. . . and conservatives had better learn. I have been making this point for years. So I was pleased to see Jack Kerwick nail it down in Who are the Real 'Snowflakes,' Leftists or Conservatives?
Dropping Prepositions
It seems to be acceptable in British English, as witness:
Donald Trump received a glittering welcome from leaders in Saudi Arabia on the first day of his first international tour, as the two countries agreed a series of military deals worth nearly $110bn (£85bn).
That offends my linguistic sensibilities. If I were editor, I would expend some red ink. One does not agree X, one agrees to X, or upon X. If you make a proposal, I may reject it, but if I agree, I agree to it; I don't agree it.
Stateside one often hears sentences like 'She will graduate high school in June.' The meaning is clear, but the style is bad. One graduates from high school.
I am just reporting on how I prefer to write and speak. But if a competent user of English reports on how he prefers to write and speak, then the report has normative import.
The Lousy Linguist has more data on British English if this topic is of interest. And even if it isn't.
Addendum
An equal but opposite stylistic infelicity is the adding of unnecessary prepositions. For example, 'Where's your car at?' instead of 'Where's your car?'
Agenda Fetishism
You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off.
…………………
Agenda is the plural of agendum, something to be done. The infinitive form of the corresponding verb is agere, to do.
Age quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.
Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man. (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.' I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.
The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'
Word of the Day: ‘Eructation’
Eructation is simply a fancier, and some might argue a more decorous, word for "belch." "Eructation" was borrowed from Latin in the 15th century; the verb eruct, meaning "to belch," followed in the late 16th century. Both have their source in the Latin verb eructare, which is the frequentative form of erugere, meaning "to belch or disgorge." (A frequentative form is one that denotes a repeated or recurrent action or state.) "Eructare" shares an ancestor with Greek word ereugesthai as well as Old English "rocettan," both of which also mean "to belch."
The poverty of most people's vocabularies these days is enough to make one belch in disgust.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Strange’ Songs
In three categories: Rock, Religion, Romanticism.
Cream, Strange Brew
Doors, People are Strange
Doors, Strange Days
Mickey and Sylvia, Love is Strange, 1956
Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers. Utterly deplorable.
Eva Cassidy, Wayfaring Stranger
Johnny Cash, Wayfaring Stranger
Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night To be is to do (Socrates). To do is to be (Sartre). Do be do be do (Sinatra).
Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger, 1963. 1963 was arguably the best of the '60s years for pop compositions.
Emmylou Harris, Hello Stranger. Same title, different song. This one goes out to Mary Kay F-D. Remember the Fall of 1980, Mary Kay?
Get up, rounder/Let a working girl lie down/ You are rounder/And you are all out and down.
Carter Family version from 1939.
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore. A memorable '60s instrumental. More here.
The Rise of Political Correctness
Angelo M. Codevilla's essay is essential reading. Restraining myself, I will quote only the opening paragraph:
“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
he notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
Related: A Mistaken Definition of 'Political Correctness' and a 'Correct' One
The Stalinization of Trump Derangement Syndrome: “Show Me the Man, and I’ll Find You the Crime”
From a Cato Policy Report:
. . . Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA. “Show me the man,” says any federal prosecutor, “and I can show you the crime.” This is not an exaggeration.
And now Donald J. Trump, the legally elected president of the United States, is the man. To prosecute someone for a crime, some crime has to be alleged. But in this case what is the crime? Alan Dershowitz raises the question and answers it: there is no crime.
There is no evidence that Trump or his team colluded with the Kremlin to swing the election in Trump's favor. But even if there were, such collusion would be at worst political wrong doing, not a crime. This is not my opinion but the opinion of a distinguished Harvard law professor who is not a Trump supporter. As Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson last night, "I voted for Hillary Clinton very proudly."
Around 3:10 Dershowitz speaks of "hacking the DNA" several times. He means: hacking the DNC, the Democrat National Committee. Carlson failed to catch the mistake.
I now want to make a point that Dershowitz did not make last night, namely, that phrases like 'hacking the election' have no definite meaning. You can literally hack into John Podesta's e-mail account, but you can't literally hack an election. (It has been claimed that the password he employed was 'password.' Could Podesta be that stupid or careless? I am skeptical.) Of course, you could use 'hack an election' to mean 'influence an election,' but then you will have changed the subject. Almost all of us, from low-level bloggers to the most august pundits, were trying to 'hack the election' in the sense of 'influence the election.'
What we have here with the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller is not an inquiry into whether a crime has been committed, but a witch hunt: a search for a nonexistent crime to pin on a much-hated man.
But didn't Trump obstruct justice by firing Comey? Is that not what is maintained by such powerful intellects as Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi? Of course not, as Dershowitz points out at 3:38 ff. Trump's firing of Comey was well within the president's constitutional rights. "Under the unitary theory of the executive, the president has the right to direct the justice department." I would add that the president fired Comey for good reason.
