Why I Carry a Gun

Mirabile dictu, not everything The Atlantic publishes these days is left-wing crap. Never-Trumper David French explains why he carries. (HT: Bill Keezer)

It is rather curious, though. Here is a guy who not only supports Second Amendment rights, but also exercises them by keeping firearms in his home and bearing them on his person. And yet he either voted for Hillary the gun-grabber or refused to vote for Trump whose conservative accomplishments have been stellar in just one year.  What bloody sense does that make? You support the person who opposes your values? 

Another thing that angers me about French is that before the election he published an anti-Trump piece in which he referred to the Wall of Trump as a "pipe dream." That is the kind of disgusting, supine defeatism that you would expect from a pseudo-conservative like Jeb! Bush.

'Liberals' need to understand what they are up against in their crusade to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights.

You 'liberals' are profoundly stupid and lazy. If you want fewer guns in civilian hands, stop your screeching and emoting.  Study the issues. Learn the terminology. Take a course in logic.  Read the Constitution. Open your minds. Shut your lying mouths. The more you lie and slander, the more you galvanize the opposition.

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Proper Names

The Ostrich maintains:

1. Proper names have a (context dependent) sense. Context dependent, because ‘Mars’ can mean the god, or the planet, depending on context.

BV: Agreed.

2. The object itself cannot be part of the sense, although the mainstream view is that it is.

BV: What is being called the mainstream view, I take it, is the direct reference view according to which the semantics of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.  That is, there is nothing more to the meaning of a proper name than its referent. There is not, in addition to the referent, a (reference-mediating) sense that the name has whether or not it has a referent.  This implies that an empty (vacuous) name has no meaning.

The formulation of (2) leaves something to be desired. If we distinguish sense from reference/referent, as we must, then it is trivially true that the object, the planet Mars say, cannot be part of the sense. What's more, (2) misrepresents the mainstream view. No direct reference theorist holds that proper names have reference-mediating senses. No such theorist can be maintaining that the object itself is part of a reference-mediating sense. So (2) might be read like this:

2*. The object itself cannot be part of the MEANING of the name, although the mainstream view is that it is.

The trouble with (2*) is that it is false. Surely Mars is part of the MEANING of 'Mars' inasmuch as Mars is the referent of 'Mars.' 

The Ostrich's argument seems to perish at this point of an equivocation on 'sense' as between 'sense' in the sense of Frege's  Sinn and MEANING where the latter embraces both Sinn und Bedeutung, both sense and reference in Fregean jargon.

3. Nor can the sense signify some property, or collection of properties. Not a collection, for the reasons Kripke has cogently argued. Not a single ‘haecceity’, for the reasons you have argued.

BV: Right, if you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent. 

4. The only remaining candidate (in my view) is that a proper name acquires its meaning via anaphora (i.e. ‘back reference’). In all cases. 

BV: What do you mean by 'meaning'?  Do you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent?  My verdict is that your argument is still too murky to be evaluated. 

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler. 

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.  What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count?  His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested.  (inter esse)

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from  being an object of those attitudes of propinquity — to give them a name — such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh.  But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite.   I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity.  If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed. 

Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl

How Identity Politics is Made to Destroy Us

An outstanding essay by David Horowitz. I am tempted to reproduce the whole thing. I shall restrain myself.

Three Pillars of Totalitarianism

The totalitarian implications of this increasingly powerful ideological trend in the national culture have become pronounced enough to have alarmed some liberals, most notably the writer Andrew Sullivan. Observing that cultural Marxism is now the required creed of America’s liberal arts colleges, Sullivan warns, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges—your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression—will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.”

In America’s universities, which are the training grounds for America’s future leaders, the victory of the cultural Marxists is already complete. In Sullivan’s words, “The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment—untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights—are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.”

There are three pillars of the totalitarian outlook. The first is its totalist agenda—the elimination of private space and the abandonment of the liberal idea that there should be limits to government authority. In its place, totalitarians insist that “the personal is political.” Since the hierarchy of oppression that inspires social justice warriors encompasses all social relationships between races and ethnicities, between men, women, and multiple politically correct genders, there is no area of social life that escapes political judgment and is protected from government intrusion. Already, in New York City—to take one municipality controlled by the political Left—there are 31 government designated genders, and fines for failing to recognize them.

