I have posed this question in several forms over the past few years. In his latest, Publius Decius Mus offers an excellent exposition and answer:
Comprehensive Conservative Failure
If I may address professional conservatives directly: It seems to me undeniable that you have already failed. Don’t take it personally. I can rephrase that as “we” if you like, even though I was never much of an operative within Conservatism, Inc. But I was a fellow traveler and supporter, so if you want to lay part of the blame on me, fine.
We failed. We didn’t do what we set out to do. We lost the political and culture wars decisively. Our economic victory turned out to be fruitless: all the gains have accrued to those we nominally “defeated,” as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats are now the party of the super-rich. Our victory in the Cold War also turned to ashes, as we lost our heads pursuing unrealizable foreign ambitions while fighting in ways that preclude the possibility of victory. Not that we know what victory entails or have any idea what to do with it if we achieve it—but that doesn’t matter, because since 1991, we never have. Worse, we were crushed in the war of ideas:
It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived the conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.
You don’t have to be alt-right to see that this is a perfect description of the USSR’s posthumous intellectual victory in the form of “Cultural Marxism.” Climb down from the egghead mountaintops and the defeat becomes even clearer. A principal Soviet export was crude anti-Americanism—grounded in high theory, to be sure, but simplified to be understandable by even the meanest capacities. We “won” the Cold War, but that export nonetheless spread like a virus—so much so that anti-Americanism is now and has been for at least 20 years the civil religion not just of all Third World populations, not just of Western allies, but of American elites and their foot soldiers.
We failed to preserve a true understanding the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We failed to preserve the proper working order of the Constitution. We failed to protect and nurture that virtue in the people necessary to sustain the Constitution. We failed to defend the family from relentless assault. We failed to maintain any semblance of a shared public morality. We allowed—through a combination of active cheering and ineffective opposition—demographic and cultural replacement. We lent a great deal of our talent to serve rapacious interests in the name of “economic freedom.” All the things we were supposed to conserve—the nation, its people, its way of life, its governing structure—we have not conserved.
This is exactly right. It also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump — and why you ought to vote for him despite his manifest negatives. He is our only hope to stop, or at least impede, America's leftward slide into oblivion.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) died 47 years ago yesterday, at the age of 47, his years dead now equaling his years alive. Here are some songs that refer to him and his work.
Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:
Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.
It began in the universities in the '60s. And now it is in full 'flower.' I recall Dennis Prager putting it this way: "There is no coward like a university administrator." Now hear David French:
Fortunately for the radicals, our universities are populated by the craven and the cowardly. Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join, self-righteously advancing their own false oppression narratives even as they enjoy lives billions of others would covet. There is nothing brave about these people. They are not “elite.” They don’t deserve a single dime of taxpayer money or one cent of student tuition. They dishonor their schools and their country.
Closeted campus conservatives are worse than useless. Indeed, their very timidity contributes to the narrative that there is something shameful about their beliefs. To read anonymous letters from professors who are afraid to “out” themselves in a hostile campus culture is to read the sad dispatches of people too pitiful for their profession. Do something else, anything else, than merely sit and watch while the revolutionaries shred the Constitution, reject our culture, and assert their own will to power.
The true shame is that it doesn’t even require actual courage to defeat the university Left, just a tiny bit of will — a small measure of staying power. No one is shooting at trustees. No one is beheading professors. There’s no guillotine in the quad. Instead, campus “leaders” tremble before hashtags and weep at the notion of losing a football team so inept that it couldn’t score a touchdown through most of the month of October. Let them strike. With an offense that inept, the SEC won’t even notice.
These are the times that try men’s souls? No. These are the times of men without chests. The Left has the will to power. University leaders have no will at all. They have earned nothing but contempt.
This Holtschneider (Woodcutter) must have sawdust for brains. Where is the 'bigotry' in standing up for the rights of the unborn? How can a Catholic cleric who is the president of a Catholic university grovel in such sickening and supine fashion before the forces of political correctness?
Holtschneider is an all-too-common case of administrative cowardice and abdication of authority. No sane person ought to be concerned about 'hurting the feelings' of the thugs of BLM by stating the obvious: ALL lives matter, and therefore,
What follows is a re-post, slightly redacted, from 3 November 2012. Occasioned by the Biden-Ryan Veep debate in 2012, it is equally applicable to the 2016 Kaine-Pence Veep debate, except that in 2016 only Kaine is (nominally) Catholic.
…………………..
The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion. The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example. The moderator introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion.” Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion? Why did she bring up religion? And why the phrase "personal views"? Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views? Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square.
