Here:
The three defining features of modern liberalism are an intense aversion to the Constitution, a denial of objective truth, and a penchant for intentionally abusing the English language with an aim to mislead the public. No issue exemplifies these three features better than the “debate” about the AR-15 and “assault weapons.”
Well said, my man, well said, with pith and punch.
I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.
We need to battle them in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.
An obfuscatory leftist phrase. And therefore used by Obama the Mendacious. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.
It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.
Language matters!
In the following entries I engage in a form of creative anachronism:
Epictetus Advises Imelda Marcos
With respect to the third entry, a young man with an overly literal mind wrote to inform me that while my Heidegger quotation was from 1935, Cassius Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, did not see the light of day until 1942. So how could Heidegger be commenting on Ali?
In this sort of literary trope what one does is take contemporary individuals such as Marcos and Ali as tokens so representative of their types as to count as types. The quoted commentary is then to be read as directed against the type. Since the type is relatively timeless, the anachronism is innocuous. What is true of the type is true of every token thereof, whether past, present, or future.
The worth of my trope, like the worth of many, is its contribution to concreteness. Imelda Marcos as opposed to a shoe fetishist. Cassius Clay as opposed to a prize fighter.
Now here is my question: Is there any accepted name for this literary trope, can we subsume it under an extant trope, or should we coin a name and add it to the list of tropes?
I wrote recently, "Fear not, I shall not report on the state of my bowels, which is excellent, nor pull a Trump and crow about the efficacy of my schlong."
The sentence illustrates the literary trope called apophasis. Wikipedia:
Apophasis is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up.[1]Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.
The device is also called paralipsis (παράλειψις) – also spelled paraleipsis or paralepsis – or occupatio,[2][3][4][5] and known also as praeteritio,preterition, antiphrasis (ἀντίφρασις), or parasiopesis (παρασιώπησις).
Epictetus, Enchiridion, tr. E. Carter, XXXIX:
The body is to everyone the measure of the possessions proper for it, as the foot is of the shoe. If, therefore, you stop at this, you will keep the measure; but if you move beyond it, you must necessarily be carried forward, as down a precipice; as in the case of a shoe, if you go beyond its fitness to the foot, it comes first to be gilded, then purple, and then studded with jewels. For to that which once exceeds a due measure, there is no bound.
Indeed, as one may observe here.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 73:
Too much security for the child's heart, and the adult will spend his life demanding this security from people — even though people are only opportunities for risk and freedom.
Related articles
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 61:
Socialism, according to Zochtchenko, will be when violets grow on asphalt.
Bernie Sanders take note.
Translator's footnote: Mikhail Zochtchenko (1895-1962), Soviet writer and humorist persecuted by Stalin.
A London philosopher sends the following along which I take to be a quotation from Jasbir Puar:
One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness as sexual identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations.
The London friend then comments:
Bill, to me this reads like a parody of Continental Philosophy. What are ‘corporealities’? ‘Identitarian’? ‘Deprivileges a binary opposition’?? What other kinds of opposition are there?
Sartre has a lot to answer for.
A lot of recent Continental 'philosophy' is gibberish, and the above passage reads almost like a parody of it. So my London friend and I agree that the above is rubbish, and as such, beneath critique. How would one even begin to criticize writing like this?
What is Puar trying to tell us in the first sentence? Continentals are big on verbal inflation. So Puar can't just write bodies, she must write corporealities. It sounds impressive to the unlettered. She wants to give the impression that she is engaging is some really deep theorizing here. Referring to a body as a corporeality is like referring to a method as a methodology or a truth as a verity.
It makes some sense to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been "problematically conceptualized," to use another pretentious phrase. To supply my own politically incorrect example, you would be 'problematically conceptualizing' the dick of a homosexual male if you maintained that it was but a social construct. But for a body to be problematically conceptualized via Muslim sexualities makes no sense at all. Is she trying to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been dubiously understood or perhaps wrongly understood by Muslims? But then how do sexualities come into it?
Puar has a thing for the plurals of abstract substantives: corporealities, sexualities, exceptionalisms. But we are only half-way through her meaningless opening sentence. We are told that dubious theories about homosexual bodies somehow support U. S. exceptionalisms. Who would have thought? What does it even mean?
It only gets worse, so enough of this.
Now if this junk were merely the scribblings of some crackpot on her personal blog, we could ignore it. But she is an associate professor at Rutgers University. File this under Decline of the West.
As for Jean-Paul Sartre, I would say say that my insular friend is not being quite fair. A lot of important work has been done by Continental philosophers up to an including the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. (I confess to not having studied Critique of Dialectical Reason.) Here is a list of (some) Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.
I would point out to my London correspondent, who is interested in medieval philosophy and logic, that Paul Vincent Spade, no slouch of a scholar, has a lively interest in the early Sartre. See here.
So I don't think too much can be laid at Sartre's door step. The rot sets in in good earnest later with characters like Derrida who, according to John Searle, "gives bullshit a bad name."
John D. Caputo is another Continental 'philosopher' that I criticize in a number of entries. He is not as bad as Puar, however. But he is very bad!
From the 1980s to the present. Some lists are 'static,' some 'dynamic.' The Ten Commandments is static whereas the list of Islamist outrages is unfortunately dynamic, highly dynamic.
Exercise for the reader. Compile a list of Christian terror attacks from the 1980s to the present and compare its length to that of the Islamist list. Make sure that you put on this list only those acts whose justification lies in orthodox Christian doctrine, and not acts by people who just happen to be residents of 'Christian' lands.
This is one of the books I am reading at the moment. Tr. Ryan Bloom. First appeared in French in 1989 by Editions Gallimard, Paris, English translation 2008, first paperback edition 2010 (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago).
Some good stuff here, but some nonsense as well, for example:
A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books. (94)
It proves no such thing, obviously. Our literary man is confusing the thought of eternal life with the experience of eternal life.
The trouble with too many French philosophers is they cannot decide whether they want to be clever literary scribblers or actual philosophers. It is often difficult to dress up the plain truth in fine phrases.
One of the temptations we philosophers face is that of allowing style to dictate substance. A temptation to be resisted.
That is my advice. Now apply it to what I have just advised.
Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, 13 June: "Omar Mateen despised gays in the same way that Donald Trump and too many of his supporters despise Muslims."
Why isn't this libel?
'Libel' as defined in the law:
1) n. to publish in print (including pictures), writing or broadcast through radio, television or film, an untruth about another which will do harm to that person or his/her reputation, by tending to bring the target into ridicule, hatred, scorn or contempt of others. Libel is the written or broadcast form of defamation, distinguished from slander, which is oral defamation. It is a tort (civil wrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie. Read more.
Dvorak and her employers ought to be careful. Trump is a vindictive man with the will and the wherewithal to take legal action against his enemies. There are plenty of negative things she could say about the man that are true.
Whether or not Dvorak's outrageous statement counts as libel, she has no evidence for it. To call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration is perfectly reasonable in present circumstances and does not imply any hatred of Muslims.
Analogy. The law forbids the sale of firearms to felons. I think this provision of the law is wise and good and conducive unto law and order. Does that make me a hater of felons? I don't hate them; I merely hold that it would be unwise to allow them to purchase firearms. Similarly, I don't hate Muslims, I merely hold that in present circumstances it would be wise to vet carefully immigrants from Muslim lands.
Thomas Sowell poses the question:
Is diversity our strength? Or anybody's strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan's homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word "Balkanization" remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?
Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?
Read the whole thing in the light (darkness?) of Orlando.
