The abuse of a thing is no argument against its proper use. For example, the occasional abuse of State power by its agents is entirely consistent with the State's moral legitimacy.
You say you don't like the roundup of illegal aliens and their incarceration in detention centers such as the one in the heart of the Florida Everglades prior to their deportation? I don't like the roundup either, and it is to be expected that abuses will occur when a small minority of ICE officials overstep their legitimate authority. But the rule of law must be upheld.
It is also perfectly plain that the roundup would not be necessary had the previous (mal)administration enforced the borders and upheld the rule of law. So the Dems should look in the mirror and own the mess that they have created.
Nancy Pelosi spoke truly when she said that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. What she said is true; too bad she didn't meant it.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration will restrict immigrants in the country illegally from enrolling in Head Start, a federally funded preschool program, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday. The move is part of a broad effort to limit access to federal benefits for immigrants who lack legal status.
Translation: Illegal aliens will no longer be allowed access to taxpayer dollars to which they have no right.
Dems will scream in protest and start doing what they reliably do, namely, lie. They will claim that the Administration is eliminating the Head Start program just as they are supposedly eliminating Medicaid.
I would begin to have some respect for our political enemies if they stopped lying and simply stated their adamant opposition to the USA as she was founded to be, and owned up to the fact that their goal is the "fundamental transformation" (Barack Hussein Obama) of the USA so as to bring it in line with what they think a nation ought to be. But they will not come clean. That is why I label them 'stealth ideologues.'
In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle. But that is not my theme.
Is a person just his body? The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body? Am I identical to my body? Am I numerically one and the same with my body, where body includes brain? Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.
The indented material is from Colin McGinn's blog. My responses are flush left and in blue.
Paradoxes exist.
True.
Paradoxes belong either to the world or to our thought about the world.
True, if 'or' expresses exclusive disjunction.
They cannot belong to the world, because reality cannot be intrinsically paradoxical.
True. And so one ought to conclude that paradoxes reside in our thought about the world.
They cannot belong to our thought about the world, because then we would be able to alter our thought to avoid them (they cannot be intrinsic features of thought).
But surely we can alter our thought to avoid the paradoxes that reside in our thought about the world but not in the world.
Therefore, paradoxes don’t exist.
Non sequitur.
Therefore, paradoxes both exist and don’t exist.
Non sequitur. Although paradoxes do not exist in the world, in reality, they do exist in our thinking about the world, thinking that can be altered so as to avoid paradoxicality.
This is the paradox of paradoxes.
There is no such a paradox. It seems to me that McGinn is equivocating on 'paradox.' His first three assertions are all true if 'paradox' means logical contradiction. But for the fourth assertion to be true, McGinn cannot mean by 'paradox' logical contradiction.
The Paradox of the Smashed Vase will help me make my point.
Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you support this outrageous claim by arguing:
1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it.
2) When the vase is smashed, all the ceramic material that constitutes it remains in existence.
Therefore
3) The vase remains in existence after it is smashed.
"I don't owe you a penny!" (Adapted from Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 91.)
This paradox arises from faulty thinking easily corrected. The mistake is to think that an artifact such as a vase is strictly and numerically identical to the matter that composes it. Not so: the arrangement or form of the matter must also be taken into consideration. This response is structurally the same as the much more detailed response I make to Peter van Inwagen's denial of the existence of artifacts.
Politics in hyperdrive. Who can keep up? And to what extent should one keep up? Here are a couple of articles that caught my eye:
The Islamic Republic's New Lease on Life. Mercifully brief, and very interesting. In Foreign Affairs, by one Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar. I'd be interested in Caiati's and Soriano's comments.
Elon Musk is America's Dumbest Smart Person. Roger Kimball is right, and he is a very good writer to boot, unlike so many journo-punks now churning out bad prose. How do I know Kimball is a good writer? It takes one to know one.
It's a funny world. My opinion of the 'pre-historic' Fetterman has gone up during the same period that my opinion of the engineering genius Musk has gone down.
I would put it like this. Donald Trump has injected the 'art of the deal' into politics. He has brought the transactional skills of a consummate businessman to bear with impressive results. He was politically naive but the seemingly providential interregnum provided him with a 'sabbatical' during which to 'bone up' with the help of brilliant advisors. That, and the stark contrast with the mentally inept, morally corrupt 'Traitor Joe' Biden have brought the Orange Man to power. Maybe God had a hand in it, or we just got lucky. I prefer not to bluster about the unknowable.
Musk, on the other hand, remains politically naive. You can't engineer politics.
Musk's third party doesn't have a chance, and in any case, Third Parties are nothing but discussion societies in political drag, as I argue over at the Stack.
Trey Gowdy issued one on his show last night. The man needs to stiffen his spine and realize that our political opponents are enemies with whom we share insufficient common ground for productive debate. They don't need debating but defeating. He did guest a Dem pol who talked some sense and seemed decent, but the guy was an outlier who apparently hasn't yet grasped that his party is and has been for some time a hard-Left outfit.
