Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so. But it matters which. If something does matter and you live as if nothing matters you may end up not only having wasted your time but your eternity as well. So time spent getting to the bottom of this question is time well spent.
-
‘Pastime’
-
‘Per’ versus ‘As Per’
I have become annoyed recently by the increasing use of 'per' instead of 'as per' by journalists. Here is an example:
And that essentially was the end of her [Kamala's] campaign. Per Democratic strategist James Carville, “It’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze, you literally freeze, and you say, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything,'” he said in a postelection analysis.
Is my annoyance misplaced? I love the English language, my beloved mother tongue, and it angers me when people misuse and maltreat her. But in this case I may have overreacted. Merriam Webster:
The fact is that both per and as per have existed in English in the sense “according to” for a very long time–since the 15th and 16th centuries, respectively. The choice of which to use (or avoid) is entirely a matter of taste. The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason.
-
Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity
Top o' the Stack.
UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc."
https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz
4 responses to “Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity”
-
Why Do the Dems Hate Us?
You can count on the inferior to hate the superior. It's human nature, and an eternal war.
Dio Cassius 38.39.2 (speech of Caesar; tr. Earnest Cary):
Against this prosperity many are plotting, since everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy; and consequently an eternal warfare is waged by all inferiors against those who excel them in any way.
πολλοὶ γὰρ ἐπιβουλεύουσιν αὐτῇ· πᾶν γὰρ τὸ ὑπεραῖρόν τινας καὶ ζηλοῦται καὶ φθονεῖται, κἀκ τούτου πόλεμος ἀίδιός ἐστιν ἅπασι τοῖς καταδεεστέροις πρὸς τοὺς ἔν τινι αὐτῶν ὑπερέχοντας.
Addendum (8/2/2025)
Let's apply the thought I found at Michael Gilleland's erudite site to current events.
Against the prosperity, peace, and manifold accomplishments of the Trump administration that lift people up, both here and abroad, many are plotting, belittling, denigrating, and refusing to acknowledge. The successes of the current administration arouse both emulation and jealousy, or rather envy. The Democrat attempts at emulation are pathetic and childish consisting of such merely performative stunts as throwing F-bombs (Hunter Biden), working out with weights (Swalwell) and waving around a baseball bat while howling in rage (Cory Booker, a.k.a. 'Spartacus'). It is merely performative when a pussy postures as a tough guy.
And let's not forget the self-deportation of such powerhouse intellects as Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres. Rosie, expecting the grass to be greener on the Emerald Isle, discovered that it is illegal there whereas her supply was assured in LaLaLand (Los Angeles) whence she came. And driven mad by the big bad Orange Man's rent-free residence in her narrow and shallow pate, she can't sleep at night, Zanax, like marijuana, being hard to find in Ireland. Her spatial translation has not abated her ire which continues to be regularly displayed on TikTok as Jesse Watters is wont to report.
As for Democrat envy of Trump, it is perhaps the main source of their mindless hatred of the man, a hatred so intense and unhinged as to warrant a quasi-psychiatric appellation, 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' (TDS). The Dems are in such disarray that they are reduced to trotting out their discredited bromides and tired bullshit, and as for the various cards they play, race, white supremacy, Hitler, and the rest, they haven't noticed that they are played out. People who ought to know better such as Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) claim with a straight face that the Dems failed to get their message across. Kelly, a former astronaut, is an intelligent man, but such people sometimes say stupid things. The Dems have no message and they have no messenger. A message both salutary and sellable cannot consist of an embrace of 80-20 issues such as allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events, and a 90-10 issue such as allowing the nation's border to remain wide open. And who might be their messenger in 2028? Kamala the clown? Did you hear the airhead's latest inanities? Are you paying attention?
What we have here is a war for the soul of America. That was one of the few intelligent things Traitor Joe said. The current Dems are a pack of inferiors who hate us because of our superiority morally and intellectually.
"An eternal warfare is waged by all inferiors against those who excel them in any way."
