Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Christmas Tunes

    BoulevardierMerry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  It'll melt a snowflake for sure. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Campari joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. 

    Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity. An irrational prejudice against artichokes? Razzismo vegetale!

    Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
    Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

    Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
    Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

    Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas.  

    Captain Beefheart, There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evening Stage

    Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

    Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
    Judy Collins, Silver Bells

    Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate
    Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa

    Is this the same guy who sang Desolation Row back in '65?  This is the 'stoned' version.  It'll grow on you! Give it chance. YouTuber comment: "The original was already the stoned version." An alternate version for the true Dylan aficionado with period shots of Albert Grossmann, et al.

    Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache. Not Christmasy, but a good tune.  Remember Bob Luman? His version. Luman's signature number.

    Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

    Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

    The Band, Christmas Must be Tonight

    A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Christmas Tunes”

  • At the San Gabriel Mission

    Catacomb Joe and I grew up near the San Gabriel Mission. He sends the following as a visual comment on a couple of recent entries:

    San Gabriel Mission RIP

    Bill Vallicella

  • Logic Quiz: Is the Argument Below Specious or Sound?

    1) What I know cannot be otherwise: if I know that p, then p cannot be false.

    Therefore

    2) If I know that a man is walking, then 'a man is walking' cannot be false.

    Therefore

    3) If  I know that a man is walking, then it is necessarily true that a man is walking.

    Extra credit: explain the meaning of 'specious.'

    Bill Vallicella

    26 responses to “Logic Quiz: Is the Argument Below Specious or Sound?”

  • On the Fear of Death

    A Substack meditation occasioned by Philip Roth's Everyman.

     

    Roth substack image

    Bill Vallicella

    9 responses to “On the Fear of Death”

  • A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?

    Sontag

    Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . . my mother could not get enough of being alive, she reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that." (143) But this being was the being of a sick mortal human animal soon slated for destruction. And so the question arises: is an attitude toward life like that of Sontag excessive and idolatrous? Is it not absurd to attach an absolute value to something so transient and miserable?

    There are inordinate loves in this life — of wine and travel, loot and land — and there is the inordinate love of life itself, this life, mortal life, life that ends utterly with the death of the body after a short span of years. That is the case of Susan Sontag, secularist. Convinced that this is it, she had no belief in a life beyond this mortal life.

    The horrors of this world strike many as an argument against its value, and in the case of such anti-natalists as David Benatar, the horrors speak against the morality of human procreation. But the horrendous evils of this life did nothing to dampen Sontag's vital enthusiasm. "She thought the world a charnel house . . . and couldn't get enough of it. ". . . my mother simply could not get her fill of the world." (149) She thought herself unhappy . . .  and wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could." (147) And ". . . how profoundly she had been unhappy." 

    She lived in and for the future because she was unhappy in the present. ". . . my sense is that she had always lived in the future . . . and yet surely the only way to even remotely come to terms with death is to live in the present." (19-20) Sontag couldn't be here now and abide in the present. She lived for a future that must, she believed, lead in a short time to her extinction.

    Was Sontag's attitude toward and valuation of life reasonable? You might retort that reason doesn't come into it: the love of life is irrational! Yet Sontag was science-based and had utter contempt for the false hopes and cancer 'cures' peddled by her New Age friends. Secular to the core, religion for her was but a tissue of superstitions.  She was too rational for religion but not so rational as to see the absurdity of attaching an infinite value to her miserable life.

    Rieff quotes Marguerite Duras: "I cannot reconcile myself to being nothing." And then he quotes his mother: "Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the 'I'." "But she who could do so many things in her life could never do that." Rieff thinks his mother "the very incarnation of hope." (167) 

    I'd say her hope was a false hope, false because baseless and irrational.  An absurd hope, absurd because an unquenchable love of life cannot be satisfied in a charnel house. It is perfectly plain that a mortal man, mortal because material, cannot live forever in a material world. It would be more reasonable to take one's unquenchable love of life as pointing to a fulfillment beyond this life. Why would we have this unquenchable love if we were not made for eternal life? This non-rhetorical question can be cast as an argument, not that it would be rationally coercive; it would, however, properly deployed, render rationally acceptable the belief in and hope for eternal life.

