The Italians are wising up. Georgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy exposes the Left's migrant agenda.
A Version of Alt-Right Identitarianism
My right-wing identitarian sparring partner makes a good response to my attempt, earlier today, to locate a common root of both right-and left-wing identitarianism. My responses are in blue.
……………..
Wouldn't you agree, on reflection, that the bolded passage [from a NYT article] is a straw man?
"Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural."
A typical 'alt-right' identitarian in Europe or America believes things like this:
(a) race is real,
(b) race is an important part of human identity, and a natural basis for organizing society,
(c) racial differences have important political consequences,
(d) whites have the right to act in their own interest, e.g., by stopping immigration or defending the dominance of white European culture and norms in white European societies . . .
I accept, with qualifications, all four of these propositions. Much depends, of course, on what exactly they are taken to mean.
As for the first proposition, I accept it as it stands if it is the negation of the claim that racial differences are wholly a matter of social construction. Racial theories and classifications are of course social constructs; but these theories and classifications are attempts to understand an underlying biological reality. That there are biological differences between the races is as obvious as that there are such differences between men and women. These biological realities make it impossible for a person to change his race. See my response to Rebecca Tuvel's "In Defense of Transracialism."
As for the second proposition, I can accept it, but only with serious qualifications. I hold that a human being is a spiritual animal, and therefore not just an animal. My opponent will probably not accept this; my impression is that he is a naturalist. My theistic personalism is a version of anti-naturalism. As a personalist I maintain that race bears only upon my animal identity, WHAT I am as a bit of the world's fauna; not upon WHO I am as a person. Furthermore, my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person. See Is There a Defensible Sense in which Human Beings are Equal?
Of course, I don't expect my interlocutor to accept any of this if he is a naturalist. But then the discussion shifts to naturalism which comprises a set of questions logically prior to the present set.
With respect to the first half of (b), I would say that race is not an important part of my identity as a person, because it is not any part of my identity as a person, even though it is essential to my identity as an animal: I am not accidentally Caucasian any more than I am accidentally male. (Thus even if I pulled a Bruce Jenner and donned 'superdrag' apparel complete with surgically fabricated vagina, mammaries, etc, I would still remain biologically male. I would just be parading around in 'superdrag.' ) My opponent, if he is a naturalist who sees himself as identical to a living human animal, is committed not only to saying that race is an important part of human identity, but is essential to human identity.
The second half of (b) also requires qualification. First of all it is not clear what it means to say that race is a natural basis for organizing society. Is this supposed to rule out a 'proposition nation'? And what exactly is a 'proposition nation'? The Alt-Right seems adamantly opposed to such a thing. But the unity of the USA is not the unity of a tribe but the unity of a set of ideas. Those who accept these ideas are Americans regardless of whether they come from England or Germany or Italy, or Greece — or China. I grant, of course that certain ethnic groups are better equipped to implement American values and ideals than others. But that is consistent with the USA being a 'proposition nation.'
As for the third and fourth propositions, I agree. Racial differences do have political consequences, and immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country and its culture. It would therefore be national suicide to allow the immigration into Western nations of sharia-supporting Muslims. But what about educated secular Turks who are religiously Muslim to about the same extent as a Boston Unitarian is Christian and bear some of the innocuous cultural marks of Muslims such as the valuing of modesty in women and an aversion to the consumption of alcohol? What could justify excluding them from immigrating?
Pence’s Departure a Stunt?
While Trump and Corker took potshots at each other, Vice President Mike Pence engaged in an intentionally polarizing stunt by showing up at an Indianapolis Colts football game only to depart in a huff when players from the San Francisco 49ers (predictably) knelt in protest during the national anthem. It was an utterly gratuitous effort to sow race-based dissension and animosity in the country — the diametric opposite of the kind of behavior we normally label "presidential."
Polarizing? We are already polarized. There is no need for any polarizing. VP Pence was merely taking a stand at one of the poles, the pole of patriotism and decency and respect, and protesting the antipodean ingratitude and disrespect of the louts who protest an imaginary 'systemic racism.'
Intentionally polarizing? How does Linker know what Pence's intentions were?
Stunt? Pence was courageously pushing back against destructive leftist scum.
Predictably? So the louts lack free will and must be expected to engage in bad behavior?
Gratuitous? Not at all. It was a warranted response to the loutish behavior of know-nothings.
Effort to sow race-based dissension? Again, how does Linker know what Pence's intentions were? And again, the dissension already exists. There's no need for any sowing.
Race-based? What does race have to do with this? Pence was standing up against unpatriotic behavior at a NATIONAL Football League event.