Addendum 2 (8/3/2025). "It is merely performative when a pussy postures as a tough guy." Replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration. Corroboration:
A highly theatrical Sen. Cory Booker screamed a series of false justifications for his obstructionism on the Senate floor. “For us to move forward as a body is to be complicit in what Donald Trump is doing. I say, ‘no.’”
The New Jersey Democrat asserted the administration was rounding up people “with a right to be in this country,” unaware the Kilmar Abrego-Garcia “Maryland Man” story has been exposed as a hoax. Far from being a sympathetic citizen, Abrego-Garcia is an illegal alien facing human trafficking charges.
Mr. Booker also pretends that CBS didn’t fire Stephen Colbert because of his rock-bottom television ratings. “I see businesses taking late night talk show hosts off the air because they dare to insult a president,” Mr. Booker said. “That is complicity with an authoritarian leader who is trashing our constitution. It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone, it’s time for us to fight, it’s time to draw a line.”
-
AI and the Shroud of Turin
Here. Linkage does not constitute endorsement. I haven't watched the video at the time of this posting.
12 responses to “AI and the Shroud of Turin”
-
The Hatfields and the McCoys: A Challenge to Reists and Extreme Nominalists
Top of the Substack pile.
6 responses to “The Hatfields and the McCoys: A Challenge to Reists and Extreme Nominalists”
-
One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism
This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson. He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:
P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.
Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally a product of insanity, Brentano's view I find to be incomprehensible. (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.)
I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers. (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions. An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise. I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.' (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.) A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention. (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)
There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal. (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)
Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'? The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates. (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.) A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.
There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all, need concrete states of affairs (STOAs) as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).
But that is not what Brentano is saying. His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F. For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.
On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism? I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense. For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense. They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.
'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him. This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates. Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense. 'Ostrich' nominalism does not. The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'
Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.' At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise. (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.
31 responses to “One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism”
-
Retribution and Psycho-Political Projection
'Retribution' has two main senses in English, and they are importantly different. The word can refer to revenge or to a form of justice, retributive justice. Do I have to explain that justice is not revenge? Conflating the two, journalistic shills for deep-state malefactors try to dismiss as revenge what is a quest for justice to right the wrongs perpetrated against Donald Trump by said malefactors.
Tulsi Gabbard's exposure of the Russia Collusion Hoax has leftists in our government sweating. Jonathan Turley names names: John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe.
But of course one cannot expect our political enemies to play fair in what they take to be a war. So this comes as no surprise:
Former Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC on Sunday morning that the Justice Department is being politicized to attack enemies of the Trump administration and "put at risk the lives and well-being" of people who oppose the president.
Talk about projection! What Holder & Co. are accusing our side of doing is precisely what they have been doing all along.
There is also the underhanded ploy of accusing us of putting lives at risk when our side rightly responds to their illegal actions. We are supposed to accept the injury meekly, lest our legitimate objections to their outrages inspire some lunatic to go on a rampage. Yet another application of the Left's double-standard 'principle.'
We should never forget what sort of sorry specimen this Holder was and is. See Photo ID: Eric Holder's Assault on Common Sense.
3 responses to “Retribution and Psycho-Political Projection”
-
Travel: More Than Ever a Fool’s Paradise
I’m not sure I want to travel internationally again.
Me too. Been there, done that. One of his reasons:
. . . we all know how the Filth in Britishland regard the matter of self-defense Over There. Nothing puts a damper on the travel experience like having to explain to some judge why you didn’t want to just let the little choirboy take your property and shake your head sorrowfully at your loss. That you applied your walking-stick to the little shit’s cranium (in lieu of having the old 1911 at hand) would no doubt land you in Serious Trouble, just as your attitude to the cops being more or less on the criminal’s side rather than on yours might also result in the cop’s uniform being ruined by the flow of blood (his).
To which he adds:
And then there’s this little nugget, from one of my most-favored places on the planet:
Most famous districts in Vienna are in the heart of the city and during summer or at Christmas season they become overcrowded, which can lead to pickpocketing, mugging and even terrorist attacks. In these areas frequented by tourists, bus and train stations, people around you need to be carefully watched and your possessions should be kept close to you.
