Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Universal Suffrage

    I wrote, on 4 March, 

    The war is over the soul of America.  The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii) restore those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should replace the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.

    As I was writing clause (iii) I realized that some to my Right, people I consider friends, whose intellect and judgment I respect, and with whom I agree on many fundamentals, would take issue with my endorsement of universal suffrage. They are against it. Two points in response.

    The first is that the 19th Amendment, ratified 18 August 1920, will never be overturned.  The Amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." And so the question whether female citizens should have the right to vote, while of historical and theoretical interest, has no practical importance whatsoever. 

    The second point is that, even if it could be overturned, it ought not be. Now I concede to my friends on the Right that women as as a group are not as politically astute as men as a group.  Their political judgment is inferior to that of men. This is a fact, and a fact is a fact whether you like it or not. We conservatives stand on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to human wishes and dreams. 

    What I have just asserted is enough to bring down the wrath of  many feminists upon my head. They will hurl the 'sexist' epithet at me. And I will reply: It can't be sexist if it is true, and it is true.  This is a special case of a general principle: It cannot be X-ist if it is true.  Candidate substituends for the variable include 'age,' 'race,' 'species,' 'able,' and others. Particularly knuckleheaded is the accusation of 'ableism.' 

    I have said enough to establish my conservative bona fides.

    Why shouldn't the 19th Amendment be overturned?

    Yesterday, on C-SPAN, I watched Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) rake Christopher Wray, FBI Director, over the coals. She did a superb job, a job as good as any man could do. So I put the question to my friends on the Right: Do you think that Stefanik should not have the right to vote and participate in the political life of the country?

    To nail down my point, here is a list, off the top of my head, in no particular order, of just a few females  who are lot better politically than a lot of men I could mention:

    Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, K. T. McFarland, Tulsi Gabbard, Riley Gaines, Candace Owens, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce, Faulkner Harris, Diane West, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald.

    Will the friends to my Right dismiss these women as wholly unrepresentative outliers? Do they have arguments? What might they be?

    Bill Vallicella

    17 responses to “Universal Suffrage”

  • 2024: The Last Year of the Republic?

    A New York friend of mine writes,

    When I settled in Jackson Heights after leaving Mom's Bronx nest almost a half-century ago, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Great architecture, uncongested sidewalks, a police presence, and elderly ladies taking a stroll in the early evening were among the first things that struck me. It's now, to coin a  cliché, a third-world shithole run into the ground by "progressives." Few of its current denizens remember when it was otherwise.

    The same friend thinks we won't make it to November.  When he so opined some months back, I thought that this might just be perspectival distortion due to his perch in Jackson Heights.  But he may well be right.  Another friend sends me here where we read some concrete suggestions of the sort that I have been asking for, but Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Levin,  and so many other astute commentators fail to make, content as they are merely to analyze and report:

    . . . the next eight months should be spent getting prepared.

    So, yes, I want you to vote in November — and, yes, I want you to prepare for the communist takeover of America when your vote won’t matter anymore. That might seem contradictory or incoherent but it’s basic strategy: you plan to win the battle, but you also plan for an orderly retreat so that you can survive to fight another day.

    No, I’m not being gloomy or hopeless. I’m not telling you to quit. I’m not encouraging you to stop voting. I’m telling you to get prepared. What does that really mean? It means you should get a satellite phone. You should buy more guns and ammo. You should stockpile medicine and water and food. Hold cash. Hold gold and silver. Have an emergency plan with your friends and family.

    It’s time to get serious.

    {. . .]

    You do realize that you’re in the middle of a global conspiracy to end the democratic West, right? You’ve heard about The Great Reset haven’t you? You don’t want to believe it’s true — of course. That’s why you keep ignoring the obvious signs.

    That’s called: magical thinking.

    We’re already at the stage of the communist revolution in which 320,000 illegal aliens have been flown into the United States by the Biden regime to occupy your country and to eventually serve as soldiers and police who are loyal to the communists.

    We’re already at the stage when the agents of the Biden regime are openly admitting that they will not allow Trump to hold the office again if he’s elected. They’re telling you he should be denied classified briefings right now. They’re telling you that it’s time to dissolve the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and order American soldiers to disarm the people. They will not allow a peaceful transfer of power.

    I hope that I’m wrong — butwhat happens to you if I’m right?