Unpresidential? Not at all. Pence courageously took a patriotic stand. He did his job. Had he not done what he did he would have been unpresidential.
As for Trump, it is eminently presidential of him to call for the elimination of NFL subsidies.
It looks like we have a bit of a disagreement here.
An Identitarian is an Identitarian, Left or Alt-Right
And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. Here is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added):
In the most memorable sentence in “The First White President,” Mr. Coates declares, “Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring
I am not so sure the febrile, destructive bullshit of millionaire celebrity Coates is morally superior to white supremacism, but the bolded passage gets at the truth of the matter.
By the way, the bums at the NYT have made it difficult to copy from their articles, but here are two work-arounds. I just now employed the first and it is not too much of a pain.
Are ‘Progressives’ Now Entirely Devoid of Moral Sense?
From an article by A. N. Wilson:
Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime. It was hardly surprising that the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said he did not believe in abortion, because he is a man of conviction as well as a Roman Catholic, and this is the teaching of his Church. Yet his view was treated with incredulity and disdain by everyone from trolls and women's groups to the higher echelons of the political Establishment.
Catholics need to to realize that it is utterly foolish to invoke the teachings of their church in justification of their beliefs when countering leftists. If that is what the Tory MP did, then he needs to wise up. In the eyes of a leftist, he may as well have 'defended' his opposition to abortion on the ground that his mum/mommy taught him that it is very bad.
Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept? The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative, although few seem to understand this. Yet another reason why you need my blog.
I argue it out here.
The Truth About Che Guevara, Mass-Murderer and Hero of the Left
50 years ago today: execution of Che Guevara by Bolivian government.
Che Guevara has the most effective public relations department on earth. The Argentine guerrilla and modern Cuba’s co-founding father has been fashioned into a hipster icon, a counter-cultural hero, an anti-establishment rebel, and a champion of the poor. As James Callaghan once put it, “A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro’s chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru’s Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala’s White Hand on the right.
You know-nothing liberals need to read the whole thing.
Unbegriff
This passage from Schopenhauer illustrates one of my favorite German words, Unbegriff, for which we have no simple equivalent in standard English.
"An impersonal God is no God at all, but only a word misused, an unconcept, a contradictio in adjecto, a philosophy professor's shibboleth, a word with which he tries to weasel his way after having had to give up the thing." (my trans.)
I read Schopenhauer as attacking those who want to have it both ways at once: they want to continue talking about God after having abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they speak of an impersonal God, a construction in which the adjective 'contradicts' the noun. (The Ostrich of London may perhaps fruitfully reflect on the deliberate use-mention fudge in my last sentence.)
The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.
God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?
We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?
This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.
God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.
Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.
On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)
And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?
If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.
On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.
Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?
Compensation
To compensate us for loss of hearing, old age grants us the wisdom to appreciate that most of what is said is not worth hearing in the first place.
Hugh Hefner’s Legacy
Here:
Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.
Read it all. I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Petty (1950-2017)
When the '60s ended my musical interests shifted to jazz and classical, so my acquaintance with rock from the '70s on is pretty spotty. But I sat up and took notice when, in the late '80s, Petty teamed up with his elders Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne to form the supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys. With Petty's death, Dylan and Lynne are the sole remaining Wilburys.
And as we all approach The End of the Line, the Traveling Wilburys have some words of wisdom:
Maybe somewhere down the road a ways
You'll think of me and wonder where I am these days
Maybe somewhere down the road when someone plays
Purple Haze[. . .]
Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray
Well it's all right, you still have something to say
Well it's all right, remember to live and let live
Well it's all right, best you can do is forgive.
Johnny Cash has a great version
Were Trump Voters Irrational? Instrumental and Epistemic Rationality; Truth and Accuracy
A very good article. I agree that the answer to the title question is in the negative. But I have a couple of questions about the following:
Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality is achieved when we act with optimal efficiency to achieve our goals. Epistemic rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world—that is, whether our beliefs are accurate, or true. A quick and memorable way to differentiate the two is to say that they concern what to do (instrumental rationality) and what is true (epistemic rationality). Of course, the two are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world. In order to understand the rationality (or irrationality) of the Trump voters, I will focus first on instrumental rationality and then turn to epistemic rationality.
The definition of instrumental rationality is perfect.
The definition of epistemic rationality, however, leaves something to be desired. And I should think truth and accuracy ought not be conflated.
Epistemic Rationality
It seems we we are being told that a belief is epistemically rational if and only if it is true. But that cannot be right. Epistemic, or better, doxastic, rationality is a relative property while truth is absolute. What it is rational to believe at one time might not be rational to believe at another time. But if a proposition is true it is true independently of time, place, and the vagaries of belief and desire. For example, it was doxastically rational for the ancient Greeks to think of water as an element even though we now know that to be false. The history of science is littered with beliefs that were at one time rationally accepted but are now rightly rejected as false.
