Imitation is the highest form of flattery.
A Political Counterfactual Conditional: Had Hillary Won . . .
. . .
The U.S. embassy would have stayed in Tel Aviv. “Strategic patience” would likely still govern the North Korea dilemma. Fracking would be curtailed. The — rather than “our” — miners really would be put out of work. Coal certainly would not have been “beautiful.” The economy probably would be slogging along at below 2 percent GDP growth.
China would be delighted, as would Iran. But most important, there would be no collusion narrative — neither one concerning a defeated Donald Trump nor another implicating a victorious Hillary Clinton. In triumph, progressives couldn’t have cared less whether Russians supposedly had tried to help a now irrelevant Trump; and they certainly would have prevented any investigation of the winning Clinton 2016 campaign.
Add this to the list of Trump's manifold accomplishments: he has forced the Dems and their Deep State operatives to show their true colors. We now know what we are up against.
The Second Amendment, First Principles, and the Right of Revolution
Trigger Warning! Likely to cause snowflake meltdown.
Edward J. Erler offers one of the best explanations of the Second Amendment I have ever read. Clear, scholarly, and right-headed. The folly of Justice Stevens is exposed. An excerpt, with bolding added:
Furthermore, the Declaration specifies that when government becomes destructive of the ends for which it is established—the “Safety and Happiness” of the people—then “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” This is what has become known as the right of revolution, an essential ingredient of the social compact and a right which is always reserved to the people. The people can never cede or delegate this ultimate expression of sovereign power. Thus, in a very important sense, the right of revolution (or even its threat) is the right that guarantees every other right. And if the people have this right as an indefeasible aspect of their sovereignty, then, by necessity, the people also have a right to the means to revolution. Only an armed people are a sovereign people, and only an armed people are a free people—the people are indeed a militia.
Barbara Bush
She taught her boys to be gentlemen, but apparently not how to fight. Now civility is a wonderful conservative virtue, but it is for the civil only. It doesn't work with thugs. If we are not willing to be uncivil in our response to our enemies, we will not be able to preserve a space for civility.
In this age of post-consensus politics such gentlemen as Jeb! are viewed by true conservatives as appeasing jokers, 'cuckservatives' in the harsh but telling lingo of certain alt-rightists.
To say it again: I am not alt-right; my disagreements with those boys go deep. But I am also not a knuckle-headed Never-Trumper who thinks the Alt-Right can be dismissed unread as if there is nothing genuine and important that motivates them.
Prager on Fear of the Left and its Consequences
Read it. Excerpts:
There are two reasons the left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.
[. . .]
It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported: “Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.”
One hopes that the solution to leftist scumbaggery won't require a 2A invocation.
We would like to think well of our fellow citizens. But most on the Left are making it impossible. They are not, in the main, good people. It is time to face reality and realize that many of our 'fellow citizens' are domestic enemies.
Would Don Juan Approve of Bill Cosby?
Drugging a woman to have sex with her takes all the sport out of the chase.
Philosophy’s My Passion . . .
. . . teaching a distraction.
No Voice for Men in Abortion Debate? Do Arguments Have Testicles?
Michael in Russia writes,
Got a question for you. I am a pro-abortion man (or even more generally a pro-death man since I support capital punishment too). You strongly oppose the former. I'm not going to repeat all familiar pros and cons. Rather, I've got one peculiar premise which I have never met in discussion of the issue and which I take to be the first step in dealing with it—namely, I hold that we, men, should have no voice at all in this business. Since no man has ever known what it is (like to be a bat) to conceive, to bear, and to give birth, and it appears that no one is going to, I maintain that this issue must be decided on strictly by women whatever the outcome. It's utterly undemocratic, but I'm not a fan of egalitarian democracy. So, what do you think of this: no voice for men in abortion debate, that's strictly women's business?
Thank you for reading, Michael, and thank you for writing.
It warms my heart to hear that you are pro-death – – when it comes to capital punishment. You are probably aware of my arguments for the latter's moral justifiability in some cases and in some venues. (In a place where the justice system is unfair, I would be inclined to support a moratorium on the death penalty.) I also maintain, pace the late, great Nat Hentoff, that it is logically consistent to be for capital punishment and against abortion.
My view in one clean sentence: Abortion is morally prohibited in most cases while capital punishment is morally required in some cases.
Now on to your question: Ought men have a say in the abortion debate? Here is my short answer:
Arguments don't have testicles!
But that bumper sticker wants unpacking.
An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument. And similarly for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime. The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers and consumers.