Here at MavPhil my tone is 'edgier' than on Substack and on Facebook it is edgier still. A good writer can write in different tones and voices depending on his audience.
See my Leftists and Civility over at the Stack for a measured partial statement of my views on this topic.
A reader asked for an explanation of Russell's Paradox. My pleasure.
1. From a contradiction, anything follows. Ex contradictione quod libet. Another way of putting it would be to say that every argument having contradictory premises is valid. 'Valid' is a technical term. An argument A is valid =df no argument of A's form has true premises and a false conclusion. Now if A has two premises and they contradict each other, then the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) assures us that one of the premises must be false. It follows that no argument of A's form can have true premises and a false conclusion.
As long as 'valid' is understood as a technical term having all and only the meaning it is defined as having, then there should not be any trouble understanding how every argument with contradictory premises is valid.
Now consider this derivation:
a. Al is fat and Al is not fat.
b. Al is fat. (From (a) by Simplification)
c. Al is fat or Bush is blind (From (b) by Addition)
d. Al is not fat. (From (a) by Commutation and Simplification)
e. Bush is blind. (From (c) and (d) by Disjunctive Syllogism)
This illustrates how any proposition follows from a contradiction.
2. Now if Russell's Paradox is a contradiction, then set theory harbors a contradiction. And if anything follows from a contradiction, this is a serious problem for the logicist program of reducing all of mathematics to set theory.
3. Unrestricted Comprehension is the intuitively attractive idea that for any condition, or open sentence, or propositional function, there is a corresponding set. Thus, corresponding to the condition 'x is a cat' there is the set {x: x is a cat}, in plain English, the set of all cats. Intuitively, it seems that no matter how strange or complex the condition, there ought to be a set of things that satisfy the condition. Thus, corresponding to 'x is either an apple or a sparkplug' there is the set of all x such that x is either an apple or a sparkplug. Unrestricted Comprehension appears to be self-evident.
4. Now consider 'x is not in my pocket.' That condition picks out the set S of all things not in my pocket. Thus my wife and the Eiffel Tower are members of S. But so is S! The set of all things not in my pocket is not in my pocket. Thus S is a member of S. S is a self-membered set. But other sets are non-self-membered. The set of philosophers, for example, is not a member of itself. No set is a philosopher.
5. Now consider R, the set of all non-self-membered sets. Is R self-membered or not? Clearly, R is self-membered if and only if R is not self-membered — which is a contradiction.
This contradiction is known in the trade as Russell's Paradox. The name, I'd say, is a misnomer. It ought to be called Russell's Antinomy since a paradox need not issue in a contradiction.
6. It is easy to see that the antinomy cannot arise without the Unrestricted Comprehension axiom which implies that, corresponding to the condition 'x is the set of all non-self-membered sets' there corresponds the set R. So one solution to the antinomy is via rejection of Unrestricted Comprehension.
About so much. About gutting the 'safety net' for example. WSJrebukes the mendacious shites. (Ought we be polite to such brazen liars?)
As for multi-'colored' Kamala, she is like unto Traitor Joe not just in her moral obtuseness, but also in respect of her intellectual vacuity, as explained here.
Here and here for two more examples of leftist lunacy.
More proof this Monday morning (7/7/25) of the praeternatural mendacity and wrongheadedness of the intracranially feculent Democrats. GOP mega-bill structurally racist! Camp Mystic is whites-only!
And now, for a dose of sanity, I present Victor Davis Hanson who exposesMadmani Mandami for the destructive fraud he is.
Recently, Trump said he would "watch over" Mandami, and this morning he said the Feds would work "close" with Texas authorities. We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable do not support him because he is articulate in his word-slinging, although he does manage to get his meaning across. We support him because he is a great leader who knows what has to be done and more importantly does it.
You say the man has no class? I agree. That's what Jack Kennedy said about Dick Nixon in 1960. But how important is class in a world such as this one? Far more important is the ability and willingness to 'kick ass.' That he has done, and not just to the benefit of the USA, but the benefit of the whole world.
Besides, Trump does not need class; the First Lady has more than enough for both of them.
Bill Vallicella
4 responses to “The Dems, True to Form, are Lying”
The single thing I can imagine Russell finding most shocking would be Frege’s endorsement of patriotism as an unreasoning prejudice. The absence of political insight characteristic of his times, Frege says, is due to “a complete lack of patriotism.” He acknowledges that patriotism involves prejudice rather than impartial thought, but he thinks that is a good thing: “Only Feeling participates, not Reason, and it speaks freely, without having spoken to Reason beforehand for counsel. And yet, at times, it appears that such a participation of Feeling is needed to be able to make sound, rational judgments in political matters.” These are surely surprising views for “an absolutely rational man” to express. The man who wanted to set mathematics on surer logical foundations, was content for politics to be based on emotional spasms.