    This is good advice. We don't despair or give up, we fight on "in the gloaming" to use my poetic phrase. We vote and we prep. Both. It's twilight time for the West, and while it is true that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk (as per the Hegelian trope), and we philosophers rejoice at the wisdom gained when the bird takes flight, we philosophers still attached to gross-material bodies  endeavor to push that final denoument as far into the future as possible. After all, no one KNOWS whether or not there is anything beyond this scene of strife, this miserably mundane mundus sensibilis. (Am I sending a coded message that only white-supremacist dogs can hear?)

    We fight on. We vote and we prep. And when we vote we do so not only with ballots but with our feet and our wallets.  Buy  a satphone. I hadn't thought of recommending that. Excellent suggestion for something you can do.  Take the rest of Emerald Robinson's advice.

    But don't expect any help from the Judas Iscariots and con artists of the pseudo-con Right. David French is a prime example as are Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney,  Chris Christie, and so many others. Turncoats, quislings, yap-and-scribble lapdogs of the Left, cuckservative clowns, worse than useless, worse even than the cadre-commie anti-civilizational woke-joke leftards.

    French and Pence are justly pilloried here.

    UPDATE (3/16)

    That well-fed, miserably misguided matron Liz Cheney is torn to pieces by Kash Patel here.

    The greatest con job ever to happen in American politics is the false Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative. The singular mission of this narrative is to stop Donald Trump from ever setting foot in the Oval Office again. 

    A key pillar of the left’s propaganda about insurrection is to distort the truth surrounding whether Trump authorized, prior to Jan. 6, the deployment of National Guard troops to keep order on that day. The main architect of this disinformation campaign is former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.  

    Issues and Insights is another good source of anti-totalitarian punch-back. This article, for example:

    Democrats don’t support open borders for humanitarian reasons. They want the lines erased because they see every illegal alien as a likely Democratic voter crucial to their political power grab. But there’s another reason: They want to increase the populations of Democratic states to boost their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

    Apparently it’s not enough for Democrats to have become authoritarians, they have to be corrupt, too.

    Of course this is no surprise. Only the corrupt become authoritarians. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek showed in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom” why socialist systems never have decent people in charge.

    “Bad men,” Hayek explained in Why the Worst Get on Top, have no inhibitions about running other peoples’ lives. It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited,” he wrote in 1944, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

    Put another way, by Dune author Frank Herbert, “​​Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

    And thus we understand why the Democratic Party is overflowing with the most wretched people imaginable. It’s a party that draws in the worst among us in much the same way communism attracted the Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Castros.

    The kakistocrats that captain the Democratic Party are so lacking in principle and so filled with villainy that they are using illegal aliens as pawns in their scheme to establish unopposed, unchallengeable power.

    How can we know this? Because not a single Democrat voted last week in favor of an amendment from Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty that would allow only citizens to be “counted for the purposes of allocating congressional districts and electoral votes.”

    When Hagerty offered the amendment, “the Democrats just went nuts,” he said. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer “threatened to shut the government down.”

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “2024: The Last Year of the Republic?”

  • The Latest from Peter van Inwagen

    This just over the transom:

    Dear Sir, 

    Recently I have been looking for some work by Peter van Inwagen and found his recent book Being A Study in Ontology. I believe the subject could be very interesting to you, because, as far as I know, you have written several times on his ontological views (even if there is deep disagreements between his and yours ontological views). 
     
    I hope you are doing well in this messy and unpredictable world. 
     
    Kind regards, 
    Miloš Milojević 
     
    Dear Mr. Milojević,
     
    Thank you for bringing this book to my attention.  I will try to persuade the editor of a journal to send me a review copy. Failing that, I will happily shell out 75 USD for a copy. The undisputed 'king' of the 'thin theorists,' van Inwagen is wrong about Being, but brilliantly wrong and a formidable adversary. 
     
    I have addressed his views many times in these pages and a few times in print.  Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method is one; "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" ( in Daniel D. Novotny and Lukas Novak (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge. pp. 45-75. 2014.) is another.
     
    Other articles of mine on Being and existence can be found via my PhilPeople page.
     
