Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • We Have a Problem . . .

    . . . and according to Malcolm Pollack, there's no fixing it:

    We have a problem, and as far as I can see, it isn’t going away; indeed, I expect it will get sharply worse in the wake of next month’s election. The problem, simply put, is that although the bedrock principle of the American political formula is “consent of the governed”, we have now reached the point where whichever faction comes to power will govern entirely without the consent of half the population.

    This was not always the case. Once upon a time — within my own memory — there was enough commonality on social, political, and moral axioms that those out of power would subordinate their dissatisfaction to the importance of playing the game, and would look at political setbacks as little more than a bad year for the home team. “Next season” was never too far off, and meanwhile we could live with the opposition temporarily in power because we knew that, despite some differences about policy, we more or less agreed on the fundamental axioms of American life.

    Now, things are different. For the losers in the next election (whichever side that is), being governed by the victors isn’t going to feel like like losing a round; it will feel like being subjugated. It’s going to be like having their homeland pillaged and their altars desecrated by a despised and unholy enemy before whom they will be made to kneel. And that is going to get worse, not better, as time goes by.

    The two factions, the Cloud People and the Dirt People, each have power, but very different kinds of power (the power of the latter is still mostly latent and unorganized, but it is real). Clearly, we can’t live together, and neither is willing to be ruled by the other — but we can’t get away from each other, either.

    The problem is summed up perfectly in the final sentence.  I don't have a real solution but a return to federalism may help mitigate tensions, as I suggest in my latest Substack upload.

    Bill Vallicella

    14 responses to “We Have a Problem . . .”

  • Are MAGA Republicans Fascists?

    The Left's favorite 'F' word is 'fascist.' But of course leftists won't define it, the better to use it as a verbal cudgel.  We know, however, that responsible discussion of a topic begins with a definition of terms.

    What is a fascist? More to the point, what is fascism? The term expresses what philosophers call a 'thick' concept. Such concepts combine evaluative and descriptive content.  Examples include cruel and cowardly. If I describe an action as cowardly, I am both describing it and expressing a negative moral evaluation of it. Right and wrong, by contrast, are 'thin' concepts inasmuch as they contain no descriptive content.  If I commend you for doing the right thing, my commendation includes no descriptive content.

    Read the rest at Substack.

    UPDATE (10/21): The 'Fascist' Meme Returns. (WSJ) 

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Are MAGA Republicans Fascists?”

  • Bumper Stickers and Yard Signs

    As November 5th approaches, I am seeing a lot of them, especially yard signs. I myself prefer to 'go gray' inasmuch as such signage will reliably trigger emotions, but never persuade anyone to change his position.  Suppose you have good relations with your neighbor across the street. You share some interests, but have never talked politics.  You display a Trump-Vance sign. He sees it, and thinks to himself, "I thought Ron was a nice guy, but what sort of person would vote for Hitler?"  What did you accomplish by putting up the yard sign?  Nothing, and you've made things slightly worse.

    "But shouldn't you stand up for what you believe in?"

    Generally speaking, yes. But there are more effective and prudent ways of proceeding.  Vote, encourage your like-minded friends to vote, try to persuade open-minded fence-sitters, make a campaign contribution.

    There are also safety considerations, especially if you have a family to protect.  Take a gander at this, seeing once again  just how vicious, vile, and dangerous our political enemies can be.

    Trump supporters in Pennsylvania are reportedly being targeted with threatening letters from radical leftists, warning them that their visible support for the former President could lead to dire consequences.

    Residents with Trump signs in their yards, particularly in Philadelphia, have reported receiving disturbing letters through the U.S. Postal Service, complete with fake Trump campaign letterheads, Post Millenial first reported.

    The threatening letters, which start off as a seemingly benign “thank you” note for being engaged in the electoral process, quickly devolve into dark, ominous threats.

    One Trump voter, Janet from Penn Valley, shared her harrowing experience to Post Millenial.

    After proudly displaying Trump signs in her yard, she received one of these letters, filled with hateful rhetoric and explicit threats to her family and property.

    The unsettling message was far from an isolated incident. Janet, who reported the matter to the Lower Merion Police, revealed that other Trump supporters in her area had received similar letters.

    Local law enforcement, however, has been unable to pursue the matter further, as the letters were delivered through the mail without any available video evidence.

    Despite this, Trump supporters in the area have confirmed that this intimidation campaign is widespread, with reports of the same threatening letter being delivered both by mail and without postage directly into mailboxes.

    The letter, which opens with pleasantries, swiftly transitions into a vitriolic condemnation of Trump supporters, labeling the former President a “felon, rapist, desecrator,” and blaming him for political violence in the country.

    Read it all.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Bumper Stickers and Yard Signs”

  • Reader Requests Advice re: Learning Basics of Philosophical Argumentation

    A New Zealand reader writes,
     
    I was hoping if you are able to provide me with some guidance regarding where to begin learning the basics of philosophical arguments. I’ve been trying to understand how to evaluate political and theological debates for awhile, but despite my interest I often find them go away over my head. I found your Substack a couple of weeks ago and was delighted to find your articles not only quite easy to follow but made plenty of sense. So I thought why not give it a try and ask you for help in getting better critical thinking. It would be wonderful if you are able to help with this.
     
    Many thanks,
    Cameron
     
    I am happy to be of assistance, Cameron. Jay F. Rosenberg's The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners comes to mind.
     
    Your question has been put to me before. Here is a post from 2011 in which I make a few other suggestions. You will also find the comment thread to that post useful.
     