A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post: What does the abortion issue have to do with religion? But I need to make the question more precise. 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. The following argument contains no religious premises.
1. Infanticide is morally wrong. 2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and infancticide. Therefore 3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.
Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument.
But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.
Return to the above argument. Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise. Present this argument:
4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong. 5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings. Therefore 1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise. Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide – general in the sense that it admits of exceptions — comes from the Ten Commandments which isd part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.
But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law. My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful. If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.
Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body. This is the Woman's Body Argument:
6. The fetus is a part of a woman's body. 7. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body. Therefore 8. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.
For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term. There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.
If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (6) is true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (7) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (7) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.
If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (7) is acceptable, but (6) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'
I wrote "perhaps (7) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (7) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (7) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.
I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument. The first is that my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises. The second is that the argument is unsound.
Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother). Now not everything immoral should be illegal. But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be illegal.
Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems. And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden and the the benighted Tim Kaine.
So what else is new? That the sky is blue? The trouble with Trump is that he doesn't know enough about the issues to punch back effectively when Mrs. Clinton lets loose with one of her whoppers. He let her escape several times during their third and final debate. Sean Davis:
In her answer to a question about her views on gun rights, Clinton said she opposed the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which recognized the constitutional right for individuals to own and carry firearms, because it was about whether toddlers should have guns.
[. . .]
So what was the Heller case really about? It was about whether Dick Anthony Heller, a 66-year-old police officer, should be legally allowed to own and bear a personal firearm to defend himself and his family at home.
[. . .]
If Clinton opposes an individual’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms to protect his or her family, she should just come out and say so instead of blatantly lying about the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter. But it gets better: after claiming that the Heller decision was all about toddlers, Hillary then claimed that the Constitution guarantees a right to partial-birth abortion, a practice that requires an abortionist to rip an unborn baby from the womb, stab or crush her skull, and then vacuum out her brains. Because Hillary Clinton’s top priority is protecting innocent children from violence.
Hillary is a stealth ideologue who operates by deception. This is what makes her so despicable. If she were honest about her positions, her support would erode. So not only are her policies destructive; she refuses to own them. She is an Obamination both at the level of ideas and at the level of character.
“You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not show partiality to the powerless; you shall not give preference to the powerful; you shall judge your fellow citizen with justice." Alternate translations here.
In the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said the following about Supreme Court nominations. "And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing on behalf of our rights as Americans."
This is the sort of leftist claptrap according to which the judiciary assumes legislative functions and the Constitution is a tabula rasa on which anything can be written. The purpose of the court is not to stand up to the powerful or take the side of the powerless, but to apply the law and administer justice.
There must be no "partiality to the powerless." Might does not make right. But neither does lack of might.
(Credit where credit is due: I am riffing on a comment I heard Dennis Prager make yesterday.)
Wise move. Things have come to a sorry pass when defunding the Left includes quitting the SCP. The outfit ought to rename itself: Society of Culturally Marxist 'Christian' Philosophers.
And of course every Right-thinking person must work to defund the Left. Voting with feet and wallet are most effective. Just walk away and take your money with you.
Why the surge? I have no idea despite scrutiny of my referral list. I have been averaging 1600-1800 page views per day. But yesterday's spike was nothing like the one this site received in late February of this year: 10,695. I figure that that was due to my post about the Norwegian anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zappfe.
Perhaps we philosophers need to pay more attention to anti-natalism as a cultural phenomenon and as a component in der Untergang des Abendlandes.
We are losing the will to perpetuate our civilization and its values. Christians in the Middle East are being slaughtered and their churches pulverized by Muslim savages. So what did Pope Francis say in response to Donald Trump's call for a wall along the southern U.S. border? We don't need to build walls, but bridges. Francis the fool is one dope of a pope.
Evangelical Protestants understand this, though they are too polite and politic to put it the way I just did. This is why, mirabile dictu, so many of them support Trump, the nasty sybarite of Gotham who builds casinos to the greater glory of Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Lady Luck.
They understand that his character flaws are no worse than Hillary's and that ideas and policies trump persons and their peccadilloes. His are mainly sound; hers are all of them destructive.
(I used 'peccadillo' above because I am overly fond of alliteration; but it is not quite the right word, referring as it does to little sins. The sins and crimes of Hillary are by no means little. She belongs in jail.)
I hit upon 'uniquely unique' the other day as an apt predicate of God. But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.
To be unique is to be one of a kind. It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique. So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind. (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God. What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique. (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every possible world.)
