Top o' the Stack.
Wherein I ruminate upon the curious modality, necessitas per accidens.
Civilization Versus the New Nihilists
Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off. Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect. (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)
Here's my take from 2017:
The Nihilism of the Left
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.
………………..
And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists. It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy. They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout.
There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Say ‘When’
Scene from "Tombstone."
B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out
John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved? This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.
Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In
Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In
Laura Nyro, And When I Die
Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman
Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece
The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece
Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down
More:
Jackie de Shannon, When You Walk in the Room
Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
Good theme music for a post on the difference between dying and falling asleep.
Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man
Substack latest.
America First!
I explain what it means over at Substack.
I refute the fragile Kristol and articulate what the inarticulate Trump cannot. But to this man of action goes the credit of having put paid to Kristol and others of his pseudo-con ilk as well as to the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Jeb! is toast and Chelsea has been strangled in her political crib. Remember Jeb!? The mendacious Hillary has been put to pasture where she chews her cud of resentment.
Occasionalism, Omnipotence, and Matthew 23:9
Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis
The book has been recently translated.
Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."
Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it. But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing.
To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely. Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid, and the same goes for many Europeans to the east of France.
Leftists Regularly Abuse Language
Example du jour: 'Gun Buy Back'
Top o' the Stack.
Is Trump a Threat to Democracy?
He most certainly is if 'democracy,' as per the woke Orwellian switcheroo — to give it a name — refers to plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. The plutocratic elites of the present time, unlike those of yesteryear, are woke open-borders globalists with no commitment to their countries of origin. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are good examples. You will recall Hillary's endless mouthing of 'our democracy,' not that it has stopped. The superannuated and hyper-mendacious cow has been put out to pasture, thanks to DJT, but the attention-obsessed greed head won't stay there.
That the USA is a plutocracy is convincingly argued by Peter Turchin in End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023). When Turchin, no conservative, tells us that the USA is a plutocracy, he means that ". . . at the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community: the owners and managers of large income-producing assets . . . ." (124-5) The economic elites rule America indirectly by dominating the political class by lobbying and the like. (125) "The two power networks, economic and administrative, are jointed at the hip" with the economic network in the dominant position. (125) "The corporate community also controls the ideological basis of power through the ownership of mass media corporations . . . ." (125)
In nuce: Hillary is homo mendax, and not just her: we do not have a democracy, but a plutocracy, and Trump, billionaire that he is, is a threat to it in his role as populist.
How Censorship Drives the Woke Revolution
Nick Short at Tom Klingenstein's place quotes from Tucker Carlson's interview of Mike Benz:
Benz: You had this new power within DHS to say that cybersecurity attacks on elections are now ‘our purview.’ And then they did two cute things. One, they said mis-, dis-, and mal-information online are a form of cybersecurity attack; they are a cyber attack because they are happening online. And they said, well… we’re actually protecting democracy and elections. We don’t need a Russian predicate after Russiagate died.
So just like that, you had this cybersecurity agency be able to legally make the argument that your tweets about mail-in ballots — if you undermine public faith and confidence in them as a legitimate form of voting, you were now conducting an attack on U.S. critical infrastructure by articulating ‘misinformation’ on Twitter…
Carlson: So, in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid?
Benz: Yes. You could literally be on your toilet seat at 9:30 on a Thursday night and tweet, ‘I think that mail in ballots are illegitimate.’ And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on U.S. critical infrastructure because you were doing ‘misinformation’ online in the cyber realm, and ‘misinformation’ is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions.
It really is as bad as that. As for mail-in ballots (except for certain narrowly restricted classes of people, e.g. military personnel serving abroad) they are an open invitation to voter fraud, an invitation that has been and will continue to be widely accepted. The invitation is of course part of the overall strategy of the Left to destroy our republic.
Herewith, yet another reason why anyone who is not a destructive, hate-America leftist must support Trump, warts and all, and is a contemptible idiot oblivious to his own long-term best interest if he doesn't.
