In case it is not obvious, VDH will explain it to you in under six minutes.
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Are We Safer under Biden or under Trump?
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Reading Now: Demonic Foes
By Richard Gallagher, M. D. Available via Amazon.
It arrived yesterday and I'm already 60 pages into its 247 pages. A page-turner for sure. I did, however, refrain from reading any of it in bed last night before drifting off — for obvious reasons. Experiences of my own incline me to take very seriously "Unseen Warfare."Dr. Gallagher comes across as a very credible witness. Rooted as he is in Western canons of rationality and scientific method, he nonetheless appreciates that there are points at which methodological naturalism must give way in the teeth of massive evidence of super- and preter-natural phenomena.This article features an interview with Dr. Gallagher.UPDATE (6/14). I am now up to p. 82. It gets better and better. Packed with distinctions essential for clear thinking about this topic.
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Anti-Semitism in John Chrysostom
Eight Homilies against the Jews, Homily I. Some historical background to this:
It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”
4 responses to “Anti-Semitism in John Chrysostom”
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Ambiguity, Vagueness, Generality, Disambiguation
Top o' the Stack
Some distinctions needed for intellectual hygiene.
2 responses to “Ambiguity, Vagueness, Generality, Disambiguation”
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten and Unforgotten Folkies
Paul Clayton, Wild Mountain Thyme. Baez version from the "Farewell, Angelina" album. A snippet of the same song by Dylan and Baez with a beaming Albert Grossmann looking on. And while we're at it, here is Joan with Farewell, Angelina. Beautiful as it is, it doesn't touch the magical quality of Dylan's own version which is in a dimension by itself.
Paul Clayton, Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone). Dylan borrowed a bit of the melody and some of the lyrics for his Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.
Dylan talks about Clayton in the former's Chronicles, Volume One, Simon and Shuster, 2004, pp. 260-261.
Mark Spoelstra is also discussed by Dylan somewhere in Chronicles. While I flip through the pages, you enjoy Sugar Babe, It's All Over Now. The title puts me in mind of Dylan's wonderful It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
Bonnie Raitt does a good job with it. Or perhaps you prefer the angel-throated Joan Baez. Comparing these two songs one sees why Spoelstra, competent as he is, is a forgotten folkie while Dylan is the "bard of our generation" to quote the ultra conservative Lawrence Auster.
Ah yes, Spoelstra is mentioned on pp. 74-75.
About Karen Dalton, Dylan has this to say (Chronicles, p. 12):
My favorite singer in the place [Cafe Wha?, Greenwich Village] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.
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How to Roast Yourself in Five Different Ways
Substack latest.
13 responses to “How to Roast Yourself in Five Different Ways”
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Matt Taibbi on Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
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Donald Trump: Enemy of the State
Have you studied the Ayaan Hirsi Ali piece? I assigned it yesterday. The mind and life you save may be your own.
12 responses to “Donald Trump: Enemy of the State”
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Of DEI and the Devil
Top o' the Stack. Excerpt:
The hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, is evil at its core. I don't say that every leftist, 'progressive,' and wokester is evil. Most of these folks are useful idiots. A large subset of them are superannuated, low-information, life-long Democrats who are pissing away their 'golden years' in empty socializing, hitting little white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.
14 responses to “Of DEI and the Devil”
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Sohrab Ahmari on ‘Lawfare’
An exercise in naïveté:
Reacting to Donald Trump’s hush-money conviction in Manhattan on 30 May, the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked on X: “Has there been a single left-of-centre person… who has said: ‘Hey, nakedly partisan prosecutions of your political opponents goes against the values of liberal democracy, rule of law, justice, and everything my side claims to support?’”
A number of progressive figures have, in fact, decried lawfare against Trump and the Trumpians.
[. . .]
But the honour roll of the principled anti-lawfare left is all too short. That’s a shame, because right-wing populists won’t be the only victims.
[. . .]
Such partiality in the application of law and institutional norms should alarm progressives.
Sohrabi comes across as naïve. Since when is the Left in any classical sense liberal? Since when are these 'progressives' in any sense progressive. They are more aptly described as regressive, anti-civilizational nihilists.
Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:
Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
The Muslim as the new proletarian.
The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)
Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.
It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.
Know the enemy and show him no quarter.
I know. You don't want to believe it is a war. It's a war. Which side are you on?
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On Mixing Politics with Philosophy
I have been asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones. But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward. If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain? Probably not. Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one should be a bien-pensant lefty. Well, I'm here to prove otherwise. Shocking as it will seem to some, leftist views are entirely optional, and a very bad option at that.
I could of course post my political thoughts to a separate weblog. Now a while back I did effect such a segregation, sending my political rants and ruminations to my Facebook page. But given that philosophy attracts more liberals/leftists than conservatives, it is good for them to be exposed to views that they do not encounter within the enclaves they inhabit. Or are contemporary liberals precisely illiberal in their closemindedness to opposing views? One gets that impression.
Posting the political to a separate weblog would also violate my 'theory' of blogging. My blog is micro to my life's macro. It must accordingly mirror my life in all its facets as a sort of coincidentia oppositorum of this situated thinker's existence.
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You Want Answers . . .
. . . when you are not willing or able to ask questions?
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The Cure for DEI
DJT
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Yuri Bezmenov and Subversion
Long, but important.
3 responses to “Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Yuri Bezmenov and Subversion”
61 responses to “Reading Now: Demonic Foes”