WTF? Now add to that the chance that some “migrant” takes offense that your female companion doesn’t have her head covered to his satisfaction… do you see where I’m going with this?
I suggest that we aging patriots who have done our fair share of international travel add to our MAGA lists homeland travel and blowing our excess bucks here. Can one ever get sick of Route 66?
To the young, however, I say: get out there and take the risks. See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won't regret your adventures. Then you can gloat, "Been there, done that." Forever after you will enjoy the having done what you now longer would want to do.
I dilate further in Three Reasons to Stay Home at Substack. The reasons? One's Emersonian, the second's Pascalian, and the third is of my own invention.
-
Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957
It arrived yesterday evening, and I am already 32 pages into it. Why keep a journal? Green gives an answer on page one in the entry from 4 December 1928. He tells of "the incomprehensible desire to bring the past to a standstill that makes one keep a diary." Reading that, I knew I would read the whole 306 page translation of selections from this author's sprawling diary. He nailed it.
In '66 I started my journal scribbling. I didn't want that summer to pass away unrecorded. A life unrecorded, like a life unexamined, is not worth living. So I felt then, so I feel now. Such a life lacks diachronic unity and internal cohesion. I love cats, but a man is not cat, nor should he live like one.
I'll pull some quotations from Green's diary as the spirit moves me.
This First Things article will provide some background on Green and includes translations of some journal entries written around the time of, and about, the 'reforms' of Vatican II.
3 responses to “Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957”
-
AI and Demons
You may remember our 'demonic' discussion from last summer. See Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.
Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.
Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems.
According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., "The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the 'soul' or will') of a person by one or more evil spirits." (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic. Might they then host demons?
Gallagher's book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions.
2 responses to “AI and Demons”
-
What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?
John Doran in a comment presents an argument worth bringing to the top of the pile:
A) Anything conscious has a non-material basis for such consciousness.
B) Certain AI constructs [systems] are conscious.
Therefore:
C) Such AI constructs [systems] have a non-material component in which their consciousness resides.
Why doesn't that work? It's obviously valid.
In short, and in the philosophical colloquial, when a man and woman successfully combine their mobile and sessile gametes, a human person is brought into existence, complete with a soul.
So why can we not bring an ensouled being into existence as a result of the manipulation of silicon, plastic, metal, coding, and the application of electricity?
A provocative question. But before he asked the question, he gave an argument. The argument is plainly valid. But all that means is that the conclusion follows from the premises. A valid argument is one such that if all the premises are true, then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. But are both premises true? I am strongly inclined to accept (A), but I reject (B). The various arguments from the unity of consciousness we have been discussing convince me that no material system can be conscious. How does John know that (B) is true? Does he have an argument for (B)? Can he refute the arguments from the unity of consciousness?
Now to his question.
John appears to be suggesting an emergentist view according to which, at a certain high level of material complexity an "ensouled being" (his phrase) emerges or comes into existence from the material system. His view, I take it, is that souls are emergent entities that can arise from very different types of material systems. In the wet and messy human biological system, a mobile gamete (a spermatazoon) mates with a sessile gamete, an ovum, to produce a conceptus such that at the moment of conception a spiritual soul comes into existence. In a non-living silicon-based hunk of dry computer hardware running appropriately complex software, spiritual souls can also come into existence. Why not?
Emergence is either supernatural or natural.
Supernatural emergence is either Platonic or Christian. On the former, God causes pre-existent souls to take up residence in human bodies at the moment of biological conception. On the latter, God creates human souls ex nihilo at the moment of conception. Thus on the latter the coming to be of a human being is a joint task: the conjugal act of the parents supplies the material body and God supplies the spiritual soul.
Natural emergence involves no divine agency. Souls emerge by natural necessity at a certain level of material complexity, whether biological or computational. Edward Feser, in his discussion of William Hasker's emergent dualism, mentions a dilemma pointed out by Brian Leftow. (Immortal Souls, 2024, 517.) I'll put it in my own way. Souls either emerge from matter or they do not. If they emerge, then they could only be material, which contradicts the assumption that they are necessarily immaterial. If they do not emerge, then they could be immaterial, but could not be emergent.