But some of us want to go further still. We want to say that God is uniquely unique. His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique. He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique. Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being. The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings. In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items. (Fregean propositions and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)
But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined. If I asked someone such as Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world. But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.
A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework applicable to everything other than God. So it must transcend the distinction between kind and instance. In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.
Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple.
But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique? Here is where the paths diverge.
Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute. So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent to anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings. For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework. It is rather the case that God transcends this framework. If God is the absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.
Again, if God is the absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many. As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many. The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many. It cannot be brought into opposition to anything.
"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable! I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."
What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing. The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object. A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.
Here. Radosh addresses Andrew Klavan's objections. I wonder if Radosh is aware of Dylan's 1983 song in defense of the Rosenbergs. See below.
Did you see Radosh on 60 Minutes Sunday night during the segment on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Radosh and co-author Joyce Milton definitively showed that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged, or at least Julius was.
This seems to be becoming an Internet meme. It comes with the implication that certain death will be the result. (See graphic below.) Let's think about this, just for fun.
Strictly speaking, one can play Russian Roulette only with a revolver. But surely something analogous to Russian Roulette can be played with a semi-automatic pistol with a non-zero probability of surviving.
Here is one way. Have 'a friend' load the magazine randomly with live and dummy rounds. Insert the magazine and rack the slide, thereby chambering a round. Point the gun at your head and press the trigger. If you hear a click, then the hammer fell on a dummy round. Congratulations! You are not dead. Care to press your luck? Then press the trigger a second time.
Here is a second way. Pick up a semi-auto pistol and remove the magazine. Point at head, pull trigger. If there is a live round in the chamber, you're a goner. A dummy round or nothing in the chamber and you survive to be a fool another day. Unlike Terry Kath.
Remember him? He was the blazingly fast guitarist for the band Chicago. In 1978, while drunk, he shot himself in the head with an 'unloaded' gun. At first he had been fooling with a .38 revolver. Then he picked up a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, removed the magazine, pointed it at his head, spoke his last words, "Don't worry, it isn't loaded," and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for his head, there was a round in the chamber. Or that is one way the story goes.
Such inadvertent exits are easily avoided by exceptionless observation of three rules: Never point a gun at something you do not want to destroy. Treat every gun as if loaded, whether loaded or not. Never mix alcohol and gunpowder.
Perhaps I should add a fourth: Never mix dummy rounds with live rounds. Variant: Dummies should stay clear of guns, loaded or unloaded, and ammo, live or dummy.
Uncle Bill has a fifth rule for you: Never try to cure someone's hiccups by pointing a gun at him or her. A Fort Hood soldier availed himself of this method to cure a fellow soldier's hiccups, but ended up 'curing' him of life itself. (A cock to Asclepius!) The soldier, who was drunk at the time, said he thought the gun was loaded with dummy rounds. And now for the graphic, from Diana West via Bill Keezer.
We are concupiscent from the ground up, and matters are only made worse by our living in sex-saturated societies. As a result our erotic 'ears' are continually being pricked up by salacious tales and rumors.
These distractions are exploited by the Clinton machine which knows that digging up ancient dirt on the opponent will trump any serious discussion of his ideas and policies.
And that is what we are seeing. Any intelligent and intellectually honest person should be able to grasp that what matters are the issues and the policies proposed to deal with them. The national debt, immigration legal and illegal, national sovereignty, free speech, religious liberty, gun rights, abortion, the composition of the Supreme Court, globalism, trade policy, radical Islam, and so forth.
This is what we should be discussing primarily, not the character defects of the candidates.
Policies first, persons second. Every man has his 'wobble,' and every woman too. Look hard enough and you will find it. But men and women come and go. Ideologies and institutional structures last a lot longer to either contribute to the flourishing of you, your children, and grand children — or the opposite.
But as I said, we are concupiscent from the ground up. We will stay distracted, and Hillary will win.
Plenty of other factors are in play, no doubt, such as the large group of 'tribal' women who will vote for Hillary because she is one of them.
Here:
This Holtschneider (Woodcutter) must have sawdust for brains. Where is the 'bigotry' in standing up for the rights of the unborn? How can a Catholic cleric who is the president of a Catholic university grovel in such sickening and supine fashion before the forces of political correctness?
Black Lives Matter is an anti-law enforcement movement built primarily on well-known lies about the Trayvon Martin case and the Michael Brown case.
Holtschneider is an all-too-common case of administrative cowardice and abdication of authority. No sane person ought to be concerned about 'hurting the feelings' of the thugs of BLM by stating the obvious: ALL lives matter, and therefore,