Here is an argument. "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion; therefore, abortion is morally wrong." The soundness/unsoundness of the argument cannot pivot on the sex of the producers or consumers of the argument.
Suppose someone argues that repeat-offending rapists should be be chemically or in some other way castrated by the state. Would the fact that men and men alone would bear the burden of the punishment be any reason to maintain that women have no right to a say in the matter? No.
It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man. Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection.
"You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!"
What's it like to be a pregnant woman?
In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' made famous by Thomas Nagel is not relevant. One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative. I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.
What's more, we white men can have a sort of knowledge by analogy of what women and cats and blacks feel. For example, men and women both urinate and defecate, and typically a certain pleasure accompanies these activities. I know by analogy what it is like for a woman to micturate and feel relief and a modicum of pleasure even though my modus micturiendi is somewhat different.
Defecation triggers orgasm in some women. I have never experienced that, but I can imagine it. Similarly with menstrual cramps, morning sickness, and other miseries of pregnancy. I am a sympathetic and sensitive guy as everyone knows. To be honest, I am a bit womanish in this regard, and I don't intend 'womanish' as a term of derogation.
I don't know what it is like to be a bat, and I will grant that bat qualia are beyond our ken even analogically; but I have some sense of what it is like to be a cat inasmuch as cats manifestly feel analogs of such human emotions as fear, surprise, annoyance, etc.
I have no idea, however, what my cat Max Black feels when he retromingently takes a leak.
Do I know what it is like to be black? Well, I know what it is like to disrespected. So I know what it is like to feel the hurt and the rage of a black motorist who is stopped by a cop merely for 'driving while black.'
But do I know what it is like to be a slave? About as well as contemporary blacks do in the West none of whom are or have ever been slaves.
"But you have never faced the prejudice blacks experience." Not that particular prejudice, but plenty of other kinds.
At this point tribalism enters the discussion. The more we tribalize, the more we shrink the space of objectivity, reason, and argument. The more we tribalize, the more we reduce ourselves to mere tokens of racial, ethnic, and other types. The more we do that, the more we miss the person, the free agent, the rational being.
There are blacks who would say to me, "You have no idea what it is like to be black!" I say, "Bullshit! You have incarcerated yourself in your tribal identity." Same with women who feel (that's exactly the right word) that abortion is a women's issue exclusively. Well, it is not. It is an objective issue that affects both males and females. Stop feeling and start thinking.
That should be obvious. Among those aborted are males and females. So abortion cannot be solely a concern of women.
So let us set our tribalism aside and approach the question as rational beings on the plane of reason and argument where no testicles are to be found.
Stella Morabito on the “Feral” Michelle Wolf
'Feral' is precisely the word for this disgusting leftist. The vile specimen cannot seem to distinguish between being foul-mouthed and being funny. There is no humor in what she said. Succeding as a scum bag, she fails as a comedienne.
She actually joked about abortion in the crudest terms imaginable. "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it." And then something about knocking the baby out. But she missed the one pun in the vicinity, 'being knocked up' as a slang phrase for 'being pregnant.'
Even the left-wing 'journalists' present thought Wolf's trangressivity excessive.
Pretense and Aspiration
How much of pretense is in aspiration, and aspiration in pretense?
Addicted to Food?
This is a re-post (re-entry?) from 9 December 2009. Re-posts are the re-runs of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you? The message delivered below is very important and needs be repeated and repeated again.
………………
Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':
To confuse psychological habituation with addiction is conceptual slovenliness. Addiction, if it means anything definite, has to involve (i) a physiological dependence (ii) on something harmful to the body (iii) removal of which would induce serious withdrawal symptoms. One cannot be addicted to nose-picking, to running, to breathing, or to caffeine. Furthermore, (iv) it is a misuse of language to call a substance addictive when only a relatively small number of its users develop — over a sufficient period of time with sufficient frequency of use — a physical craving for it that cannot be broken without severe withdrawal symptoms. Else one would have to call peanuts toxic because a tiny number of people have severe allergic reactions to them. Heroin is addictive; nicotine is not. To think otherwise is to use ‘addiction’ in an unconscionably loose way.
Avoiding loose talk in serious contexts is a good part of proper intellectual hygiene.
Liberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.
First, it aids them in their denial of individual responsibility. They would divest individuals of responsibility for their actions, displacing it onto factors, such as ‘addictive’ substances, external to the agent. Their motive is to grab more power for themselves by increasing the size and scope of government: the less self-reliant and responsible individuals are, the more they need the nanny state and people like Hillary, who gives some evidence of aspiring to be Nanny-in-Chief.
