Rights and Needs

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one."

Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated. 

Vote, vote early, and vote against the tyrants and the projectionist liars and language abusers of the Kamalist Left. I am assuming that you understand what is in your own long-term best self-interest. Go to GunVote.org to register.

No Complacency! All Hands on Deck!

The Republic hangs by a thread. We must defeat the Kamalists* and do so decisively.  They need not just defeat but demoralization. Unfortunately, too many 'influencers' are predicting a Trump victory.  Not wise.  We must not wax complacent. Our political enemies will do anything to win. No moral or legal considerations constrain them. We know a priori (in Kant's relative sense of the term) that they will cheat their posteriors  off — get the pun? –and then lie their heads off about their cheating. Why shouldn't they lie and cheat? We let them get away with it. Like Bret Baier, we conservatives are hobbled by our virtues, our civility for example. 

Roger Kimball the other day, and now Piers Morgan may be doing more harm than good. 

Morgan:

“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”

I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.

As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.

First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.

This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.

Read it all.

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*My astute readers of course know not to confuse Kamalism (a coinage I borrow from Thomas Klingenstein) and Kemalism.

Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?

Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter.  A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience.  We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is  intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation.  An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience. 

So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious.  Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that.  Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is. 

It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.

Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience:  it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.*  But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:

1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:

2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. 

3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:

4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body. 

Possible Objection

At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well?  However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.

In a later entry I will  respond to the objection.

__________

*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"

 

My Grunt Jobs

Furniture mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles;  grave digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California;  letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree planter in Oregon; taxi driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.

Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.

Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us.  That is buncombe pure and simple.  There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.

But individuation is a task, not a given.  Es ist nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. You have to work at it.

There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.

And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals.  To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.

Tribal identity is pseudo-identity.

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.

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) 

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.

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.
 

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.

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. 

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.