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.  

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!

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.)

Lukasiewicz JanThat is  to my mind an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his rejection of the tense-logical principle, p –>FPp,  and because of the consolation he derives from its rejection.

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.

Alan Rhoda responds:

Yes, in my paper "Presentism, Truthmakers, and God" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 2009). I argue that the best way for presentists to supply truthmakers for truths about the past is to appeal to divine memories.

I accept the datanic nature of your distinction between the actual and the merely possible past. I'm not clear, however, on why that distinction by itself should count against presentism. Unlike Lukasiewicz, most presentists do posit present grounds for that distinction. The live question is what sort of present facts, if any, could serve the presentist's purposes. That's where my argument for theistic presentism gets its purchase.

If only that which exists now, exists, then that which existed does not exist. If to exist = to be actual, then that which existed is not actual. Since what existed is presumably not impossible, that which existed is merely possible. It therefore looks as if one can get very quickly from the distinction I pointed out to a rejection of atheistic presentism. Atheistic presentism cannot supply the truth-makers for past-tensed truths such as 'Kierkegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen.'

Atheistic presentists need to find present facts to ground the distinction in question.  Now there are some present facts that could serve to ground some past-tensed truths. Consider 'Bill Sykes the burglar entered my house yesterday.' This contingent truth needs a truth-maker, and on presentism this truth-maker must exist today. Our presentist might plausibly say that it is Sykes' footprints outside my window, and the the broken glass, both of which exist today, that tie Sykes to the crime and make-true the contingent sentence in question.  But what makes it true that my grandfather Alphonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940 and pronounced it excellent?  Suppose the red wine drunk by Alphonso came from the Gallo vineyard. What now makes it true that that particular glass of dago red came from the Gallo vineyard as opposed to the Cribari vineyard? What exists now that could serve as a truth-maker of such truths?  There are plenty of past-tensed truths that have no presently existing truth-makers.  This is why Rhoda argues that it is only present facts involving divine memories that are up to the truth-making job.

Whether recourse to God and his omniscience works to save presentism we leave for later. 

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'?)

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?

Politics, Lies, and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1).  Have I lied?  That depends on what a lie is.

What is a lie?

A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie.  No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible.  It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.

On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie.  (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.

Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?

It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual.  So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,'  is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.) 

But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia.  More about this later.

Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2). Consider a second example. 

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter. 

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad  for later rumination and delectation:

1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.

2) The true ones are contingently true.

3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.

4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.

5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.

These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject?  I hope to come back to this problem later.

A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:

“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”

Ed comments:

Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.

What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading  Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.

Related: Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science

A Clarkian-Barthian Argument for your Evaluation

Gordon Clark in Religion, Reason, and Revelation ( The Trinity Foundation, 1986, pp. 37-38) discusses and agrees with Karl Barth (Church Dogmatics II, 1, pp. 79 ff.).  The following is my distillation of the Barthian argument to which Clark assents.  Barth is attacking the Roman Catholic viewpoint as expressed at the Vatican Council of 24 April 1870.

1) The Christian God is triune.

2) The rationally demonstrable God is not triune. 

Therefore

3) The Christian God is not the rationally demonstrable God.

Therefore

4) The Christian God is not the God of the philosophers.

Therefore

5) We cannot know God from nature, 'cosmologically,' by natural reason. (Natural theology is a non-starter.)

Therefore

6) We can know God only through God.

It is perhaps obvious why the presuppositionalist Clark would like this argument. Clark strikes me as the best theologian among the presuppositionalists.  The book cited is extremely rich in provocative ideas. 

Dueling Articles

We need to revisit in thought if not in fact the practice of dueling. Later. In lieu of that, here are a couple of dueling articles. You know where I stand. How about you?

David Frum, The Ruin that a Trump Presidency Would Mean

Steve Cortes, Only Trump Can Save America

For the foolish Frum Ukraine is the only issue worth mentioning.. He neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country would not have occurred had Trump been president. 

Nothing else seems to interest him. And so he fails to understand Trump's broad appeal. Cortes gets it:

We confront a perilous moment in U.S. history. Our country suffers from sky-high violent crime, the ravages of an effectively open border, a subversive educational system, and the anxiety of an economy that punishes workers – all brought about, deliberately, by Joe Biden and his allies. [emphasis added.]

There you have the explanation of Trump's comeback in a nutshell. There is more to be said, but  the Cortes quotation cannot be beat for pith and punch.  

But let me tweak it a bit. For the average citizen, the order of concern is  (i) the economy, (ii) crime, (iii) the subversion and 'wokification' of curricula with the concomitant labelling of protestors at school board meetings as 'domestic terrorists,' and (iv) the wide-open border. Now I don't expect Joe Sixpack to understand the full ramifications of a wide-open border, but my surmise is that what really rankles him is the fact is that he is being played for a chump: he works long and hard, plays by the rules, obeys the law and has to watch global elitist lawbreakers allow illegal alien lawbreakers to invade his country, and then add insult to injury by smearing him as a 'racist' and a 'white supremacist.'

Without touching upon the deeper issues that exercise right-thinking historians, political scientists, and philosophers, we have in the four points mentioned an adequate explanation of Trump's ascendency.

Addendum

Anent the folly of Frum, vide Francis P. Sempa, "David Frum and the Axis of Errors."

Of Course Trump Won Iowa

Dov Fisher speaks his mind:

There has been only one truly great country in the entire world these past 150 years, the United States of America. 

[. . .]

America’s great secret always was equal opportunity. It remained a step behind its fullest potential as long as it denied equal opportunity to some of her citizens: Italians, Irish, Germans, Asians, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks. But America got past it. By the 1980s, equal opportunity went without saying anymore. That is how Obama got into Columbia with whatever grades he had. That is how he got into Harvard Law with whatever grades he did or did not have. That is how he got to be the president of Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a law review article, something all but unheard of. He became a law professor, building on a resumé that was sketchy. Blacks in America had all the opportunity in the world by the 1980s.

Obama changed America to focus on equal outcomes. Not opportunity that entails great risk but offers enormous reward, but outcomes that guarantee mediocrity for everyone. The Brave New World of Equal Outcomes applies everywhere except in areas where Blacks excel, like professional basketball and football. Notice that there is no affirmative action or DEI or equal outcomes in NBA basketball. Why not? If there is DEI in medicine and medical school, where lives are at stake, in law firms and in Disney, in Hollywood and on Broadway — why not in the NBA? Why not open the NBA to more Orthodox Jews? There is not a single one, although there is one who is competitive. Why not more Irish? More Germans? More Italians? More Plain Whites? If Whites are 76 percent of America, why isn’t the NBA 76 percent White? The NFL?

Obama destroyed America. 

 

Continue reading “Of Course Trump Won Iowa”