This is a rich and fascinating topic, both intrinsically and especially for me, given my recent deep dive into the world of Carl Schmitt and his antecedents. I will be returning to him. But there is so bloody much else that clamors for my attention. I'm a scatter-shot man to my detriment. Quentin Smith detected that tendency in me way back when. How I miss that crazy guy.
Live long, old friends die, and new friends will never be old.
But Robert A. Heinlein is right: "Specialization is for insects." The trick is to be a jack of all trades but a master of one while running the risk of being a master of none.
Bill Vallicella
4 responses to “Ray Monk on Frege, Russell, Patriotism and Prejudice”
You may have noticed that our relations with some people improve when we no longer have contact with them. Now while we can and must round up and deport illegal aliens, our classically liberal principles make it very difficult to force out of our midst those of our political adversaries who count as out-and-out political enemies. And of course we must do our level best to avoid hot civil war while preparing to engage in it should it prove unavoidable. May we be spared from the hell of that unavoidability!
Might the solution be voluntary segregation? I make the case at Substack.
Note the qualifier 'voluntary.' And please don't play the know-nothing who confuses segregation with racial segregation. I am talking about the voluntary political segregation of the sane and the reasonable from the rest.
If you are a sane and reasonable American citizen, and you love your country with an ordinate love, then I bid you a happy Fourth of July. If and only if.
It is according to the author of a TNR article. I don't disagree. After all, the bad hombres are being held against their will in one place prior to their deportation. The conclusion to draw, of course, is that some concentration camps are morally justified. This one is also legally justified. President Trump is merely upholding the rule of law, unlike the Dems who love to mouth that phrase, but don't mean what they say. "No one is above the law," Nancy Pelosi and her followers intoned again and again. Did she and they mean that? No. They meant: no one is above the law except our guys and gals.
POTUS is legally justified in building a concentration camp in the middle of the Everglades for the housing of illegal aliens prior to their lawful deportation. What was legally unjustified was the Biden-Mayorkas invitation of an invasion of illegal aliens into our country. Those 'gentlemen' were in dereliction of duty and should both have been impeached and removed from office, at the very least.
Some say, quite reasonably, that they should both now be in prison.
If you think my use of 'invasion' two paragraphs supra is an exaggeration, consider that in December 2024, during the Biden-Harris (mal)administration, there were 301, 981 Southwest Land Border Encounters according to official U. S. statistics. For the same year there were over two million total such encounters. Under Trump, border encounters have dropped dramatically. In June of this year there were zero. Again, these are official stats.
If you are against detention centers, then you must also be against prisons. Is your name Zohran Mamdani?
What I like about the winner of the New York City mayoral Democrat primary is that he is not a 'stealth ideologue' a phrase I have been using for years to characterize the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Mamdani, unlike the mendacious foursome just mentioned, comes clean about what he and the Dems intend:
Mamdani is now the mainstream of the once great Democratic Party.
The only difference is that Mamdani isn’t afraid to say what other Democratic politicians try to hide.
Think about what Mamdani has proposed or supported:
A yearlong freeze on rent
A $30 minimum wage
Free bus service
City-owned grocery stores
Defunding the police
Calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
“Mainstream Democrats” support every one of these positions in one way or another.
With the advent of Mamdani it will be more difficult now to remain a Useful Idiot as so many of the supporters of the Dems are. You know these people. We have them in our families and in our neighborhoods and workplaces. A lot of them are the "college-educated white women" of a certain age. They rescue cats and dogs and support what they sincerely believe are good causes. But they are lazy and inattentive and too wrapped up in their private lives to pay proper attention to current events. Their loving and nurturing feminine nature impairs their political judgment and makes them easy marks for the fraudulent come-ons of professional pols like Phony Joe Biden who has 40 years of experience of looking into the camera, smiling, and making an emotional appeal. The women think, "He's a nice man!" They cannot see past the polished style to the lack of substance. Conversely they cannot see past Trump's off-putting style to his genuine and salutary substance. In the case of pretty boy Gavin Newsom, they are so taken by his style that the question of substance doesn't even arise. I had to agree with Sean Hannity one night when he remarked that Joy Behar of The View has a "crush" on him. Joy Behar, that well-fed paragon of wisdom and insight!
But old men, too, are part of the Useful Idiot contingent. Lazy, inattentive, superannuated and superficial, pissing their lives away hitting little white balls into holes and — worst of all — living in the past. Mamdani, as a sort of Fidel redivivus, may help these Rip van Winkles wake up.
One more thing. It is good that the battle lines are clearly laid out. Let the battle begin, the battle for the soul of America. Mamdani is a Great Clarifier as is our boy Trump. John Catsimatidis, billionaire, said on Stuart Varney's show this morning that Trump has God on his side. How would he know? Does the billionaire have a hot line to the divine? What is within the range of our knowledge, however, is that Trump's the man to save the Republic, and make the whole world a safer place, as he already has.
6 responses to “Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?”