the right kind of maverick. To Trump, McCain writes in his new memoir, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations, the mere appearance of toughness “seems to matter more than any of our values.” He suggests the president is jeopardizing those values by undermining the free press with regular accusations of “fake news”—a tactic “copied by autocrats,” McCain writes—supporting torture, branding immigrants criminals and opening the door to moral equivalence with Vladimir Putin by saying, “We have a lot of killers too.” That, McCain writes, “was a shameful thing to say, and so unaware of reality.”

The problem congressional mavericks can pose is well-illustrated by McCain's slanderous, ill-considered, and personally-motivated attack on Donald Trump. Trump was elected to push a populist, Jacksonian agenda; instead of getting with the program, McCain plays the obstructionist, objecting like a Democrat, talking like a liberal, while the opposition party maintains a unified front. This is why true conservatives consider it a good thing, not that he is dying, but that will no longer be able to obstruct.

I wonder if the typical liberal can understand the distinction I just invoked. Probably not, in this Age of Feeling.

Suppose someone is a serious impediment to your flourishing. You will want his opposition, interference, harassment to stop. Should the opponent die, then his opposition will stop. If the person dies you can legitimately take satisfaction in the cessation of his wrongful and petty opposition without taking satisfaction in his dying. And that is what you ought to do, difficult as it is to avoid all Schadenfreude on the death of an enemy.

As for McCain's slanders, the worst of the ones mentioned above is the egregious falsehood that Trump "brands immigrants criminals." This is a constantly repeated leftist smear. That McCain would repeat it is appalling. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and decency would understand Trump to have said that some illegal immigrants are criminals, which is certainly true, and an additional reason why the nation's borders must be secured. But McCain hates the president and his hate blinds him. I understand why the former hates the latter, but the fact remains.

I'll finish this later. It is 4:50 AM. I have already this morning written philosophy in my journal from 2:00 to 3:30; done my spiritual exercises from 3:30 to 4:10, eaten a little breakfast, two rice cakes smeared with jam and almond butter, drunk two cups of seriously strong java, and uploaded this entry to my blog. It is now first light and time to hit the trails before Old Sol becomes too uppity.

The strenuous life is best by test.

A Common Abortion Mistake

It is often said that a human fetus is a potential human life. Not so! A human fetus is an actual human life.

Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother. It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And let's be clear that a potential X is not an X. A potential oak tree is not an oak tree. A potential neonate is not a neonate. A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker. But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn. And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.

The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities. So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition. You need to find a morally relevant difference — not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference — between the fetus and any born human individual.

Does the Validity of an Argument Depend on the Order of its Premises?

Suppose you have a valid argument. Can you render the argument invalid by changing the display order of the premises?

I should think never. The Dark Ostrich, however, offers the following putative counterexample. He says he got it from Sainsbury; I should like to see a reference. And if there is a literature on this, I should like to see a bibliography.

(A) Some Greek is called ‘Mark’, Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (VALID)

(B) Mark is an evangelist, some Greek is called ‘Mark’, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (NOT VALID)

(A) is valid and (B) is not. But this is not evidence that premise order affects validity. For while the sentences are the same, the premises of the two arguments are not the same. Made explicit, (A) becomes

(A*) Some Greek is called 'Mark', this same individual called 'Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist.

Clearly, (A*) and (B) have different premises. So it is not the different order of the premises in (B) that causes it to be invalid.

A Great Hot Sauce Rant from 2013

We must never forget how vicious and stupid leftists are. Enjoy!

……………………….

California Regulators Go After Sriracha Hot Sauce

Pope Francis recently spoke, quite foolishly, of "unfettered capitalism," as if there is any such thing in the world. A more worthy cynosure of disapprobation is the slide toward unfettered regulation and omni-invasive government spearheaded by presumably well-meaning liberal-fascist nanny-staters.

You know things are getting bad when they come after your hot sauce. An Asian restaurant without Sriracha is like, what? A house without a fireplace? Coffee without caffeine? A man without balls?

You see, if these food fascists can go after Sriracha on the ground that it is a raw food, then Tabasco sauce, that marvellous Louisiana condiment from Avery Island, that undisputed king of the hot sauces, recognized as such by true connoisseurs all across this great land, that sine qua non of fine dining, and the criterion that separates, in point of the prandial, the men from the candy-mouthed girly-men, and which is also a raw food — then, I say, Tabasco sauce is in danger, a state of affairs the only appropriate remedy to which would be of the Second Amendment variety, if I may be permitted a bit of holiday hyperbole.

