Maverick Philosopher – Page 385 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers.

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.

Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

My Gun Permit

It is called the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Issue date: 15 December 1791. Expiration date: Never.

Motto: Fear the government that fears your guns.

On this Thanksgiving we have much to be thankful for, including the defeat of the mendacious Hillary Clinton who, while paying lip service to the Second Amendment, had every intention of undermining it.

A Pro-Life Feminist Who Voted for Trump

Thereby helping to block the butchery Hillary would have exacerbated. I hope you 'conservatives' who refused to vote for Trump will come to your senses at some point.

Reading Now: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness

The book arrived yesterday via Amazon and I began reading it this morning. Looks good!

Oxford University Press, 2001. Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore's original thought." (p. 5)

Here is a review.

The Decline of the Universities

From Plato to Play-Doh.

From Higher Education to Higher Infantilization.

The decline of the universities is the decline of the West.

The Left has a lot to answer for.

Rod Dreher on Steve Bannon

Fair and balanced. An excellent antidote to the mindless screeching of the loons of the Left. But do loons screech? It is more like a plaintive keening.

‘Constructivism’ Gone Wild: Biological Male Wins Women’s Cycling Event

Story here:

A 36-year-old biological male dominated the women’s division of the El Tour de Tucson last weekend, an annual cycling competition in Arizona that attracts thousands of amateur and professional cyclists.

Jillian Bearden — who identifies as a transgender woman — won the 106-mile race in 4 hours and 36 minutes, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

[. . .]

The International Olympics Committee recently changed its ruled to allow biological men to compete as women without first undergoing a sex-change operation. [emphasis added]

Let me see if I understand this. A biological male, who identifies himself as a woman, is allowed to compete against biological females in an athletic event. Am I missing something? Bear in mind that the competitor in question, at the time of the event, has the standard male 'equipment': he hasn't had a sex change operation. And with that equipment come the sorts of muscles useful for powering a bicycle.

When we conservatives refer to liberals as loons, examples like this are what we have in mind. Don't you have to be unhinged from reality to suppose that a biological male who merely fancies himself a biological female can thereby transform himself into one?

The paradox here is that while biological reality is being denied, it is at the same time being used to gain an unfair advantage over women.

There is a denial of biological reality if you imagine that your being male or female is simply a matter of a free self-construal or self-construction via thoughts and feelings. But it is that very same biological reality which gives the biologically male cyclist who fancies himself a woman the edge over biological females.

How would it be any different if a 25-year-old male runner were to enter a footrace in the 60-70-year-old male division on the ground that he 'identifies' as an old man?

Another paradox is that feminists are typically constructivists; but in a case like this it comes back to bite them. Shouldn't they be howling over the unfairness of a biological male's domination of women in a women's event? But their political correctness has them hamstrung.

What is ultimately at the bottom of all this nonsense? The denial of reality and the substitution for it of various types of constructions, both social-collective and individual. It is a long story.

Catholicism as True Enough

Catholicism is true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance for many, many people. So if you are a lapsed Catholic, you could do far worse than to return to the arms of Holy Mother the Church. And this despite the deep post-Vatican II corruption. Better such a reversion than to persist in one's worldly ways like St. Augustine who, at age 30, confessed that he was "still caught fast in the same mire by a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." (Confessions, Bk. 6, Ch. 11, Ryan tr., p. 149)

But if you are a Protestant like Tim McGrew or James Anderson, should you 'swim the Tiber'? Some branches of Protestantism are also good enough and true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance. And this despite the problems of Protestantism.

I should think that practice is more important than doctrine. Better to remove the lust from your heart than to write an erudite blog entry about it. The doctrines will always be debated and contested. Does the Incarnation make logical sense? Is it perhaps true whether or not it makes sense to the discursive intellect? We will never know here below.

Would it not be folly to postpone the reform of one's life until one had solved intellectual difficulties that we have good reason to believe cannot be solved in our present state? Orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy. Three elements of Christian orthopraxy: follow the Ten Commandments; avoid the Seven Deadly Sins; try to live by the Two Greatest Commandments. You won't get very far without grace, but the trying may precipitate the grace.