Second, loose talk of ‘addiction’ fits in nicely with what I call their misplaced moral enthusiasm. Incapable of appreciating a genuine issue such as partial-birth abortion, they invest their moral energy in pseudo-issues.
The main point is that tobacco products can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways, just as alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways. I have never met a cigarette yet that killed anybody. One has to smoke them, one has to smoke a lot of them over many years, and each time you light up it is a free decision.
Some people feel that all smokers are irrational. This too is nonsense, if we are talking about means-ends rationality. Someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day is assuming a serious health risk. But it may well be that the pleasure and alertness the person receives from smoking is worth the risk within the person’s value scheme.
Different people evaluate the present in its relation to the future in different ways. I tend to sacrifice the present for the future, thereby deferring gratification. Hence my enjoyment of the noble weed is abstemious indeed, consisting of an occasional load of pipe tobacco, or an occasional cigar. (I recommend the Arturo Fuente ‘Curly Head’ Maduro: cheap, but good.) But I would not think to impose my abstemiousness, or time-preference, on anyone else.
Addiction is not a Disease
The liberal wussification initiative needs ever more victims, ever more government dependents, and ever more sick people. Hence the trend in this therapeutic society to broaden the definition of 'disease' to cover what are obviously not diseases. Need more patients? Define 'em into existence! Theodore Dalrymple talks sense:
There are cheap lies and expensive lies, and the lie that addiction is a disease just like any other will prove to be costly. It is the lie upon which Washington has based its proposed directive that insurance policies should cover addiction and mental disorders in the same way as they cover physical disease. The government might as well decriminalize fraud while it is at it.
The evidence that addiction is not a disease like any other is compelling, overwhelming, and obvious. It has also been available for a long time. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s definition of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” is about as scientific as the advertising claims for Coca-Cola. In fact, it had its origin as a funding appeal to Congress.
To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.
Read it all.
The Multiverse Idea: Does it Help with the Question ‘Why Something Rather than Nothing?’
If 'universe' refers to the totality of what exists in space-time, then there can be only one universe. Call that the ontological use of 'universe.' On that use, which accords with etymology and common sense, there cannot be multiple universes or parallel universes. But if 'universe' refers to the totality of what we can 'see' (empirically detect) with our best telescopes in all directions out to around 14 billion light-years — call that the epistemological use of the term — then it is a reasonable speculation that there are many such universes.
After all, it is epistemically possible — possible for all we know — that there are other self-contained spatio-temporal regions beyond our current ken. Let's run with the speculation.
These many universes would then make up the one actual universe (in the ontological sense) which we can now call the multiverse: one universe with many spatio-temporally disconnected regions each with its origin in its own big bang.
Some journalists succumb to the conflation of the MODAL notion of possible worlds with the COSMOLOGICAL notion of a multiplicity of universes. These need to be kept distinct.
If there are many physical universes, as some cosmologists speculate, they are parts of total physical reality, albeit spatio-temporally disconnected parts thereof, and therefore parts of the total way things are, using 'are' tenselessly. But the total way things are is just what we mean by the actual world. To invoke the Tractarian Wittgenstein, "The [actual] world is all that is the case." "The [actual] world is the totality of facts not of things." The actual world is the total (maximal) way things are, and merely possible worlds are total ways things could have been. Therefore, if there are many physical universes, they are all 'located within' the actual world in the sense that they are all parts of what is actually the case.
In other words, each universe in the multiverse is a huge chunk of actuality; universes other than ours are not merely possible. They are actually out there beyond our ken. So it is a mistake to refer to the universes in the multiverse as possible worlds. This should be obvious from the fact that there is a possible world in which there are no universes beyond the one we 'see.' Obviously, this possible world is not identical to a physical universe beyond the reach of our telescopes.
Now suppose we want an answer to the question, Why is there anything physical at all, and not rather nothing physical at all? Does the multiverse idea help with this question?
Not in the least.
First of all, we can ask the same question about the multiverse that we asked about the plain old universe prior to the popularity of the multiverse theory. We can ask: why does the multiverse exist? After all, it is just as modally contingent as 'our' universe, the one we 'see.' Even if there are infinitely many universes in the multiverse, there might not have been any. What then explains the existence of the multiverse?
If I want to know why 'our' universe exists, it does no good to say that it is one of the universes in the multiverse, for that simply invites the question: why does the multiverse exist?