A Final Word to Brother Jackass
You've served me well, old friend, borne many a burden, and conducted me over many a pons asinorum. Your exuberance and animal spirits have caused me trouble, but they have also broadened and deepened my soul's experience.
I too have served you well with my counsels and warnings. More than once have I saved your ass, or was it mine? I've reined you in as you have let me ride. But now it is time to say goodbye as you return to the earth and I to the sky.
Topical Insanity
One type of temporary insanity is topical insanity. I explain it at the top of my Stack and apply it to the case of firearms.
Realpolitik and What it Excludes
It has been said that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed. The saying is strongly reminiscent of Carl von Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means." Both exemplify Realpolitik. What does Realpolitik exclude? It excludes any politics based on otherworldly principles such as Christian principles. Does it not?
The exclusion is implied in the following passage from Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):
The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]
"Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters." Nietzsche says something similar somewhere in his Nachlass. I paraphrase from memory. (And it may be that the thought is expressed in one of the works he himself published.)
The philosopher is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life for safe navigation. Bobbing like a cork, he capsizes easily. The solid bourgeois, weighted and freighted with the cargo of Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof, ploughs deep the waves and weathers the storms of Neptune's realm and reaches safe harbor.
The philosophers who shouldn't be given any say in matters mundane and political are of course the otherworldly philosophers, those I would dub, tendentiously, the 'true philosophers.' There are also the 'worldly philosophers' discussed by Robert L. Heilbroner in his eponymous book, such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
The 'true philosophers,' which include Plato and his opposite number Nietzsche, have something like contempt for those who would occupy themselves with the human-all-too-human alone.
I am of the tribe of Plato, more a spectator of all time and existence than a participant in the flux and shove of the order of impermanence. It is this perch above the fray that enables the true philosopher to see the nature of the political that is hidden to those in the grip of the vita activa.
Is Leftism a Form of Mental Illness?
Wokery is the most extreme form of leftism. Some if not all elements of wokery are indicative of mental illness on the part of those who actually believe them. I will mention just four.
- Thinking that one can effect a sex-change by merely mental gymnastics, by 'identifying' as a woman or as a man. Cognate with this species of insanity is the notion that sex of a neonate is 'assigned' at birth as opposed to being biologically inherent in the organism that exits the birth canal. A name can be assigned but not sex. Not even an inappropriate nominal assignment has the power to alter the sex of the nominatum. The boy named 'Sue' remained a boy.
- The bizarre notion that permitting or minimizing the consequences of criminal behavior will lead to less crime.
- The astonishing conceit that mathematics is racist. Why exactly? Because blacks as a group are not good at it?
- The knuckleheaded notion that wholly legitimate criticisms of a 'person of color' such as Alejandro Mayorkas may be deflected by hurling the slur 'racist,' a word which wokesters never define the better to use as an all-purpose semantic bludgeon.
- Et cetera ad nauseam.
Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche
Substack latest.
Does causation have a moral dimension?
This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism.
He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books he has recently published. A veritable writing machine, he's out-Fesering the phenomenal Ed Feser. And it's good stuff. I dove into his Trinity and Incarnation this morning and will be discussing in future posts the shift in his views from orthodox or what he calls catholic (lower-case 'c') Christianity to a position reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta he calls "Qualified Monism."
Western Superstitions: Hieroglyphic Canyon Hike out of Cloudview Trailhead
MavPhil commenter Trudy Vandermolen and her husband Ken from Michigan paid me a visit yesterday. It's becoming an annual thing. Next year: either the Garden Valley Loop out of the First Water Trailhead or Fremont Saddle out of Peralta. Here are a couple of shots of me and Trudy from the hike I took them on. Photo credit: Ken.
Trudy, "The guidebook said this hike is moderate!" Me, "It is by the standards of the Superstition Wilderness."
"These are trails that try men's soles." Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.