An Imagined Exchange With Yogi Berra

Me: He who hesitates is lost.

Yogi: You mean Peter?

……………..

What inspired this imagined exchange? The thought that the grammatically third-person singular masculine pronoun has logically non-pronominal uses.

To the ‘Victims’ of Liberal Victimology

Blacks need to learn from Jews, Italians, the Irish, and others who have faced abuse. Don't whine, don't complain, don't seek a government program. Don't try to cash in on your 'victim' status, when the truth is that you are a 'victim' of liberal victimology. Get the needle out of your arm, and that soul-killing rap noise out of your ears. Listen to the late Beethoven piano sonatas. May I recommend Opus #s 109, 110, and 111? We honkies want you to be successful. And we don't care what color you are. It's not about color anyway. It's about behavior. Work hard, practice the ancient virtues, and be successful. If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. Don't let Brother Jesse tell you otherwise. Don't get mad, be like Rudy Giuliani. Can you imagine him making a big deal about being called a greaseball, dago, goombah, wop, guinea . . . ? Do you see him protesting Soprano-style depictions of Italian-Americans as mafiosi?

Bernie Goetz, 30 Years Later

A Quasi-Kierkegaardian Poke at Paglia

Novels

Ontological Crisis?

You will have noticed by now that leftists are in permanent 'crisis mode.' But now comes something new, ontological crisis:

In the wake of their devastating loss, Democrats find themselves in the midst of ontological crisis . . . .

Holy Heidegger! It serves them right.

College-Educated or College-Indoctrinated?

Lefties like to point out that the college-educated favored Hillary over Trump. But so what? Apart from the STEM disciplines, the colleges and universities of the land have become leftist seminaries, hotbeds of political correctness, and centers of Higher Infantilization. They have strayed far from their original charter.

So of course the college-indoctrinated will favor Hillary the leftist nanny-stater.

Leftists also crow over the fact that Hillary won the popular vote. But again, so what? Lefties congegate in certain densely populated enclaves wherein 'correct' views are enforced and 'incorrect' ones excluded. Most people, being highly suggestible, simply imbibe the circumambient suggestions. Few people form their political and social beliefs by any process of deep study and hard thinking. The more impressionable people crammed into places like San Francisco and New York City, the more leftist group-think. People naturally want to be liked, accepted, and get ahead. They go along to get along.

So how significant is it that Hillary won the popular vote?

But the finally trumping consideration is that our great system of government bequeathed to us by the greatest generation, that of the founders, prescribes that it is the members of the Electoral College, not the populace at large who decide presidential elections.

Get over it, punks. You lost.

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 53 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. Here Willie Nelson does a great job with the traditional song. You Dylan aficionados will want to give a listen to young Bob's rendition of the old song.

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at the moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

Since those far-off and fabulous days of 'Camelot,' we have learned a lot about Kennedy's dark side. But every man has his 'wobble,' and who among us would want to be exposed to the full light of day? He was a boyhood hero of mine, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109," as I described him in a school essay. My assessment of him has been dialed downward over the years, but there were traces of greatness about him. He was a resolute commie fighter and a lifetime member of the NRA and Second Amendment defender. In those days, a decent, patriotic American could be a Democrat.

And if it weren't for his inspiration we wouldn't have beaten the Evil Empire in the space race.

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

And let's not forget that it was a commie who murdered Kennedy.

A Protreptic Puzzler

A curious passage from Aristotle's Protrepticus:

. . . the fact that all men feel at ease in philosophy, wishing to dedicate their whole lives to the pursuit of it by leaving behind all other concerns, is in itself weighty evidence that it is a painless pleasure to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to philosophy. For no one is willing to engage in exhausting work for a long time. (#53, p. 24)

To set the Stagirite straight, I should like to shunt his shade into some Philosophy 101 classroom for a spell.