Top o' the Stack.
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Mysticism with Monica
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Defensive Gun Use Without a Shot Fired
Texas man defends family from machete-wielding home invader with his 9mm semi-auto.
A quartet of questions.
How would you repel a home invasion?
Would you vote for a political party they leaders of which intend to violate your right to self-defense?
Would you lay money on the proposition that the miscreant depicted in the article is an illegal alien?
Is it wise to vote for a party that stands for open borders?
Related: An Abuse of Language: 'Gun Buy-Back'
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna (With Latin and English). Better performance without lyrics.
Joan Baez, There But For Fortune. The best rendition of a song written by Phil Ochs. Watch the short video. Ochs' version.
I agree with this analysis of Ochs:
The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.
Joan Baez, A Simple Twist of Fate
Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust. Dylan wouldn't have made it without her.
4 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi”
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Philosophy and Christianity
Substack latest
Ruminations on Ratzinger
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The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of this Country
Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom. Answer below the fold:
Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving. So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. — some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question — can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates? Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence. It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.'
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Franz Brentano, The Teaching of Jesus and its Enduring Significance
An old book recently translated. Reviewed here.
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Comrade Kamala’s Dangerous Policies
Stealth ideologue that she is, she won't tell you what her policies are. You can either elect her to find out, or go here for a preview.
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No Church for Old Men?
Good news, if true:
The American Catholic Church is seeing a prolonged surge of conservative young priests, leaving the aging and far more liberal Vatican II generation with no replacements.
According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, of 3,500 priests ordained since 2020, “More than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox.'” Foreign-born priests in the United States, a significant contingent due to the overall low number of ordinations in the U.S., were found to be significantly more liberal than their American counterparts.
However, perhaps most revealing, the study found that no priest ordained since 2020 described himself as “very progressive.” In addition, nearly all priests ordained in 2020 and afterward described themselves as politically moderate or conservative.
Is the fumigation of the RCC finally upon us? As I recall my pal Catacomb Joe saying back in the day, fumus sanctus!
An RCC that degenerates into just another piece of leftist cultural junk needs to be defunded and ignored.
8 responses to “No Church for Old Men?”
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Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man
On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.
The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009). It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him. Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon. Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:
Read the rest over at my Substack site.
Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly. The latter begins:
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept. She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.
In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:
While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):
Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will. Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you. What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?
I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!
3 responses to “Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man”
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Pattie Boyd as Muse
A musician needs a muse. George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd. Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired. If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment. Frank Sinatra famously said of George Harrison's "Something" that it "was the best love song ever written." He ought to know.
Layla (The best part starts at 3:13 the poignancy of which still rends my soul the way it did 54 years ago)
Bell Bottom Blues ("If I could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms . . . .")
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Once More on Whether Existence Could be a Property
This just over the transom from Samuli Isotalo:I recently started reading your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence and the following kind of argument against the view that existence is a first-level property came to my mind. Probably you and many others have considered something like this, but I send it anyway.Suppose existence is a first-level property and to exist is to instantiate this property. Now, given that some substance a instantiates some property P, we most likely want to say that this property P itself also exists. Thus, given that some substance exists, we want to say that the property, existence, it instantiates, also exists. But if to exist is to instantiate a property, existence, then it seems that in order for this property to exist, it needs to instantiate a further property, existence2. But then we also want to say that this property, existence2, exists, therefore it needs its own property, existence3, and so on ad infinitum.You make three points.The first is that, if existence is a first-level property, a property of concrete individuals or substances, and if the existing of substance a is its instantiating of this property, then the first-level property of existence must itself exist. I agree. For if existence did not itself exist, then neither a nor any concrete individual would exist. This holds no matter to which category we assign existence. No matter what existence itself is, were it not to exist, nothing would exist. But if you read me carefully, you will see that I resolutely deny that existence is a property (where properties are defined in terms of instantiation) of anything, whether individuals, properties, concepts, linguistic expressions, worlds, . . . whatever.Your second point is that if existence is a property of individuals, and existence itself exists, then there has to be a second property, existence2, in virtue of whose instantiation existence1 exists. But this doesn't follow. For it may be that existence is a self-instantiating property, roughly in the way a Platonic Form is self-exemplifying. (But we needn't digress into a discussion of Plato, his Forms (eide), participation (methexis) in Forms, the Third Man Regress, etc.)Consider the property of being concrete. Is it itself concrete? No, it is abstract. Now consider the property of being abstract. Is it itself abstract? Yes. Therefore, the property of being abstract is self-instantiating. (Notice: I did not say self-exemplifying. A property is not an exemplar.). The same holds for other putative properties: self-identity is self-identical, causal inertness is causally inert, omnitemporality is omnitemporal.So why can't existence be self-instantiating? I am not saying that it is, but if it is, then, to your third point, the infinite regress cannot get started. Note also that if properties are necessary beings, as many philosophers maintain, and if existence is a property of individuals, then too the infinite regress could not arise.Thus, treating existence as a first level property leads to an infinite regress. Existence seems to always pass on to some further property, like a slippery piece of soap that one cannot catch. What if we say that the property existence itself just exists, without it instantiating any further property? Then it seems that we have arrived at a picture very much like the one you are endorsing, namely, existence itself as Paradigm. For then we have this one property existence, which alone exists without it pointing to anything further, and every other thing exists in relation to it, by participating in it or instantiating it. But then it seems that to call such a thing ‘property’ is misleading, for properties are ontologically posterior to substances. Now, this reminds a lot of Aquinas, when he says, e.g. in De Ente et Essentia that existence itself is to be understood as something absolute and every other thing as participating in it.What you are missing is that I deny that existence is a property. So your criticisms do not touch my view. What I conclude, after a complicated argument that I cannot here summarize, is that existence is more like a paradigmatic individual. It is not a predicable entity. It is more like the opposite of a predicable entity. It is not a property of individuals, properties, or anything else. As I said above, self-existent Existence, as that in virtue of which everything else exists, resembles a Platonic paradigm. You are right to catch the similarity to Aquinas, although my argumentation is wholly non-Thomistic. It is unlike any of his Five Ways. This because it it not based on an Aristotelian substance ontology, but on a fact ontology deriving from Gustav Bergmann and D. M. Armstrong.
8 responses to “Once More on Whether Existence Could be a Property”
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The Case Against Investing in Cryptocurrencies
7 responses to “The Case Against Investing in Cryptocurrencies”
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Israel: Leader of the Free World
For eight decades after the end of World War II, America’s proudest title was “Leader of the Free World.” Today, both on grounds of practical leadership and grasp of what it means to be free, we are yielding the title to Israel.
George Gilder makes the case, and a strong case it is.
7 responses to “Defensive Gun Use Without a Shot Fired”