Christina Cross, Sherri Ann Charleston.
How many decades will it take before Harvard regains its reputation? Will it ever?
With a serial plagiarist as POTUS, what can you expect? The fish stinks from the head.
The case for Trump grows ever stronger. Here it is made succinctly and devastatingly.
My plan this morning was to hit the mat of meditation at 2:30, but it wasn't until 4:00 that I got there, having once again become entranced by the depth, probity, and genius of Wittgenstein as displayed in his Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen). His was a great if tormented soul and a powerful intellect. The latter description holds even if the judgment of my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay is right: "Wittgenstein took every wrong turn a philosopher can take."
I sometimes refer to the current pope as Bergoglio the Termite to underscore the destructive effect he is having on a once-great institution. Early this morning it occurred to me that I might write a post comparing the various termites undermining our institutions. Of course 'President' Joe Biden immediately came to mind. Just now, an e-mail crossed the transom pointing me to an article in which William Kilpatrick, whom I have often approvingly quoted, does part of the job for me, comparing the termitic attributes of Bergoglio and Biden. I recommend it for your perusal.
Needless to say, when I refer to Bergoglio as a termite, that is a figurative use of language: I am not suggesting that he is literally an insect or ought to be 'rubbed out' by chemical or other means. People who cannot distinguish between the literal and the figurative show a lack of intelligence. Most recently, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC and others of his scrofulous ilk have shown this lack of intelligence when they failed to grasp that Donald Trump's recent use of 'bloodbath' was figurative, not literal.*
Joey B struggles with the distinction as well. Remember his “The American people literally stood on the brink of a new Depression”? That was around 2013 if memory serves.
It is worth noting that not every term of abuse is purely abusive: 'termite' as applied to Jorge and Joseph (both of whose initials are 'J. B.') is not purely abusive in that it contains a factual core: both of these clowns are in fact working to destroy their respective institutions. Wittingly or unwittingly? I am inclined to say wittingly in the case of Bergoglio, unwittingly in the case of the demented Biden.
There is of course a serious moral question connected to the use of abusive language meant to express contempt for fellow human beings. But in a war against such anti-civilizational forces as we now face, different rules of engagement are permissible. Or so it seems. A hard nut to crack.
___________________
*You could of course respond to me that Scarborough and Co. understand the literal-figurative distinction and also understand that context is crucial in the interpretation of anyone's oral or written remark. They probably do. But then it is even worse for them: they are trying to bamboozle the American people. This is a moral defect, which is worse than a failure of understanding. Dripping with intellectual dishonesty and disregard for truth, these people warrant our contempt
Substack latest.
The piece ends:
So I persist in my view that Rand is a hack, and that this is part of the explanation of why many professional philosophers accord her little respect.
That being said, I'll take Rand over a leftist any day.
Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily discern from my Rand category, this term from her lexicon does earn a non-plenary MavPhil endorsement.
Context matters!
We have been discussing how to proceed against our anti-civilizational political enemies. This essay by Carlson is not all that good, but it is worth a quick read-through. His points about truth and death are spot on.
Nicole Gelinas in Regressives explains how a healthy progressivism transmogrified into regressivism rendering Gotham the shithole it now is.
The beauty of blog is that the blogger is under no editor who might take umbrage at the occurrence of 'transmogrified' and 'shithole' in one and the same sentence.
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?
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.”
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
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.
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.
When a policy is not a policy.
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.
"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.
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.