David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods, fled communist Viet Nam to come to our shores for freedom and a chance at self-reliance and economic self-determination . Unfortunately, the successors of commies, the leftists of the Democrat Party, may drive Tran out of California into a friendlier environment.

When they came for the soda, you did nothing because you don't drink the stuff. When they came for the Sriracha, you did nothing because you didn't know what the hell it was. But if they come after Tabasco sauce and you do nothing, then you deserve to be shot — figuratively speaking of course.

Story here.

Conservative Resistance on the Language Front

One form conservative resistance takes is insistence on one's right to use standard English and oppose innovations. But it ought to be a tolerant resistance, one that permits the politically correct to speak and write as they wish so along that do not try to impose their foolishness upon us.

. . . the use of PC jargon aids and abets the Left's tendency to inject politics into everything. The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized. For a conservative to employ PC jargon is therefore very foolish. As I have said dozens of times in these pages, conservatives should not talk like liberals. Battles in the culture war are often fought and won on linguistic ground, and we conservatives should not acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism.

Like a Faraday Cage

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.'

A ‘Fake News’ Smear

Donald Trump baits the so-called journalists of the lamestream media with his largely, but not entirely, true accusations of 'fake news' and what do the 'journalists' do? They bite. They take the bait.

In their TDS-driven rage they verify the accusations by violating their own professional standards. Well, keep it up knuckleheads! You are destroying what is left of your credibility.

By the way, when John McCain and others accuse Trump of attacking the Fourth Estate they are merely flailing about in frustration. Trump is rendering a salutary service by punching back effectively at the patently biased and leftward-leaning mainstream/lamestream media.

Trump's genius is that he knows how so to needle them that they show their true colors. Or as Dan Bongino rather less delicately put it the other night, "He gets them to pull down their pants and show their asses."

Bongino then went on strangely to remark that he didn't mean the comment literally! No?

The only thing wrong with Trump's 'animal' comment is that it is not fair to animals. They don't have free will; MS-13 gangsters do.

It is clear proof that leftists in high positions in the Fourth Estate are moral scum that they could with impunity slander a duly elected president in such a vicious and absurd way.

Why Did America Fight the Korean War?

Victor Davis Hanson explains in less than five minutes.

South Korea is a model global citizen and a strong ally of the U.S.—and stands in sharp contrast to the communist regime in the North that has starved and murdered millions of its own people and caused untold mischief in the world community. Had it not been for U.S. intervention and support to the South, the current monstrous regime in Pyongyang would now rule all of Korea, ensuring its nuclear-armed dictatorship even greater power and resources.

The American effort to save South Korea also sent a message to both communist China and the Soviet Union that the free world, under U.S. leadership, would no longer tolerate communist military take-overs of free nations. The resulting deterrence policy helped to keep the communist world from attempting similar surprise attacks on Japan, Taiwan, and Western Europe.

Finally, the Korean War awakened the United States to the dangers of disarmament and isolationism and led to the bipartisan foreign policy of containment of global communism that in 1989 finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it victory in the Cold War.

The Korean War was an incomplete American victory in its failure to liberate North Korea and unite the peninsula, but a victory nonetheless. And not just from a military perspective, but from a moral one as well. The reason 35,000 Americans died in Korea was to keep at least half the Korean people free. Korea did not have a single material resource that would have benefited America.

The Korean War merits more than a blank stare. It deserves to be remembered and studied – with pride.

The Populist Surge in Italy and Elsewhere

Immigration, both legal and illegal, is perhaps the central issue of our time. Robert W. Merry:

And, of all the issues roiling Europe these days, none generates more political force and energy than the immigration crisis—representing a direct threat to the very definition of the West as well as its cultural coherence and health. The globalist elites don’t get it, even now, but their days are numbered. It is noteworthy that the two political institutions seeking a coalition government in Italy represent some 69 percent of the March 4 vote. That’s a lot of populist sentiment, and the elites may be able to chip away at it if the coalition stumbles, but they won’t be able to reverse it. The country is set upon a populist course for years to come.