So what it is rational to believe needn't be true. On the other hand, a proposition can be true but not rational to believe. It is easy to imagine situations in which a person speaks the truth but it would not be rational for his audience to believe him because of circumstances or his low credibility or the high antecedent improbability of the proposition asserted.
Truth and Accuracy
The author conflates these two; this strikes me as a mistake.
What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions, beliefs, judgments, etc.?
It seems obvious that 'false' and 'inaccurate' do not have the same meaning as is indicated by their differential usage by competent speakers of English. To say that John F. Kennedy finished his first term in office in good health is to say something false, not inaccurate, while to say that he was assassinated on 23 November 1963 is to say something inaccurate (and also false). He was assassinated on 22 November 1963.
Suppose someone says that there are people now living on the Moon. No one competent in English would say, 'That's inaccurate!'
Intuitively, an inaccurate statement is near the truth. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on the 22nd of November, 1963. If I state that, then I make a statement that is both true and accurate. If I say he was shot on the 23rd, then I say something very near the truth but inaccurate. Similarly if I said that he was shot on the 22nd in Fort Worth rather than in Dallas. Inaccurate but near the truth.
If I simply say that Kennedy was assassinated, then I say something true. But is it also accurate? If every inaccurate statement is false, then, by contraposition, every true statement is accurate.
If I say that Kennedy was not assassinated, then I say something false. But is it also inaccurate?
Perhaps we should say the following. While every statement is either true or false, only some statements are either accurate or inaccurate. Which statements? Those that feature terms that admit of degrees or somehow imply numerical values. 'Tom is a smoker' would then be either true or false but not either accurate or inaccurate. But 'Tom is a pack-a-day smoker' would be either true or false and either accurate or inaccurate. Of course, if it is accurate, then it is true, and if it is inaccurate, then it is false.
It is plausible to maintain, though not self-evident, that while accuracy admits of degrees, truth does not. A statement is either true or not true. If bivalence holds and there are only two truth values, then, if a statement is not true, it is false. It does not seem to make sense to say that one statement is truer than another. But it does make sense to say that one statement is more accurate than another. 'The value of π is 3.14159' is more accurate than 'the value of π is 3.1415.' Neither statement is entirely accurate, and indeed no such statement is entirely accurate given the irrationality of π. But I suggest that the following is both entirely true and entirely accurate: 'π is the mathematical constant whose value is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.'
Here is something bordering on a paradox. Given its irrationality, π is such that every statement that can be made in a finite time about its value is inaccurate. But if every inaccurate statement is false, then every statement that can be made in a finite time about the value of pi is false.
The blood libel is an outright lie perpetrated by many Muslims. It would be absurd to speak of it as 'inaccurate.'
How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?
Chris M writes,
If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently – say, if the world didn't exist – his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?
That is a clear statement of the difficulty. As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:
1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.
2) God knows some contingent truths.
3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.
4) God exists necessarily.
The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.
For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth. He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God. The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God. Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.
I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category.
Is It ‘Racist’ to Hose Dog Droppings off Sidewalk?
Thanks to 'liberals,' we live in an age of race obsession. Almost everyone and everything is 'racist' these days.
Story here (and it is no joke):
According to the [Seattle] Times, Councilmember Larry Gossett “said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists.”
The article did not reveal Gossett's race. It turns out he's black.
Isn't it profoundly racist for the the author not to mention Gossett's race so that blacks can get the credit they deserve for having among them a man of his great sensitivity and compassion?
Come and Take Them, Bret Stephens
David Harsanyi's refutation of Bret Stephens' call to repeal the Second Amendment begins like this:
The idea that gun-control advocates don’t want to confiscate your weapons is, of course, laughable. They can’t confiscate your weapons, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps inch further towards that goal. Some folks are more considerate and get right to the point.
Exactly right. Never underestimate the mendacity of a leftist.
You will have noticed that the Left is now opposing free speech. Time then to repeat: It is the Second Amendment that provides the concrete back-up to the First.
A few days before the Las Vegas massacre I penned an entry that refutes Stephens' optimism about disagreement. He naively thinks that mutually respectful conversations on hot-button issues will converge on agreement. Well, events have borne me out.
Can anyone in his right mind think that 'conversations' about the Second Amendment will converge on agreement?
You see, when a leftist speaks of 'conversations,' what he means is that the right-minded need to shut up and acquiesce in what the loons say.
To which the only rational and appropriate response is of the middle-fingered sort.