No doubt the 'optics' were bad: the firing looked self-serving. So the haters pounced suggesting that the only reason Trump fired Comey was because Comey was about to expose criminal acts by Trump. But that is just nonsense. Again: which criminal acts?
Even if Trump was sick of Comey and wanted him out for personal motives, he had solid impersonal legal reasons for firing him. They were set forth in the Rosenstein memorandum.
The Trump haters appear to be committing a version of the genetic fallacy. The psychological motivation of a claim or action is irrelevant to the question of the truth of the claim or the justifiability of the action. Had Hillary or Bernie or Jill or Jeb! been president, each would have been justified in firing Comey. Again, this is because of the availability of solid impersonal legal reasons for his firing. And you can bet all of Hillary's ugly pant-suits that she would have fired him had she won as she was 'supposed to.'
Heather Mac
Heather Mac Donald is a profile in civil courage in stark contrast to the cowardice of the university administrators who, in abdication of authority, allow leftist thugs to prevent her and other sensible people from speaking. As I have lately observed, the university is pretty much dead, not everywhere of course, and naturally I except the STEM disciplines.
When the authorities will not maintain order, then eventually others will, and things can turn very ugly very quickly.
Related: Civil Courage
National Security Agency
I was joking with somebody recently about blog backup.
"Why do I need to back up my blog?" said I. "The NSA has every word."
Joking aside, the underlying issue is a vexing one. There is no true liberty without security, but a security worth wanting must make allowance for a large measure of liberty.
It is a case of competing values. One of my early posts (13 May 2004) explores the dialectic. I gave it the catchy title, Liberty and Security. Damn, if it's not good! By the way, one of the many pleasures of blogging is re-reading and re-enjoying one's old writings.
Power Tools
Serendipitous! I spent the morning out in the desert practicing with my handguns. When I logged on afterward I found that Bill Keezer had referred me to an entry entitled Power Tools by Malcolm Pollack in which the latter quotes Col. Jeff Cooper. I want the quotation for my files:
Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools of liberty. Weapons compound man’s power to achieve whatever purpose he may have. They amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters–and good servants of good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
I haven't been able to find a source. As you know, I do not like unsourced quotations. It's the scholar in me. Paging Dave Lull! If cyberspace has a Head Librarian, Dave is the man.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
You are free to live unarmed, and for some this will be a wise course. A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training, and you will need to throw thousands of (aimed!) rounds down range before you can consider yourself competent.
These are trying times. The thuggish elements among us are on the rise, and they are enabled by those in positions of authority. The wise hope for the best, and work for the best, but prepare for the worst. You might want to think about that as well as ask yourself: Which side am I on, and who is on my side?
Related: Colonel Jeff Cooper's Situational Awareness Color Codes. Very useful information along with commentary by me that is sure to cause snowflake melt-down.
UPDATE (5/20): Dave Lull sends us here, where you can find more Jeff Cooper quotations (unsourced) as well as a daughter's tribute to her father.
UPDATE 2 (5/20): Malcolm Pollack's follow-up post.
Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering:
The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it is like for its subject, from the inside—that purely physical processes do not share. Physical concepts describe the world as it is in itself, and not for any conscious subject. That includes dark energy, the strong force, and the development of an organism from the egg, to cite Black’s examples. But if subjective experience is not an illusion, the real world includes more than can be described in this way.
I agree with Black that “we need to determine what ‘thing,’ what activity of neurons beyond activating other neurons, was amplified to the point that consciousness arose.” But I believe this will require that we attribute to neurons, and perhaps to still more basic physical things and processes, some properties that in the right combination are capable of constituting subjects of experience like ourselves, to whom sunsets and chocolate and violins look and taste and sound as they do. These, if they are ever discovered, will not be physical properties, because physical properties, however sophisticated and complex, characterize only the order of the world extended in space and time, not how things appear from any particular point of view.
The problem might be condensed into an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Take a little time to savor this problem. Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
Which proposition should we reject? Dennett, I take it, would reject (1). But that's a lunatic solution as Professor Black seems to appreciate, though he puts the point more politely. When I call Dennett a sophist, as I have on several occasions, I am not abusing him; I am underscoring what is obvious, namely, that the smell of cooked onions, for example, is a genuine datum of experience, and that such phenomenological data trump scientistic theories.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Black, and others of the scientistic stripe, accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
I appreciate the appeal of the naturalistic-scientistic worldview and I don't dismiss it in the way I dismiss eliminativism about the mental:
Look, there is just one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it including all your precious thoughts, moods, and sensations. If you are serious about explaining consciousness, then you have to explain it the way you explain everything else: in terms of our best natural science. With the progress of science over the centuries, more and more of what hitherto was thought inexplicable scientifically has been explained. The trend is clear: science is increasingly de-mystifying the world, and it is a good induction that one day it will have wholly de-mystified it and will have cut off every obscurantist escape route into the Cloud Cuckoo Land of religion/superstition.
