Said of plagiarist Claudine Gay. I tried to fact-check, but Snopes had nothing on the topic. Takes the cake if true.
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
-
She Plagiarized her Acknowledgments?
3 responses to “She Plagiarized her Acknowledgments?”
-
The Paradox of Privacy
As privacy perishes, privacy policies proliferate.
-
Rise and Shine
I quit the bed of sloth at two this morning. I slept in a bit. But I understand that not everyone prefers the monkish life. Kant arose at five. It's now 5:30 or so. Rise and shine with Manny! Or at least with Boston. If this '70s tune doesn't get you bangin' on all eight, you need a brain re-wire.
And if this first post of the day is not yet meaty enough for you, there's more:
"The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183)
I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising goes back to my having read, at age 20, that Kant was wont to retire at 10 pm and arise at 5 am.
Soon enough, however, I was out-Kanting Kant with a 4 am arisal from the nocturnal nest. And when I moved out here to the Zone, 4 became 2:30. (A Zone Man must make an early start especially on outdoor activities in the summer before Old Sol gets too uppity.)
2:30 became 2:00, the time the Trappist monks of Tom Merton's day got up. I don't know whether the Trappist regimen is as rigorous today as it was in the '40s and '50s, and I'm not sure I want to know given the ubiquity of decadence these days. But then 2:00 became 1:30 which is now my preferred time of arisal.
I don't use an alarm clock. I have an alarm cat. Max, a husky tuxie, jumps over me as he did this morning, more for his benefit than for mine: he wants his treats. He used to jump on my chest, but I cured him of that with a slap or two.
-
Linkage
Sohrab Ahmari, Can Trump be Stopped?
Paul Gottfried, Why Lenin is No Longer Relevant
Samuel Gregg, Knowledge's Limits and a Nobel Economist's Humility
Victor Davis Hanson, The Hysterical Style in American Politics
D. Parker, Can the Left Peacefully Coexist with Us? My answer: No. Investment tip: buy Au and Pb.
-
Malcolm Pollack is Back in the Saddle . . .
. . . with a series of outstanding posts. Start with A Higher Duty and scroll down. If I have his story straight, he did not attend college. And it shows.
UPDATE
A correspondent sends the following comment from a post at Powerline that will help you understand the gravity of the situation at the southern border. It underscores the outrageousness of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision upon which Pollack comments in the entry cited above:
12 responses to “Malcolm Pollack is Back in the Saddle . . .”
-
The End of Moderation
Top o' the Stack
-
Political Perception, Advocacy, and Reality
There are, I think, three chief obstacles that stand between Biden and re-election: the public’s perception of the economy, the public’s perception of immigration, and Biden’s own weaknesses as an advocate for his policies and his presidency. [Emphases added.]
This is the sort of garbage one expects from a delusional leftist who thinks that Trump poses an Hitlerian threat to 'democracy.' Blind to their own reality denial, such people think that everything is a matter of perception, messaging, advocacy. So it it is not Biden's disastrous policies that are the problem, but his failure to persuade the ovine masses to go along with them.
How stupid can these stupidi be?
-
My Angelic Wife
One indicator of her angelicity is her support of my chess activities — in stark contrast to the wives of two acquaintances both of whose 'better' halves destroyed their chess libraries in fits of rage at their time spent sporting with Caissa.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," wrote old Will.
I'm no bard, but here's my ditty in remembrance of my two long lost Ohio chess friends:
Forget that bitch
Dally with me.
Else I'll destroy
Your library.
-
Ron and Vivek: Their Day Will Come
Both are outstanding patriots. Their day will come. They will serve the republic well if there is any republic left to serve five years from now. We have reason to be hopeful. But Trump is the man of the hour. He alone can get us back on track. When Trump's work is done, the young guys will be well-placed to take over.
Listen to Vivek Ramaswamy's fabulously hard-hitting, content-rich, and super-articulate speech in endorsement of Trump. (7:18)
Ron DeSantis' speech is also impressive. (4:33)
But no complacency! The filthy Dems will use every Alinskyite tactic and commie-playbook trick to win by any and all means.
If you are a conservative who can't abide Trump, you are just going to have to suck it up and shut up about the man's obvious flaws. As DeSantis said, he's superior to Biden — an understatement! — and I would add: superior to any Dem who might run against him.
No infighting! Circle the wagons. No RINO-fueled circular firing squad. No Libertarian/Losertarian or other third-party circle jerk. As Ramaswamy said, it's a war. In a war, you have to take sides. You can't float above the fray as if you are a transcendental spectator with no stake in the bloody battle below.
Do you have RINO friends? Confront them brusquely with 'Which side are you on?'
Do you have Democrat friends? Cut 'em off! Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? (The usual ceteris paribus considerations apply.)
And if Nikki the Neocon should get the nomination? Then too you must suck it up and support her and not hang back because she's not Trump. She can't turn things around, but she could stave off collapse until DeSantis and Ramaswamy are ready to enter the lists.
7 responses to “Ron and Vivek: Their Day Will Come”
-
A Twitterized Attention Span . . .
. . . is one that has been X-ed out.
(Crossposted at Twitter.)
-
On ‘Over-Represent’
A big Stack attack on language abuse and wokeassery.
The importance of language and the injustice of 'equity.'
-
On the Gender-Neutral Use of ‘Man’
Top o' the Stack.
Roger Donway writes,
As I understand it, there are no "gender-neutral" nouns or pronouns in English. There is the masculine gender, the feminine gender, the neuter gender, and the common gender. The last applies to entities which have sex, but in contexts where both sexes are included or the sex is undetermined. "Someone has forgotten his umbrella." "Someone" and "his" are in the common gender. So, they do possess grammatical gender. They are not "gender neutral." Not positive about this, however.