The natural emergence from matter of an immaterial individual (substance) is metaphysically impossible. The very notion is incoherent. It follows that immortal souls cannot naturally emerge either biologically or computationally. The only way they could emerge is supernaturally.
There is a second consideration that casts doubt on naturally emergent dualism. Does a spiritual soul, once it emerges, continue to exist on its own even after the material emergence base ceases to exist? In other words, are souls emergent entities that become ontologically independent after their emergence, or do they remain dependent upon the matrix, whether biological or silicon-based, from which they emerged?
I'm inclined to say that 'naturally emergent dualism of individual substances' is a misbegotten notion. Property emergence is a different story. I take no position on that. Leastways, not at the moment.
2 responses to “What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?”
-
More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?
Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness. I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat. How does the Humean* account for one's awareness of being aware? He could say, plausibly, that the primary object-directed awareness is a subject-less awareness. But he can't plausibly say that the secondary awareness is subject-less. For if both the primary awareness (the awareness of the cat) and the secondary awareness (the awareness of the primary awareness) are subject-less, then what makes the secondary awareness an awareness of the primary awareness? What connects them? The two awarenesses cannot just occur; they must occur in the same subject, in the same unity of consciousness.
Suppose that in Socrates there is an awareness of a cat, and in God there is an awareness of Socrates' awareness of a cat. Those two awarenesses would not amount to there being in Socrates an awareness of a cat together with a simultaneous secondary awareness of being aware of a cat. But it is phenomenologically evident that the two awarenesses do co-occur. We ought to conclude that the two awarenesses must be together in one subject, where the subject is not the physical thing in the external world (the animal that wears Socrates' toga, for example), but the I, the self, the subject.
What I have just done is provide phenomenological evidence of the existence of the self that Hume claimed he could not find. Does it follow that this (transcendental) self is a simple substance that can exist on its own without a material body? That's a further question. To put it another way: do considerations anent the unity of consciousness furnish materials for a proof of the simplicity, and thus the immortality, of a substantial soul? Proof or paralogism?
__________
*A Humean for present purposes is one who denies that there is a self or subject that is aware; there is just awareness of this or that. Hume, Sartre, and Butchvarov are Humeans in this sense.
-
Border Defeatism and an Old Debate Revisited
The demented Dems are defeatists in several different ways. A pox be upon them and the fools who support them. Here is Facebook post of mine from 21 July 2022, with addenda.
…………………
BORDER DEFEATISM"Build a 20 foot wall, and they'll show up with a 21 foot ladder." Geraldo Rivera has said things like that. "They'll tunnel under it," said Victor Reppert when I pointed out that an enforceable and enforced physical barrier is necessary but not sufficient for border control. The defeatist attitude of these gentlemen betrays an unwillingness to uphold the rule of law, and with it a failure to appreciate how precious the rule of law is. And then Reppert committed an ignoratio elenchi when he replied to me that a wall won't stop 'em all, as if anyone ever claimed that it would. You would think a philosophy Ph.D. would not sink to such a rookie blunder. If Reppert's wife complained about ants entering their house, would he say, "You can't stop 'em all, dear" and go back to reading C. S. Lewis?Presumably not.Reppert's hard to figure. He's a nice guy and he can think logically over the 64 squares. I believe he is close to USCF Master strength. And he is has done very good work in philosophy on the Argument from Reason. But then how explain his shoddy reasoning when it comes to such important questions as national sovereignty and border control?As for Reppert's claim that a wall won't stop them all, consider that in December 2024, during the Biden-Harris (mal)administration, there were 301, 981 Southwest Land Border Encounters according to official U. S. statistics. For the same year there were over two million total such encounters. Under Trump, border encounters have dropped dramatically. In June of this year there were zero. Again, these are official stats.I began to lose my respect for Reppert back in 2010 when we discussed Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Here is a post of mine from 27 April 2010:Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S." See here and here for the full text.
That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise. But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:
Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.
I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard. He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ." Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license. The driver doesn't have one. That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status. Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.
S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law. Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.) When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so. If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.
