Once again I pinch myself. Am I awake or am I dreaming?
It's too bad the mother country is collapsing under the weight of its own political correctness. John Stuart Mill must be rolling around in his grave.
My endorsement of Mill is measured, however: it seems to me that he takes toleration to an extreme.
It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it.
What has been said about chess may also apply to life: For a game it is too serious, and for seriousness too much of a game.
Never take anything for granite.
UPDATE: D. M. quips, "I would only do it for Micah."
UPDATE (11/9): D. B. chimes in, "And I, too – for profit."
There are so many songs under this rubric. Here are some of the less sentimental and schmaltzy.
Love, Alone Again Or. Yet another proof that in American popular music, no decade beats the '60s.
Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer
Tom Waits, Better Off Without a Wife
Beatles, Eleanor Rigby
Harry Nilsson, One
It's not easy avoiding the sentimental. But what, exactly, is wrong with sentiment? Let's not pursue it. To hell with Adorno. It's Saturday night. Time to feel, not think.
Floyd Cramer, Last Date
Linda Ronstadt, Faithless Love. J. D. Souther wrote it.
John Fogerty, You're the Reason. A crossover hit for Bobby Edwards in 1961.
I almost forgot the great Don Gibson
Sweet Dreams. Patsy Cline's version. And while we have Patsy cued up:
Retreating from the sentimental to the surreal, another indisputable proof of the vast pop-music superiority of the '60s:
Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna. Marianne Faithfull's effort.
An abstract with the above title has been making the rounds. No doubt you have seen it, so there is no need to link to it, nor does it deserve a link. It is almost certainly a joke, and if not, then the author is a fool. But since I have just made a harsh allegation, perhaps you should see for yourself.
There have always been crises. Human history is just one crisis after another. The 20th Century was a doosy: two world wars, economic depression, the rise of unspeakably evil totalitarian states, genocide, the nuclear annihilation of whole cities, the Cold War that nearly led to WWIII (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962?), and then after the Evil Empire was quashed, the resurrection of radical Islam. Should we conclude that philosophy has never been justified? But then science has never been justified and much of the rest of what we consider high culture. For they have their origin in philosophy.
Perhaps you don't agree with my 'origins' claim. Still, plenty in life is of value regardless of its utility in mitigating whatever crisis happens to be in progress. Or do you think Beethoven should have been a social worker?
But the really fundamental error is to think that philosophy needs justification in terms of something external to it. I demolish this notion with the precision and trenchancy you have come to expect in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?
Here is an example:
A Pew survey last year found that 75 percent of Republicans believed it is more important to "protect the right of Americans to own guns" than to "control gun ownership."
This way of framing the issue shows left-wing bias. For it implies that Republicans are opposed to controlling gun ownership. But that is not the case. Almost everyone wants gun control laws some of which will regulate the acquisition and ownership of firearms. Name me a Republican who thinks that felons should be allowed to purchase firearms.
Either gun rights or gun control is a false alternative.
I have said enough about this in other entries in such categories as Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
The point, once again, is that language matters. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate. You should always be on the lookout for linguistic mischief. Liberals excel at it, but there are examples across the political spectrum.
Part of my self-imposed task in these pages is to teach critical thinking.
Much as I disagree with Daniel Dennett on most matters, I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage:
I deplore the narrow pragmatism that demands immediate social utility for any intellectual exercise. Theoretical physicists and cosmologists, for instance, may have more prestige than ontologists, but not because there is any more social utility in the satisfaction of their pure curiosity. Anyone who thinks it is ludicrous to pay someone good money to work out the ontology of dances (or numbers or opportunities) probably thinks the same thing about working out the identity of Homer or what happened in the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang. (Dennett and His Critics, ed. Dahlbom, Basil Blackwell 1993, p. 213. Emphasis in original.)
One of my favorite examples is complex numbers. A complex number involves a real factor and an imaginary factor i, where i= the square root of -1. Thus a complex number has the form, a + bi where a is the real part and bi is the imaginary part.
One can see why the term 'imaginary' is used. The number 1 has two square roots, 1 and -1 since if you square either you get 1. But what is the square root of -1? It can't be 1 and it can't be -1, since either squared gives a positive number. So the imaginary i is introduced as the square root of -1. Rather than say that negative numbers do not have square roots, mathematicians say that they have complex roots. Thus the square root of -9 = 3i.
Now to the practical sort of fellow who won't believe in anything that he can't hold in his hands and stick in his mouth, this all seems like idle speculation. He demands to know what good it is, what it can used for. Well, the surprising thing is is that the theory of complex numbers which originated in the work of such 16th century Italian mathematicians as Cardano (1501 – 1576) and Bombelli (1526-1572) turned out to find application to the physical world in electrical engineering. The electrical engineers use j instead of i because i is already in use for current.
Just one example of the application of complex numbers is in the concept of impedance. Impedance is a measure of opposition to a sinusoidal electric current. Impedance is a generalization of the concept of resistance which applies to direct current circuits. Consider a simple direct current circuit consisting of a battery, a light bulb, and a rheostat (variable resistor). Ohm's Law governs such circuits: I = E/R. If the voltage E ('E' for electromotive force) is constant, and the resistance R is increased, then the current I decreases causing the light to become dimmer. The resistance R is given as a real number. But the impedance of an alternating current circuit is given as a complex number.