Excellent comment, Mr. Donway. You're right. Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category with the four subcategories you mention. I was being sloppy in violation of my own principles. Properly expressed, my point was that 'man' has a legitimate sex-neutral use in standard English. When used to refer to both males and females, it is sex-neutral but not gender-neutral for precisely the reason you supplied: so used, the term's gender is common.
The sex of an animal is biologically based and therefore not a linguistic construct. This fact notwithstanding, it strikes me as legitimate to extend the sense of 'gender' so as to cover social roles. For example, traditionally women as a group have instantiated the nurse role and not the doctor role. No surprise: women can give birth, which biological fact makes women as a group more nurturing than men as a group and suits them for the nurse role. I have no objection to referring to the nurse role, a social role, as a gender role, midway as it is between the biotic/biological and the grammatical.
But this is an extended use of 'gender.' Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category!
7 responses to “On the Gender-Neutral Use of ‘Man’”
-
The Ersatz Eternity of the Past: Denied by Lukasiewicz!
The Pole denies the actuality of the past and in consequence thereof the ersatz eternity or accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) of the past.
Quasi-literary Preamble:
What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can destroy. What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone ever reads the record. What you have done, good or bad, and what you have left undone, good or bad, cannot be erased by the passage of time. You will die, but your having lived will never die. This is so even if you and your works and days are utterly forgotten. An actual past buried in oblivion remains an actual past. The erasure of memories and memorials is not the erasure of their quondam objects. The being of what was does not depend on their being-known; it does not rest on the spotty memories, flickering and fallible, of fragile mortals or their transient monuments or recording devices.
But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.
………………………….
I posted a precursor of the above on 10 March 2010. It elicited an astute comment from Alan Rhoda. He wrote:
You here express the tense-logical idea that p –>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt. [The done cannot be undone.]
Believe it not, this has been denied by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:
"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p.128.)
3 responses to “The Ersatz Eternity of the Past: Denied by Lukasiewicz!”
-
The Case for Trump
Brilliantly made by Sebastian Gorka before the Oxford Union. (12 min.)
See also, National Populism and the Rise of Donald Trump
UPDATE (21 January 2024)
The case for Trump can also be made from the inanity and perversity of the criticisms made of him by our political enemies. Among them are the Never Trumpers at The Bulwark, a rearguard resistance outlet for discredited and resentful neocons. Take a gander at this lame outburst: Jamie Dimon Joins the Trump Normalizers.
I was going to respond point-by-point, but thought better of it, seeing as how my readers agree with me on fundamentals. In recent years, as compared to the early years of the blogosphere, we have become 'siloed into our positions' and increasingly convinced of the fatuity and futility of engaging our political opponents in anything that could be called 'productive dialog.'
The other side of the coin is that a 'surfeit of agreement' — to give it a name — can be annoying, said surfeit being one of the upshots of the 'silo effect' lately mentioned. If we too closely agree, then we end up 'stealing one another's thunder' and boring one another. Productive, clarifying, insight-generating dialogue requires disagreement; the disagreement, however, must occur against the backdrop of broad and deep agreement, where such agreement is the unity that controls the diversity, a unity without which there would be fruitless contention. Here as elsewhere diversity unchecked by unity leads to disaster. Diversity untrammeled by unity is not our strength as woke chucklephucks mindlessly repeat; it is our undoing. Near the top of the indices of leftist self-induced stupidity is the febrile and fatuous emphasis on 'diversity.'
I am not saying that diversity is not a value; it is. But it is a value subordinate to the competing value of unity. There are fools to my right who think that any talk of diversity is a concession to our political enemies. It is not. Avoid the NETTR fallacy: there are enemies to the right, right-wing anti-semites, for example, though they are at the present time outnumbered by left-wing anti-semites. And there are white supremacists even though their threat to the Republic is nothing as compared to the threat of the race-delusional leftist totalitarians for whom the slanderous Joe Biden speaks.
Self-serving as it may sound, all of my positions are sane, reasonable, balanced, and moderate. If you disagree, and do so respectfully, while giving evidence of intelligence and good will, I will listen. I am committed to adjusting my views to reality.
So, to avoid preaching to the choir, I will content myself with giving a list of some of the key terms which our enemies such as the author of the above piece either misuse or exploit to advance false, absurd, slanderous, or otherwise noxious theses.
- Cult of personality
- Norm
- Normalize
- Dictator
- Demagogue
- Insurrection
- Migrant
- Xenophobe
- White supremacist
- White nationalist
- Nativist
- Extremist
- Dogwhistle
- Authoritarian
- Tyrant
- Third Reich
- Hitler
- Insurrection-inciter
- Rule of law
- Constitution
- Democracy
Und so weiter! (Is that a 'dogwhistle'?)
4 responses to “The Case for Trump”
-
Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm
I would have thought that stopping the influx of Fentanyl would have priority over banning menthol cigarettes.
Here is a curious argument:
If it sounds a bit nanny state-ish to ban an otherwise legal product used by consenting adults, consider this: In 2009, Congress gave the FDA authority to ban all other flavors in cigarettes, which it did in order to make these dangerous products less attractive to new smokers. But Congress stalled on menthols and asked for more study.
So the more the feds ban, the less nanny state-ish any particular ban becomes?
One response to “Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm”
I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't an actual unique past. I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible. It seems obvious to me, a plain datum, that there is an important difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, which actually occurred, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her which did not occur, but could have occurred, where 'could have' is to be taken ontically and not epistemically. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture which is what Rhoda does. For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist, which implies that there is no difference between a merely possible past event and an actual past event.