According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason. That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians. I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes. The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws. The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'
Here is an entry from 28 April 2010More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070
Joseph A. e-mails:
I greatly admire Victor Reppert for a number of reasons – I think the Argument from Reason is pretty amazing and effective when formulated and defended well, and Victor remains one of the most soft-spoken and polite bloggers around.
Agreed.
But a number of thoughts occurred to me when reading his and your post.
Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials – he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately.
A certain distrust of law enforcement is reasonable. Skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism and has been from the founding. But we need to make a simple distinction between a law and its enforcement. A just law can be unjustly applied or enforced, and if it is, that is no argument against the law. If the police cannot be trusted to enforce the 1070 law without abuses, then they cannot be trusted to enforce any law without abuses. Someone who thinks otherwise is probably assuming, falsely, that most cops are anti-Hispanic racists. What a scurrilous assumption!
At this point one must vigorously protest the standard leftist ploy of 'playing the race card,' i.e., the tactic of injecting race into every conceivable issue. The issue before us is illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with race. Those who oppose illegal immigration are opposed to the illegality of the immigrants, not to their race. The illegals happen to be mainly Hispanic, and among the Hispanics, mainly Mexican. But those are contingent facts. If they were mainly Persians, the objection would be the same. Again, the opposition is to the illegality of the illegals, not to their race.
Suppose Canadians, who are mostly Caucasians, were routinely violating our northern border in great numbers. Suppose a northern state were to enact a 1070-like law. What would leftists say then to avoid facing the issue, which is illegal immigration? They couldn't cry 'racism.' Would they scream 'xenophobia'? However the lefties emote, they would be missing the point.
But Victor also typically argues very much in favor of giving government far more authority and responsibility than it now has (see his views on health care, etc.) I just find it odd that he's very worried, deeply worried, about the actions of individual police officers operating at a local level – suggesting that they pose a problem/threat we're not going to be able to adequately address – but not nearly as worried about endowing federal bureaucrats with vastly more far-reaching powers.
That is just inconsistency on Reppert's part. As I said, skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism. The skepticism is shared by libertarians and paleo-liberals.
Also, you mention the 'argument' that the bill disproportionately targets Hispanics. Of course, you rightly dismissed it, but I notice Victor does suggest that securing our borders is a major interest. The riddle I have is, how does one secure the Mexican border without 'targeting Hispanics' in the process?
I think I already explained that. It is not the race of the illegals that we who uphold the rule of law object to, but their illegality. So I deny your suggestion that there would be a targeting of Hispanics qua Hispanics. But because most of the illegals happen to be Hispanic, that fact is relevant in a decision to investigate a person's immigration status.
Suppose a cop pulls over a vehicle with a malfunctioning tail light. He asks the driver for his license. If a valid license is presented, no problem, even if the driver is Hispanic and speaks only broken English. The worst that happens is the cop writes a citation for the tail light. The same thing would happen as would happen were Reppert to be pulled over in similar circumstances. Will Reppert protest that he is being forced by a jackbooted thug to 'show his papers'? But that's the law, and the law is reasonable. You may not drive without a valid license.
Liberal hysteria about S. B. 1070 is just that. So far I haven't seen any rational grounds for opposition. It is clear why most liberals and leftists oppose it. They want as many illegals as possible in order to swell the ranks of the Democrat Party. I don't know what Reppert's motivation is. But it is without a doubt the motivation of most liberals/leftists. Please note that inquiring into people's motivations is entirely legitimate once you have demolished their arguments.
This just in (7/25/2025):NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) — Inside an armored vehicle, an Army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.
The man lowers himself toward U.S. soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a U.S. Border Patrol SUV races toward the wall — warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.
If you hate DJT, my advice is to not live by likes and dislikes, loves and hates: that's the narcissistic Facebook way of life. Stop emoting and start thinking. Trump did what no one else either wanted to do, or had the civil courage to do: secure the border. Give the man credit, you petty, hate-America PsOS.
2 responses to “Border Defeatism and an Old Debate Revisited”
2 responses to “‘Per’ versus ‘As Per’”