You might say, "The multiverse contains every possible universe, and therefore, necessarily, it contains ours." This is not a good answer because the ensemble of universes — the multiverse — might not have existence at all. Surely there is a possible world in which nothing physical exists.
Let us also not forget that the multiplicity of universes comes into existence. So there is need of a multiverse-generating mechanism which will have to operate on some pre-given stuff according to laws of nature. Even if different universes have different laws, there is need for meta-laws to explain how the base-level laws come to be. According to Paul Davies, as paraphrased and quoted here,
. . .to get a multiverse, you need a universe-generating mechanism, "something that's going to make all those Big Bangs go bang. You're going to need some laws of physics. All theories of the multiverse assume quantum physics to provide the element of spontaneity, to make the bangs happen. They assume pre-existing space and time. They assume the normal notion of causality, a whole host of pre-existing conditions." Davies said there are about "10 different basic assumptions" of physical laws that are required "to get the multiverse theory to work."
Davies then made his deep point. "OK, where did those laws all come from? What about those meta-laws that generate all the universes in the first place? Where did they come from? Then what about the laws or meta-laws that impose diverse local laws upon each individual universe? How do they work? What is the distribution mechanism?" Davies argues that the only thing the multiverse theory does is shift the problem of existence up from the level of one universe to the level of multiple universes. "But you haven't explained it," Davies asserted.
Davies dismissed the idea that "any universe you like is out there somewhere. I think such an idea is just ridiculous and it explains nothing. Having all possible universes is not an explanation, because by invoking everything, you explain nothing."
Here Davies may be going too far. If you want to explain why the physical constants are so finely tuned as to allow the emergence of life and consciousness and the minds of physicists, then it does seem to be a good explanation to say that there are all the possible universes there might have been; it would then be no surprise that in our universe physics exists. It had to exist in at least one! One would not then need God to do the fine-tuning or to actualize a life-supporting universe. But this still leaves unexplained why there is the ensemble of universes in the first place.
Davies' critique of the multiverse goes deeper. To explain the universe, he rejects "outside explanations," he said.
"I suppose, for me, the main problem [with a multiverse] is that what we're trying to do is explain why the universe is as it is by appealing to something outside of it," Davies told me. "In this case, an infinite number of multiple universes outside of our universe is used as the explanation for our universe."
Then Davies makes his damning comparison. "To me, multiverse explanations are no better than traditional religion, which appeals to an unseen, unexplained God — a God that is outside of the universe — to explain the universe. In fact, I think both explanations — multiverse and God — are pretty much equivalent." To Davies, this equivalence is not a compliment.
I don't see the damnation nor the equivalency. The appeal to God is the appeal to a necessary being about which it make no sense to ask: But why does it exist? The crucial difference between appealing to God and appealing to the multiverse is that the former is a necessary being while the second is not.
I grant, though, that the idea of a necessary being is a very difficult one!
What Alfie’s All About
Is Leftist Politics Anti-Identity Politics?
S. J. writes,
Reading your posts lately, the following thought struck me. I wonder if it's struck you, and if you'd agree:Identity politics is a misleading name for the recent catastrophic turn in so-called progressive politics. For what it actually aims at primarily is the *destruction* of traditional modes of identity, which are, loosely speaking, summarised by the slogan "faith, flag and family". What it replaces those with is of secondary importance to that central mission.That's why the obvious contradictions, and vicious internecine rivalries, on the left seem not (with certain honourable exceptions) to lead to anything approaching the self-doubt and ideological re-evaluation that conservatives assume – logically from their own frame of reference – that they ought. For it simply doesn't matter to the contemporary leftist that his preferred categories are flimsy and self-contradictory. They're only a means to an end; a solvent to be applied to the older forms of identity and self-understanding.On which account, it would be far more truthful to reckon it "anti-identity politics".(I might also add that we should therefore avoid the trap of playing up too much the individualism that, rightly understood, is central to much conservative thought, to the point of downplaying those old and authentic attachments – and so allowing the left to pose, utterly falsely, as the champions of community and relational life.)With heartfelt thanks for the stimulation to thought, not to say sheer enjoyment, that your blog continues to provide.
My kind reader is suggesting that left-wing politics is destructive of traditional forms of identity and therefore best understood as anti-identity politics rather than as identity politics.
I see matters differently. There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. This became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.' See If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist! (56 good comments).
As I see it, there is nothing inherently leftist or rightist about identity politics in the way political correctness is inherently leftist. (Anyone who is politically correct is by definition a leftist.) So what is it to be identity-political? I suggest that it is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.
In a separate post I hope to clarify and develop this suggestion.