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!

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.

Something

Isn't it a Pity

Wonderful Tonight

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 . . . .")

Pattie boyd

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.

The Integrationist Fantasy

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, although not perfectly. But no longer. Whether a One can be made of Many  depends on the nature of the Many. 

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many. 

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy.  This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

To integrate is to bring together into a whole.  But a functioning whole, whether political, social, or of any sort, cannot be assembled from any old assortment of parts. In terms of an outworn metaphor from yesteryear, there have to be some constraints on the range of ingredients thrown into the melting pot. Your stew will not be improved by the addition of ground-up spark plugs or enhanced by a liberal dose of WD-40.

Keeping with the gustatory metaphor, wide-open borders is a recipe for disaster.  

Victor Davis Hanson on the Higher Infantilization and its Cost

Is it not folly to go into deep debt to buy something wildly overpriced of little value?  And does it not contribute to  an unravelling of the moral fiber of the people for a morally obtuse grifter such as Joseph Biden to forgive debts freely incurred, thereby forcing sensible taxpayers to foot the bill?

Here's Hanson.

J. D. Vance on Kamala the Chameleon

Under three minutes. 

Look, Dana, she's not running a political campaign. She's running a movie. She only speaks to voters behind a teleprompter. Everything is scripted. She doesn't have her policy positions out there. She hasn't answered why she wanted to ban fracking, but now she doesn't. She wanted to defund the police, but now she doesn't.

She wanted to open the border, but now she doesn't. She should have to answer for why she presents a different set of policies to one audience and a different set of policies to another audience. And I think that's what President Trump is getting at. This is a fundamentally fake person. She's different depending on who she's in front of.

Spot on. The fatuous fem is a fake, a phony, a fraud.  Almost everything out of her mouth is either incoherent or vacuous.  Have you ever heard her say anything that was neither? Tell me what it was.

Lanza del Vasto on Enchainment to Mere Means

Lanza del Vasto, Principles and Precepts of the Return to the Obvious (Schocken 1974, no translator listed), p. 93:

The Pursuit of the Useful raises an endless staircase in front of men.  Whoever climbs it with all his strength and all his thought can but come out of it dead, without even having perceived that he has spent his life fleeing his life.  The difficulty, the satisfactions and the regularity of the pursuit lead him to believe that it is fine, reasonable and good to put himself into it heart and soul.

The idolatry of the Useful is indicated by the fact that 'useless' universally carries a pejorative connotation when the truth is that the Useless Things are the Highest Things.

Simone Weil and Lanza del Vasto , 20th century, France, Private collection, .

Lanza del Vasto with Simone Weil

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

'Debby' is the name of that hurricane harassing Florida? Disasters should be named after disasters: 'Hillary,' 'Kamala,' 'Nancy,' 'Gretchen,' . . . 

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.  'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now").  This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon  luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music?  Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified! 

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.

Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:

"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart.  [. . .]

Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]

Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."