The second pillar is the idea of the social construction of race, class, and gender. This anti-scientific idea that races and genders are socially created rather than biologically determined is already the unchallenged premise of virtually all academic courses relating to gender and race, and informs many of the planks of the official platform of the Democratic Party. Recognizing the role of biological factors in determining gender and race would require an adjustment to reality, whereas the goal of identity politics is revolutionary and “transformative.” Removing and/or suppressing the alleged creators of genders and races will make possible the social transformation whose goal is “social justice.” The alleged creators of genders and races are the designated villains of identity politics: patriarchal and racial oppressors (white supremacists) who employ these categories to marginalize, dehumanize and dominate vulnerable alleged victim groups.

The centrality of these victim groups is encapsulated in totalitarianism’s third pillar: objectification—the elimination of individual agency and accountability in favor of group identities and oppression status. This, of course, is the inevitable consequence of collectivist ideologies which make groups primary and remove from individuals their agencies as subjects. If there is inequality its source is an invisible hierarchy of oppression, never the inequalities and failures of individuals themselves. If homicide is the number one killer of young black males, whites must be responsible because whites allegedly control all the institutions and social structures that determine black outcomes—notwithstanding the fact that the same crime statistics plague municipalities run by blacks as those run by whites. What may go on in black communities to account for these and other appalling statistics—out of wedlock births, physical abuse by parents, drug trafficking, lax law enforcement policies instituted by liberal authorities—is rendered invisible by an ideology which regards race as the determining factor regardless of individual behaviors and failings. If women are “under-represented” in engineering positions at Google, this cannot be because of individual choices made by women—to think so is prima facie sexism—but must be the work of a patriarchal conspiracy, however invisible.

The third pillar, Objectification, is also relevant to the identity politics of the Alt-Right, a topic Horowitz does not address in his essay. It is important to see that both the Left and the Alt-Right share the pernicious "elimination of individual agency and accountability in favor of group identities." 'Objectification' is exactly the right word for the refusal on both the Left and the Alt-Right to view people as individuals, as persons, as subjects irreducible to their class or racial or sexual membership.

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For a ‘Liberal,’ Gun Control = Gun Confiscation

Suppose there occurs some horrendous incident of roadway carnage. Nobody says, 'We need traffic laws.'  Nobody competent in English says that because it conversationally implies that there are no traffic laws.  What a person might sensibly say is that we need additional traffic laws, for example, laws outlawing texting while driving.  

So why do liberals reliably say, whenever there is a school shooting, or a similar outrage, 'We need gun control'? 'Gun control' refers to gun control laws of which there are many at the Federal, State, and local levels. Why would a liberal say we need gun control when it is obvious that there is plenty of gun control?

Because, for a 'liberal,' 'gun control is code for 'gun confiscation.' It is just that they, or most of them, lack the intellectual honesty to state plainly what they are for.

One of the reasons Hillary lost to the unlikely Donald Trump is because of her mendacity on this very issue. A stealth ideologue to the core, her speeches were nothing but bromides, blather, and bushwa bereft of ideas and concrete proposals. She dared not say what she really had in mind in prosecution of Obama's destructive project of "fundamental transformation." Luckily, the Clinton dynasty is at an end as is the Bush dynasty. We can thank Trump for having put paid to both.

Sorry Hillary, It’s Not About Hunting

John Daniel Davidson:

Here it must be said that the Second Amendment was not meant to safeguard the right to hunt deer or shoot clay pigeons, or even protect your home and family from an intruder. The right to bear arms stems from the right of revolution, which is asserted in the Declaration of Independence and forms the basis of America’s social compact. Our republic was forged in revolution, and the American people have always retained the right to overthrow their government if it becomes tyrannical. 

[. . .]

That might sound academic or outlandish next to the real-life horror of a school shooting, but the fact remains that we can’t simply wave off the Second Amendment any more than we can wave off the First, or the Fourth, or any of them. They are constitutive elements of the American idea, without which the entire constitutional system would eventually collapse.