    As for this "messy and unpredictable world," let's hope it holds together for a few more years. I see no reason to be optimistic, but I derive consolation both from philosophy and from old age. In the meantime we must do our part-time best to beat back the forces of darkness.  Only part-time, however, because this world is a vanishing quantity that does not merit the full measure of our love and attention. All things worldly must pass. "Impermanence is swift." (Dogen) "Work out your salvation with diligence." (Buddha)
     
    Finally, Miloš, I  thank you for your correspondence over the years,
     
    Bill
     
    Musical addendum
     
    If Harrison was the Beatle with spiritual depth, Lennon was the radical leftist shallow-pate, McCartney the romantic, and Starr the regular guy and good-time Charley.
    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “The Latest from Peter van Inwagen”

  • Race is Real; Report It!

    A black girl viciously assaults a white girl, but no mention is made of the race of the assailant or the victim. The business of a journalist is to report the facts. Now we expect journalistic malfeasance at CNN, but Laura Ingraham last might, on Fox, also refrained from referring to assailant and victim by race.  Fear of Carlsonian defenestration? Ingraham replayed the video several times, but now I can't find one.

    Get to work MavPhil cybernauts! Find me a video so that I can be quite sure that the assailant was, and presumably still is, black.

    Bill Vallicella

    20 responses to “Race is Real; Report It!”

  • No Person is Illegal!

    That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?

    'Woke' knuckleheads  of the sort who  recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal'  regularly give something like the following lame argument:

    1) No person is illegal.

    2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.

    Therefore

    3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'

    Therefore

    4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.

    There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4).  The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.  

    To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed.  'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.  

    Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.  

    As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.

    And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.   

    That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Biden’s Climate Aspirations

    When a policy is not a policy.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Biden’s Climate Aspirations”

  • Soaring Auto Insurance Rates

    I received the bill for my 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport the other day: $302.89 for six months. For the preceding six months I paid 274.09, and the six months before that 260.42. So yesterday I paid my agent a visit and reminded him of my stratospherically high credit rating, my lack of claims, my sterling driving record, my low mileage, my loyalty to the company, the whole shot.

    He explained that  rates had gone down during the Great Covid Scare (my term not his) due to less driving but now were headed up again; Biden-flation (my term not his); and because e-vehicles are much more expensive to repair than gas drinkers (my term again).  All true. So I paid the bill and left.

    On arriving home I flipped on Jesse Watters who had a segment  on young people and how they are getting hammered on rates. His focus was on onboard surveillance technology. Now if old people are unduly cautious on the roads and dangerous for that very reason, young people are worse, being impetuous, reckless, ignorant of physics, bereft of a proper sense of their mortality, without experience of life automotive and otherwise, distracted by their devices, distractive of each other, etc.   So they do stupid things at the wheel, the data gets sent to the insurance companies, and their rates skyrocket.

    For example, I'm 'hauling donkey' in the fast lane doing 75-80 mph and some punk in a compact death-trap is on my ass.  I'm doing everything right, driving my Jeep as if it were a motorcycle: exercising due diligence, maintaining situational awareness, cycling through my mirrors and gauges, planning escape routes, staying out of blind spots, keeping my distance from other vehicles and especially from overloaded junk wagons.  I am engaging in automotive profiling. So the punk in the crapmobile tries to get around me, endangering himself, his passengers, and everyone around him.

    The punk's high rates are the just wages of his automotive sin.

    Of course, this is a deep and vexing topic. I don't want to live in a Sino-styled, omni-surveillant, Stasi-redolent police state! Damn you Dementocrats! Liberty trumps security! If you don't agree you are axiologically unfit to be an American. Go live in China or board the next time machine back to the USSR. Or the DDR. On the other hand, when the people lack virtue, automotive and otherwise, and will not govern themselves, then the plutocratic-pathocratic-totalitarian thugs have a plausible justification for their clamp-down and 'plausible deniability' of their malfeasance.

    There is a lot to discuss. Here is something that I didn't know but that comports well with the pathocratic scumbaggery of wokeassed leftards:

    Not all states allow car insurance companies to take gender into account. These six states prohibit the use of gender when pricing auto insurance:

    How unspeakably stupid can an unspeakably  stupid reality-denying leftist be? But that is exactly what you would  nowadays expect in the once great and golden State of Californication and the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Bare Assertion and Circularity

    "There is no evidence because there is no evidence." Thus some shyster defending Hunter Biden against charges of wrongdoing. I am tempted to call this a presuppositional approach to political apologetics. 