    If anyone wants to help Cameron in his quest, comments are enabled below.
     
    Bill Vallicella

    4 responses to “Reader Requests Advice re: Learning Basics of Philosophical Argumentation”

  • Gold

    Spot at the moment sits at 2709 USD/oz.  It will go up no matter who wins on the 5th, more with Kamala.   Wait for a dip to buy?  Buy now. You should have been buying steadily all along. But think for yourself and keep your own counsel. That's part of what I am trying to teach you people. You know enough to take my financial advice and predictions cum grano salis.

    Interesting that gold should surge right after Kamala's embarrassing performance in the Bret Baier interview.  How embarrassing? See here.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kamala the Destroyer

    Tom Klingenstein understands what's going on:

    Republicans criticize Kamala Harris for refusing to reveal her agenda, but, as Frank Cannon points out, she already has. Her agenda is the agenda of her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — someone Harris “ loves,” as she said recently. Unlike Kamala, Walz’s agenda and his beliefs are out there for all to see. He supports the full belief system of what I am calling “Kamalism”: a utopian society, today nominally led by Kamala, based on equal group outcomes. 

    Admitting people to college or flight training school (or anything else) based on quotas is the essence of the destructive Left’s “social justice,” which is utterly irreconcilable with American justice, which is based on individual merit. Because these are two understandings of justice (as occurred in the Civil War) it’s one or the other, group quotas or merit. A house divided against itself cannot stand; it will be all one thing to another. Not to put too fine a point on it: Kamalism must try to destroy America (and of course the reverse: we must try to save it). So, let’s frame the election: “Kamalism versus America.”

    This is by far the most important aspect of this election. One candidate wants to destroy our country ; the other wants to save it. This seems to me what virtually every politician misses. This election should not primarily be about immigration or crime or inflation or anything else Republican and Democrat politicians talk about. It should be about whether to elect a woman who wants to destroy America or a man who wants to improve it. But it isn’t. If we are to save America we must make the election about this choice, for every voter, right up until Election Day. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Kamala the Plagiarist

    She follows in the footsteps of Joe and Jill Biden, Claudine Gay, and so many others. Christopher Rufo exposes her.  

    At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

    However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Read it all.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Moral Community and Civil War

    Substack latest. 

    An exchange with Malcolm Pollack.

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “Moral Community and Civil War”

  • Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

    David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

    In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

    In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

    Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

    You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

    We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

    But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

    The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

    Brooks again:

    But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

    I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

    Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

    Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

    Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

    But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

    Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

    The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man”

  • Michael Moore Supports Trump?

    The Moore bit starts at the 1:20 mark then goes for four minutes. HT: Tony Flood.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Michael Moore Supports Trump?”

  • Thinking of Voting Third-Party?

    Don't be a fool! (Political abstinence is also folly.)

    Invective-free explanation over at Substack.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Thinking of Voting Third-Party?”

  • Kamala

    I voted already. The mail-in ballot arrived on the 10th; I mailed it on the 11th.  And I voted right. Did you? I also put my money where my mouth is by making a campaign contribution. Did you?

    Question: when one votes early by mail is one endorsing mass mail-in voting? I know my answer. What's yours?

    Bear in mind that a vote for Kamala is a vote for her puppet masters. She is a fraud, a phony, and a red herring. A vote for Trump will be a vote for a man, his own man, not a puppet. More importantly, it is a vote for policies which he has honestly stated.   In stark contrast, Kamala is a stealth ideologue. She has not come clean, and cannot: she must deceive the easily-deceived electorate to have a chance of winning. 

    UPDATE (10/14) 

    Polls Against Kamal the Phony

    I call leftist journalists, 'journos.' It is a term of disapprobation, to put it mildly. Here J. D. Vance blows a journo clean out of the water. And he does it personably and civilly without Trumpian exaggeration or unnecessary vitriol.

    Journalists these days, whatever their political affiliation, are on a pretty low level, competing with lawyers for the public's distrust. "Journalism is dead," as Bill O'Reilly used to say. But let's be fair and acknowledge the courage and commitment of journalists on both sides of the political divide who risk their lives to report on the unfolding horrors of our fallen world.  I am thinking in particular of Trey Yingst. But some lefties are courageous as well and deserve our respect.

    As for who deserves respect, does James Carville deserve any? Here is his latest outburst.

    Bill Vallicella

  • More Proof that Our Political Enemies are . . .

    . . . indeed political enemies.  Jonathan Turley is solid and sane:

    This week, Elton John publicly renounced the Rocket Man — no, not the 1972 song, but Elon Musk, whom he called an “a**hole” in an awards ceremony.

    Sir Elton, 77, is only the latest among celebrities and pundits to denounce Musk for his support of former president Donald Trump and his opposition to censorship. Musk-mania is so overwhelming that some are calling for his arrest, deportation and debarment from federal contracts.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats

    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 of any American generation. 

    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

    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.

    To be precise, it is not his  inasmuch as it was written by Herbie Hancock.

    More cat songs next week.

    Hurricane CATegories

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats”

  • Vincit qui se vincit

    "He conquers who conquers himself." Or as a cognate aphorism of mine has it:

    Self-mastery is the highest mastery.

    Self-mastery requires the mastery of both desire and aversion, not unto their extirpation as in Pali Buddhism, but sufficiently to render ordinate what is inordinate. The problem is not desire as such, but inordinate desire. Similarly for aversion.

    Along the same line, and in paraphrase of Augustine,

    The vicious man has as many masters as he has vices.

    Or as I say, with maximal pith and precision:

    Vices vitiate.

    Bill Vallicella

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