The aim of the Left is to subvert the American constitutional order. This explains why leftists never miss an opportunity to attack the Second Amendment which is the concrete back-up to the First and the others.  A school shooting is a wonderful opportunity for them to recruit schoolchildren and bleeding-heart know-nothings as useful idiots for their cause.

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Is Economic Inequality Morally Acceptable?

This from a reader:

We are born with a natural inequality with soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status. It is an essential part of the human condition, and I believe impossible to eradicate, indeed it is impossible to conceive human nature or existence without the existence of status, and our desire to improve it. It is part of any organisation, including academia or the church. This is an evil, I believe, but to eradicate it would involve destroying our freedom, which is a worse evil. 

Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status.  Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train.  But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.  

It is not desire for status that explains economic inequality  but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security it provides.  Obviously, other factors come into the explanation including living in a politically stable capitalist country under the rule of law.  There are socialist crap holes in which everyone except the apparatchiki are poor but equal, but impoverished equality is not an equality worth wanting.  This is why commie states need walls to keep legals in while the USA needs a wall to keep illegals out.

Is the desire materially to improve oneself  evil? I would say no as long as the the pursuit of wealth remains ordinate, and therefore subordinate to higher values.  Is the resultant economic inequality evil? No again. Why should it be?  I have a right to what I have acquired by my hard work, deferral of gratification, and practice of the ancient virtues. It is to be expected that I will end up with a higher net worth than that of people who lack my abilities and virtues.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I "mix my labour" (Locke) with the soil and grow tomatoes, I have caused new food to come into existence; I haven't taken from an existing stock of tomatoes with the result that others must get fewer.  If my lazy neighbor demands some of my tomatoes, I will tell him to go to hell; but if he asks me in a nice way, then I will give him some. In this way, he benefits from my labor without doing anything. Some of my tomatoes 'trickle down' to him.  A rising tide lifts all boats. Lefties hate this conservative boilerplate whoch is why I repeat it. It's true and it works. When was the last time a poor man gave anyone a job? Etc.

I deserve what I acquire by the virtuous exercise of my abilities. But do I deserve my abilities? No, but I  have a right to them. I have a right to things I don't deserve. Nature gave me binocular vision but only monaural hearing. Do I deserve my two good eyes? No, but I have a right to them. Therefore, I am under no moral obligation to give one of my eyes to a sightless person. (If memory serves, R. Nozick makes a similar point in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)

At this point someone might object that it is just not fair that some of us are better placed and better endowed than others, and that therefore it is a legitimate function of government to redistribute wealth to offset the resultant economic inequality. But never forget that government is coercive by its very nature and run by people who are intellectually and morally no better, and sometimes worse, than the rest of us.

The evil of massive, omni-intrusive government is far worse than economic equality is good. Besides, lack of money is rooted in lack of virtue, and government cannot teach people to be virtuous. If Bill Gates' billions were stripped from him and given to the the bums of San Francisco, in ten year's time Gates would be back on top and the bums would be back in the gutters.

Perhaps we can say that economic inequality, though axiologically suboptimal, is nonetheless not morally evil given the way the world actually works with people having the sorts of incentives that they actually have, etc.  There is nothing wrong with economic inequality as long as every citizen has the bare minimum.  But illegal aliens have no right to any government handouts.

Man’s Second Oldest Faith

It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God. 

― Whittaker Chambers, Witness

Related: Reading about Commies

On Verbal Aggression

Robert Paul Wolff:

Verbal aggression, speaking generally, is a good thing, especially as an alternative to physical aggression.  The general rule about verbal aggression – satire, snark, ridicule, obscenity – is:  punch up, not down. 

A rule is one thing, its application another. How apply the Stoned Philosopher's rule? Suppose I ridicule Nancy Pelosi.  Am I punching up or down?  Arguably down inasmuch as she is an obviously stupid woman who is also vile. She is my intellectual and moral inferior. So I am punching down.

I will be told that I am punching up inasmuch as she has wealth and power far in excess of mine, and that therefore my verbal aggression is justified.

Whatever you say. The main thing is to keep up the verbal punching against our domestic enemies.

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