    A circular argument is an argument, but because the 'diameter' of the circle is zero, it is no better than a bare assertion. It is a bare assertion dressed up as an argument. You could say that it is a bare assertion in argumentative drag. 

    You know about bare assertion: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. How delightful the pithy punch of this Latin tag! Unpacked, and replacing the indicative mood with the permissive, the point is that whatever may be gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied.  Thus, with no breach of logical propriety, I am allowed to meet your bare assertion with a bare counter-assertion. From a logical point of view, there is nothing to choose between the two. Or as Hegel writes in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, ein trockenes Versichern gilt gerade so viel als ein anderes. (Felix Meiner Ausgabe, 66)  ". . . one dry assurance counts exactly as much as  any other." 

    So why did the shyster give a circular argument in defense of Joe Biden's scumbag son? Was he so embarrassed to make a palpably false bare assertion that he felt the need to smuggle it in  under argumentative cover?  "See? I'm not just asserting; I'm arguing."

    By the way,  "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," as the old folk saying has it.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Bare Assertion and Circularity”

  • Sonoran Spring Surge Subsides

    It ran for four consecutive days with total page views per diem clocking in at 10,000, 75,000, 150,000, and 40,000.  And now back to blessed obscurity. What was that all about?

    One hypothesis for which I have some evidence is that I triggered an ugly bunch of Jew haters with a favorable remark about Alan Dershowitz in this Substack entry.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Charlottesville Lie

    The only sure way to stop a leftist from lying would be by stopping him from talking. The Biden administration is one of the most, or the most, mendacious in our history. Copycat that he is, Biden saw the Clintons and Obama get away with it and resolved to go them one better. A brazen liar and serial plagiarist, truth decay has rotted his soul. Will Nancy Pelosi pray for him?   Dennis Prager:

    Most people will tell that you that President Trump called Neo-Nazis “fine people” during his famous press conference following the Charlottesville riot. But he never did. So, why do so many believe it? CNN political analyst Steve Cortes explains how the Charlottesville lie happened and why it’s so dangerous. See the video here and then pass it on to family and friends. Then after they’ve seen it, ask them if they still believe “the lie”?

    Under six minutes.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Three Axes of Political Conflict

    Substack latest.

     

    Three axes of political conflict Stack image

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Three Axes of Political Conflict”

  • A ‘Temporal’ Argument Against Race Change

    The following excerpt is 'cannibalized' from my Substack article, Can One Change One's Race?

    …………………

    Can I change my race? No. I can no more change my race than I can change the fact that I was born in California.  I might have been born elsewhere, of course, but as a matter of contingent fact, I am a native Californian.  Despite the logical contingency of my California birth, there is nothing I or anyone, including God, can do, or could have done, after the fact, to change or annul that fact about my place of birth.  And there is nothing I or anyone can do, or could have done, after the fact, to alter my place of birth, time of birth, weight, or any other contingent detail.

    The same goes for race. My race is determined by my biological ancestors. Since both were white, I am white.  To change my race I would have to change a past fact, namely, that I am the product of the copulation of two white parents. But that fact, being past, cannot now be changed or annulled. The argument, then, is this:

    1) If I can change my race from white to black, say, then I can change some fact in the distant past, namely, the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

    2) It is not the case that I can change any past fact including the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

    Ergo

    3) It is not the case that I can change my race.

    The argument assumes that it is nomologically necessary (necessary given the laws of nature) that parents of the same race have offspring of the same race, that, e.g., white parents have white offspring. The assumption is obviously true. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Lawrence Auster on Bob Dylan


    Lawrence Auster
    I was surprised, but pleased, to find that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo above, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art.  Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go by the photo, but age is not even  a necessary condition for digging Dylan, as witness the case of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) who was early on into Dylan and Baez.  Auster's Jewishness may play a minor role, but the main thing is Auster's attunement to Dylan's particularism.  See the quotation below.  Herewith, some Dylan songs with commentary by Auster.

    The Band, I Shall Be Released.  Auster comments:

    This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:

    They say everything can be replaced
    They say every distance is not near
    But I remember every face
    Of every man who put me here.

    The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.

    Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine). 

    First off, some comments of mine on the video which accompanies the touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.    A quick shot of a newpaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then coalesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on a never-ending tour.

    Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

    By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

    Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

    Well the judge
    He holds a grudge
    He’s gonna call on you.
    But he’s badly built
    And he walks on stilts
    Watch out he don’t fall on you.

    There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

    Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

    Spanish Harlem Incident.  (From Another Side of Bob Dylan)  Auster's take:

    Thinking about the murder of motivational speaker and “positive, loving energy” guru Jeff Locker in East Harlem this week, where he had been pursuing an assignation with a young lady not his wife but got himself strangled and stabbed to death in his car by the damsel and her two male accomplices instead, I realized that this is yet another contemporary event that Bob Dylan has, in a manner of speaking, got covered. Here is the recording and below are the lyrics of Dylan’s 1964 song, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” where the singer, with his “pale face,” seeks liberating love from an exotic dark skinned woman, and is “surrounded” and “slayed” by her. The song reflects back ironically on the Jeff Locker case, presenting the more poetical side of the desires that, on a much coarser and stupider level, led Locker to his horrible death. By quoting it, I’m not making light of murder, readers know how seriously I take murder. But when a man gets himself killed through such an accumulation of sin and gross folly, a man, moreover, whose New Agey belief in positive energy and transformative love apparently left him unable to see the obvious dangers he had put himself in, there is, unavoidably, a humorous aspect to it.

    SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

    Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem
    Cannot hold you to its heat.
    Your temperature is too hot for taming,
    Your flaming feet are burning up the street.
    I am homeless, come and take me
    To the reach of your rattling drums.
    Let me know, babe, all about my fortune
    Down along my restless palms.

    Gypsy gal, you’ve got me swallowed.
    I have fallen far beneath
    Your pearly eyes, so fast and slashing,
    And your flashing diamond teeth.
    The night is pitch black, come and make my
    Pale face fit into place, oh, please!
    Let me know, babe, I’m nearly drowning,
    If it’s you my lifelines trace.

    I’ve been wonderin’ all about me
    Ever since I seen you there.
    On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding,
    I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where.
    You have slayed me, you have made me,
    I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
    I got to know, babe, ah, when you surround me,
    So I can know if I am really real.

     There's more.  There's always more.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Reading Now: Alex Marlow, Breaking Biden

    Subtitle: "Exposing the hidden forces and secret money machine behind Joe Biden, his family, and his administration." (Threshold, 2023).  Excerpt:

    Intellectually, Republicans understand that to have a nation, you need a border.  [. . .] But the establishment isn't going to solve a problem if the solution is going to cost them a lot of (any?) money, even if the fate of our nation depends on it.

    Unless, of course, we are talking about Ukraine's border with Russia. Then it's essential, heroic even, to have a border and defend it. After all, that border isn't keeping out cheap workers and future voters.  (p. 249)

    The RINOs and the Democrats are one in that they both want open U. S. borders, albeit for different reasons. The RINOs want cheap labor while the Dems want future votes. Thus talk of a 'uniparty' is apt. The RINOs are in cahoots with the woke globalist plutocrats and have no concern for American workers or American culture. They think they will always be able to find sanctuary somewhere with their wealth and connections, and in the meantime they are content to be lapdogs of the Left and continue to receive invitations to the toniest Beltway soirees. The 'cuckservative' label fits them nicely.  Civility and 'character' are so important to Mitt Romney, for example, that he refuses to support Trump because of his 'bad character' while ignoring that of Biden which is far worse. Liz Cheney is another disgusting specimen of this Never-Trumper species.

    Marlow sums up his book here.

    Bill Vallicella

  • 10,000 Page Views Yesterday!

    What explains yesterday's traffic surge? 

    My average is 1200-1300 page views per diem. Recent posts are nothing to get excited about. It is not as if their quality is superior to what I regularly crank out.  Have I 'triggered' some woke 'influencer'? Pissed off a powerful pol? Is the NSA rifling through* my vast archives preliminary to my incarceration?  But surely I am way too obscure for it to be cost-effective to send me to the gulag.   

    Is some AI monster grabbing my  content to regurgitate or repackage?

    I solicit your hypotheses.  

    ___________

    *'Riffling through' in British English.

    Bill Vallicella

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  2. https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

  7. Hi Bill, So you don’t think we should be discussing logical bagatelles in a time like this? I can see…

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