Bill Galston, who is no populist (his latest book is entitled Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy), nevertheless understands the wellsprings of populist movements. “Throughout Europe,” he writes, “immigration is at the core of the populist critique of the liberal democratic order.” He notes that Orban in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, France’s Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini “all have highlighted the EU’s stance on immigration, raising important questions about economic globalization, political transnationalism, and cultural liberalism.” He adds that dismissing these concerns as simply retrograde is “counterproductive.” Instead, Europe’s leaders will have to take them seriously—“while offering better answers than unscrupulous demagogues like Orban can muster.”

Why should populism be considered a threat to liberal democracy? It is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. Merry, above, speaks of "cultural coherence." A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

This is happening in Europe, Belgium being one good and chilling example. Muslim culture, however, is inferior to ours (on balance, not in every respect) and it is our decadence that blinds us to this fact. Suppose you are a benighted relativist who cannot or will not comprehend what I just wrote. Still, a nation has a right to its heritage and its culture. This is why there cannot be open borders. We have every right to preserve our culture just as Muslims have a right to preserve theirs.

In sum:

1) Immigration issues will drive our politics, and not just ours, for the forseeable future.

2) The populist juggernaut will be hard to stop, and not just here.

Addendum (5/21):

Bill Keezer recommends Civilizational Jihad in the USA: The Practicum. You will find it very interesting, if that's the word.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Assimilation and Name Change

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster. We're headed in that direction. And in Europe it is even worse. But in the meantime we enjoy some tunes from performers who ditched their Italian surnames, not so much from a desire to assimilate, or because of ethnic prejudice, but to make themselves more marketable.

But first one who didn't part with his beautiful surname. An early manager suggested to Frank Sinatra that he adopt the stage name 'Frankie Satin.' Sinatra would have none of that bullshit. He did things his way. You got a problem with that? That's Life. That's what the people say. Flyin' high in April, shot down in May.

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower! This video shows what the dude, Di Nicola not Eisenhower, looked like. He resembles a super short Joe Pesci. What Kind of Love is This?

Margaret Battavio (Little Peggy March), I Will Follow Him. An early feminist anthem.

Frank Castelluccio (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Deer Hunter version. Dawn. Walk Like a Man. (Sing like a castrato.)

Anthony Dominic Benedetto (Tony Bennett), The Way You Look Tonight

Alfred Arnold Cocozza (Mario Lanza), O Sole Mio. Here is what Elvis made of the tune. Lanza ditched his Italian name for a different Italian name. Are there any other cases of this? (Of course, scroll up.) 'Lanza' rolls off the tongue; 'Cocozza' not so much.

'Long about the time King Creole came out, when I was eight, I mentioned Elvis Presley to my Italian mother. "That jackass!" she replied. The irony, however, is that she listened to crooners like Mario Lanza.

Francis Thomas Avallone (Frankie Avalon), Venus.

Fabiona Forte Bonaparte (Fabian), his songs are too schlocky even for my catholic tastes. Linkage denied!

Before Bobby Darin became Bobby Darin he rejoiced under the name, Walden Robert Cassotto. Dream Lover. 18 Yellow Roses. You're the Reason I'm Living.

Bobby Rydell started out Robert Ridarelli. Forget him. Volare. "Letsa fly . . . ." Wild One. We Got Love.

No, his name wasn't Dino Martino, it was Dino Paul Crocetti. Schmaltzy as it is, That's Amore captures the Nagelian what-it's-like of being in love. Houston.

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, better known as Connie Francis. My Darling Clementine. Never on Sunday. I prefer the understated Melina Mercouri version.

Timoteo Aurro = Timi Yuro. When I first heard her back in the day, I thought she was black. What a voice! What's the Matter, Baby? Her signature number: Hurt.

Laura traded in 'Nigro' for 'Nyro.' Smart move. Wedding Bell Blues. And When I Die. These go out to Monterey Tom, big L.N. fan. Nyro died young in 1997 of ovarian cancer, 49 years of age.

Can it be Shown that Truth is More Than a Transcendental Presupposition?

Cyrus writes,

I've been thinking about Pyrrhonian arguments. I wonder if you could help with something:

i. Either there is truth or there is no truth.

ii. If there is truth, there is truth.

iii. If there is no truth, there is truth.

iv. Hence, there is truth.