It is essential to see, however, that this worldview is precisely that, a worldview, and therefore just another philosophy. This is what makes it scientistic as opposed to scientific. Scientism is not science, but philosophy. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, where naturalism is not science but ontology. No natural science can prove that reality is exhausted by the physical, and no natural science can prove that all and only the scientifically knowable is knowable.
But it is not irrational to be a naturalist and a scientisticist — an ugly word for an ugly thing — in the way that it is irrational to be an eliminativist. But is also not irrational to reject naturalism and scientism.
And so the strife of systems will continue. People like me will continue to insist that qualia, intentionality, conscience, normativity, reason, truth and other things cannot be explained naturalistically. Those on the other side will keep trying. Let them continue, with vigor. The more they fail, the better we look.
Do those on our side have a hidden religious agenda? Some do. But Nagel doesn't. He is just convinced that the naturalist project doesn't work. Nagel rejects theism, and I believe he says somewhere that he very much does not want it to be the case that religion is true.
Nagel, then, has no religious agenda. But this did not stop numerous prominent, but viciously leftist, academics from attacking him after he published Mind and Cosmos. See the following articles of mine:
Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
Political ‘Circularity’
Democrats know how to circle the wagons, stand together, and refrain from attacking their own. Republicans seem to prefer the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians? Theirs is the self-indulgent circle jerk of those who will never have power.
Trump Brings Out the Left’s True Colors
You can add this to the list of Trump's accomplishments: he has provoked the Left to expose themselves in all their ugliness. Wittingly? Some say yes: he is playing them like a fiddle. I don't know whether his provocations are witting or unwitting. The fact remains:
So far all the political violence associated with the election of Trump, from Inauguration to the latest campus rioting, has been on the Left. No pro-Trump crowds don masks, break windows or shut down traffic. The crudity in contemporary politics—from the constant sick jokes referring to First Family incest, smears against the First Lady, low attacks on the Trump children, boycotts of the Inauguration, talk and dreams of killing the president—is on the liberal/progressive side. The entertainment industry’s obscenity and coarseness have been picked up by mainstream Democratic officials, who now routinely resort to profanities like s–t and f–k to attack the president. Almost every ethical code—television journalists do not report on air private conservations with their guests during breaks, opposition congressional representatives do attend the Inauguration, Senators do not use obscenities—have been abandoned in efforts to delegitimize Trump.
When Hillary Clinton assumed the mantle of the “Resistance,” she was deliberately using a metaphor to convey the idea that she is analogous to a French patriot under occupation and Trump is a veritable foreign Nazi belligerent.
The point about Hillary is important. Here we have a prominent politician engaging in what is arguably seditious libel if not outright sedition.
You leftards are really looking good! Keep it up.
Four Types of Ontological Egalitarianism
There are egalitarians in ontology as there are in political theory.
Herewith, four types of ontological egalitarianism: egological, spatial, temporal, and modal.
Egological egalitarianism is the view there is a plurality of equally real selves. I take it we are all egological egalitarians in sane moments. I'll assume that no one reading this thinks, solipsistically, that he alone is real and that others, if they exist at all, exist only as merely intentional objects for him. The problem of Other Minds may concern us, but that is an epistemological problem, one that presupposes that there are other minds/selves. On ontological egalitarianism, then, no self enjoys ontological privilege.
Spatial egalitarianism is the that there is a plurality of equally real places. Places other than here are just as real as the place picked out by a speaker's use of 'here.' I take it we are all spatial egalitarians. No one, not even a Manhattanite, thinks that the place where he is is the only real place. Here is real but so is yonder. No place enjoys ontological privilege. All places are equal.
Temporal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real times. Times other than the present time are just as real as the present time. No time enjoys ontological privilege, which implies that there is nothing ontologically special about the present time. All times are equal. No time is present, period. This is called the B-theory of time. Here is a fuller explanation.
Modal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real possibilities. Possibilities other than those that are actual are just as real as those that are actual. It is plausible to think of possibilities as coming in maximal or 'world-sized' packages. Call them possible worlds. On modal egalitarianism, then, all possible worlds are equally real. No world enjoys ontological privilege. Our world, the world we take to be actual, is not absolutely actual; it is merely actual for us, or rather, actual at itself. But that is true of every world: each is actual at itself. No world is actual, period. In respect of actuality, all possible worlds are equal.
What is curious about these four types of ontological egalitarianism is that, while the first two are about as close to common sense as one is likely to get, the second two are not. Indeed, the fourth will strike most people as crazy. Was David Lewis crazy? I don't know, but I hear he was a bad driver.
Related: Philosophers as Bad Drivers?
Commentary
At root, commentary is a minding-with, a co-mentation. It is an attempt to enter into an author's thinking and think along, sympathetically yet critically. The good commentator is companion before critic, but critic too. A com-pan-ion, at root, is one with whom one breaks bread. The companionable commentator thus shares with the author the bread of sense he puts on the table.