Now what I find fascinating here is that the theory of complex numbers, which began life as something merely theoretical, turned out to have application to the physical world. One question in the philosophy of mathematics is: How is this possible? How is it possible that a discipline developed purely a priori can turn out to 'govern' nature? It is a classical Kantian question, but let's not pursue it.
My point is that the theory of complex numbers, which for a long time had no practical (e.g., engineering) use whatsoever, and was something of a mere mathematical curiosity, turned out to have such a use. Therefore, to demand that theoretical inquiry have immediate social utility is shortsighted and quite stupid. For such inquiry might turn how to be useful in the future.
But even if a branch of inquiry could not possibly have any application to the prediction and control of nature for human purposes, it would still have value as a form of the pursuit of truth. Truth is a value regardless of any use it may or may not have.
Social utility is a value. But truth is a value that trumps it. The pursuit of truth is an end in itself. Paradoxically, the pursuit of truth as an end in itself may be the best way to attain truth that is useful to us.
Walter E. Williams, Destroying Your Vote:
Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that’s because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I’ve never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities.
I have been saying the above for years. But what I hadn't noticed was the following:
There is another area where the attack on ballot-box integrity goes completely unappreciated. We can examine this attack by looking at the laws governing census taking. As required by law, the U.S. Census Bureau is supposed to count all persons in the U.S. Those to be counted include citizens, legal immigrants and non-citizen long-term visitors. The law also requires that illegal immigrants be a part of the decennial census. The estimated number of illegal immigrants ranges widely from 12 million to 30 million. Official estimates put the actual number closer to 12 million.
Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy — namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.
Read the rest.
The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college, five per semester; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality.
He writes with clarity, style, and wit, and you don't want to end up on the wrong end of his polemics, as Lawrence Krauss did recently who got himself deservedly tagged by Ed as a "professional amateur philosopher."
Ed is an embodiment of one of the truths of Quine's essay Paradoxes of Plenty, namely, that a paucity of free time is not inimical to productivity.
Ed's latest collects 16 recent essays in the areas of philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Start with "The Road from Atheism," his intellectual autobiography.
You can get the book from Amazon for a paltry $19.02. Amazon blurb:
In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser’s academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas’s Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional “perverted faculty argument.”
Black lies matter when they undermine the rule of law and get people killed. I should think that blacks would be especially concerned since they are the ones who suffer the most when crime spikes.
One of the black lies was repeated by Jalen Rose on the O'Reilly Factor the other night. He repeated the canard that a black is killed by a cop every 28 hours. Refutation here.
Police brutality cannot be tolerated, and any cop who murders anyone of any race under the cover of law should face the death penalty.
But don't forget that it is a thin line that separates civilization from criminality, decent human beings from thugs. By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug.
K. G. presents me with what he calls a conceivability argument against metaphysical idealism:
Let P denote the proposition "I have a body." Then the argument would take the form1. P is conceivable.2. If P is conceivable, then P is possible.3. If P is possible, then metaphysical idealism is false.Therefore, metaphysical idealism is false.Premise 1 is uncontroversial because I can see what I consider to be my body, and thus I can form a mental image of it. Premise 3 merely follows from the definition of idealism. Premise 2 is the most controversial, but I think that replacing "conceivable" with "imaginable" will avoid all difficulties associated with this premise. I may be able to conceive of a triangle which is neither isoceles nor scalene, but I cannot imagine one.What do you think?
It has been over fifty years now since the landmark civil rights and welfare legislation of the 1960s, an example of which is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But blacks are still not doing very well. Why? There is an explanation below the fold. But I must issue a 'trigger warning' to the PC-whipped. The opinions of the author may cause grave psychic distress. If you venture below you and you alone accept full responsibility for your distress. DO NOT go there if you identify as liberal, leftist, progressive, socialist, Maoist, as politically correct or (what may be the same thing) if you are opposed to free inquiry, open discussion, free speech, and intellectual honesty.
Continue reading “Fifty Years Later: Why Aren’t Blacks Better Off than They Are?”
Sol Stern, What I Saw in the Schools. Excerpt:
Many of my sons’ teachers were trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College or the nearby Bank Street College of Education. At these citadels of progressivism, future educators were inculcated in the “child-centered” approach to classroom instruction. All children, in this view, were “natural learners” who—with just a little guidance from teachers—could “construct their own knowledge.” By the same token, progressive-ed doctrine considered it a grave sin for teachers to engage in direct instruction of knowledge (dismissed as “mere facts”). The traditional, content-based instruction that had worked so well for my generation of immigrant children from poor and working-class families was now dismissed as “drill-and-kill” teaching that robbed kids of their imagination. Progressives also rejected the old-fashioned American idea, going back to the Founders, that the nation’s schools should follow a coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum that not only included the three Rs but also introduced children to our civilizational inheritance.
I am tempted to explain just how wrong this is. But I will resist the temptation. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you don't need it explained to you. But if you are the sort of liberal who accepts the above claptrap, then you don't need explanations, you need treatment. Please seek it for your own good.
Read the rest if you can bear to.