(i) is an instance of the law of the excluded middle; (ii) is self-evident; (iii) follows from the fact that if the proposition that there is no truth is true, there is a truth; (iv) follows from (i) – (iii). I've always considered this a really secure argument.

But the skeptic is going to point out that we must assume there is truth in order to argue that there is truth (e.g. the premises need to be true for the conclusion to follow), and therefore fall into circularity.

It is worth noting that the above consequentia mirabilis argument seems to justify the stronger conclusion that necessarily there is truth. For if there is truth whether or not there is truth, then necessarily there is truth.

The above argument is both valid and sound. But the skeptic is within his rights in pointing out that the argument does not prove unconditionally that there is truth; it presupposes it. Of course, pointing this out, the skeptic also presupposes that there is truth. For to point something out is to point it out as true.

My reader wants to know whether the argument succeeds. I think it succeeds in proving that we cannot fail to presuppose truth, that we must presuppose it. It succeeds in proving at least this much: that the existence of truth is a transcendental presupposition of all our epistemic operations. I am using 'transcendental' in a roughly Kantian way.

Things get really interesting when we ask whether truth could be shown to be more than a transcendental presupposition. I would like to be able to show that truth exists of metaphysical necessity independently of us and our need to presuppose it. The above argument, however, does not show this.

And so the following doubt arises: It might be that the necessity of truth is not an absolute or unconditional necessity, but a conditional necessity, one that depends on our contingent existence. So long as we exist, truth exists because we cannot help presupposing it. But at times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either. (Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 44 c: Warheit 'gibt es' nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist.)

How do we know that this is not the case? How do we know that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition? How do we know that, apart from discursive intellects, that truth exists absolutely or unconditionally?

The situation with truth might be like that of the Cartesian cogito: Necessarily, if I think, then I exist; but it does not follow that I necessarily exist. Necessarily, if discursive intellects exist, then truth exists; but it doesn't follow that truth necessarily exists. Could it be that in both cases we have but a conditional necessity? In the Cartesian case it seems clear that the necessity is conditional: I cannot help but presuppose my existence as long as I am thinking even when the thinking is a doubting that I exist; but 'surely' the I that thinks might not have existed in the first place.

And so if intellects of our type (whether biologically human or not) had never existed, truth (and falsehood) would never have existed either.

But now consider the statement (S):

S. At times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either.

(S) purports to be true. Would it be coherent to say that (S) is true only when we exist, and that when we don't it is neither true nor false? If it is true that there were times when we didn't exist, then it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist. Is this coherent? It seems not. For if it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist, then it was neither true nor false THEN, and it could not have been the case that truth did not exist then.

The problem is that if we think of truth as merely a transcendental presupposition, then we break the link between truth and Being. There is no truth outside of a mind; but there is also no truth in a mind that is not in contact with reality (Being). Truth is the truth about what is. This seems to imply that truth cannot be merely a transcendental presupposition of our epistemic operations.

Truth is not like a flashlight that we bring into the dark to reveal things that, apart from us, would remain in darkness. Things glow by their own light, and our minds are sensitive to this light but not productive of it.

So if we supplement the above argument with analysis along these lines of the nature of truth, then perhaps we can argue cogently that truth exists, and must exist, independently of us.

This last stretch of argument, however, is not as clear as I would like it to be. It is a deep topic! If God exists, then truth exists of metaphysical necessity and independently of us. But in philosophy we cannot start with God, though we may end with him.

Kanye and the Democrats

Walter E. Williams:

The big difference between black libertarians/conservatives and West is that he has 28 million Twitter followers and a huge audience of listeners whereas few blacks have even heard of libertarian/conservative blacks outside of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (I might add in passing that Dr. Thomas Sowell is one of the nation’s most distinguished and accomplished scholars alive today.)

The Kanye problem for the Democratic Party is that if the party doesn’t keep blacks in line and it loses even 20 to 25 percent of the black vote, it can kiss any hope of winning any presidential and many congressional elections goodbye. Democrats may have already seen that threat. That’s why they support illegal immigration and voting rights for non-citizens. Immigrants from south of the border who are here illegally may be seen as either a replacement for or a guarantee against the disaster of losing the black vote.

That's right. Illegal aliens are undocumented Democrats.

And you are still a Democrat? Then you are clearly no patriot. A patriot loves his country. He does not seek its fundamental transformation.