    But Sontag couldn't bring herself to believe in eternal life. So she should have made friends with finitude and dismissed her excessive love of life as delusional and idolatrous.

    One of the questions that arise is whether an atheist can be an idolater. I answer in the affirmative over at Substack.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?”

  • Gun Semantics

    Under 14 minutes, by Massad Ayoob, one of the best. Words mean things, especially in a court of law. Precise, penetrating, and practical. As civil society collapses around us, and more and more of us must look to our own physical defense, you must also know how to avoid verbal entrapment by the prosecutorial shysters of the Left. 'Shyster,' as you know, is from the German sheissen, to shit. (I shit kid you not.)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Real and Merely Apparent Incoherence on the Left

    Substack latest.

    Four examples.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Safe Speech

    Top o' the Stack.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Safe Speech”

  • Rod Dreher on Bergoglio’s Latest Termitic Outrage

    Decline and fall is the way of the world. It's our turn now as institution after institution is captured by wokeassery and termitry. Sodomy in the Senate and among prelates. The presidency of a 'wokified' but unqualified plagiarist at Harvard. The huge numbers of destructive leftists and their usefully idiotic fellow travellers who support a demented traitor in plain dereliction of duty for POTUS.  And that just for a start. Is consolation to be had? Well, the religionist can look beyond the passing scene, and the philosopher can take comfort in the thought that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.

    Here is Hegel in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

    When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

    Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, and wisdom arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

    When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

    Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
    Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

    Grey, dear friend, is all theory
    And green the golden tree of life.

    Dreher's piece is long but good. I've been called a writing machine but I can't hold a candle to Dreher in terms of sheer output. There is one thing I can't stomach about him, though: his mindless anti-Trumpery. But we all have our follies, fatuities, failings, and blind spots. 

    Bill Vallicella

    19 responses to “Rod Dreher on Bergoglio’s Latest Termitic Outrage”

  • The Fall of the USA: Immigration Madness

    When the USA is no more, what will future historians point to as the main causes of our collapse? One of them will be the foolish immigration policy that got its start in the '60s. Somehow we collectively forgot that

    • There is no right to immigrate
    • Immigration is justified only if it benefits the host society 
    • There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration
    • Illegal immigration runs counter to the rule of law and national sovereignty
    • There is an important distinction between legal immigration and political asylum
    • A nation is not merely an economy but also a culture
    • A culture has a right to defend and perpetuate itself
    • Some cultures are superior to others in point of their contribution to human flourishing
    • Immigration without assimilation leads to disaster
    • Only certain groups are likely to assimilate and benefit their host country.
    • Only these groups should be allowed to immigrate.

    How many of these points do you agree with? How is it that we have collectively lost our minds in respect of these (obvious) points? What are the chances of a return to sanity? How long before we collapse into hot civil war?  Are you ready?

    Bill Vallicella

  • It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic

    Substack latest. Another taste of John Fante with a bit of commentary.

    Fante and L. A. palm tree

    Tony Flood comments, "A priest is now authorized to bless the fornicating couple who recently befouled a Senate hearing room." 

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic”

  • Why No Jew-Haul?

    U-Haul is raking it in these days renting moving vans and trailers to folks eager to flee such Dementocratic crapholes as San Francisco for rather more habitable places far from the Left Coast. Why then no Jew-Haul? Because the Jews ain't goin' nowhere, to allude to a song written by a Jew. Bill Maher makes the point, displaying along the way considerable historical savvy.

    He also says something that supports the point I make in my Pollyanna post:

    History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History's sad and full of wrongs but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn't do it by asking.

    Maher is dead wrong on much, like the late Christopher Hitchens (d. 15 Dec 2011), but both are/were brilliant, articulate, courageous, and right about much.

    I stand with them for free speech, open inquiry, the life of the mind and against the anti-civilizational forces of wokery and Islamism. And that is why I stand with the Jews.

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Why No Jew-Haul?”

  • The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante

    Stack leader.

    Fante Ask the Dust

    Bill Vallicella

    4 responses to “The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante”

  • Why Liberalism and Leftism are Increasingly at Odds

    I have merely skimmed through this Substack piece by Nate Silver. But it appears to be worth a close reading. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Why Would Anyone Need an AR-15?

    You have a right to one whether you need it or not.  And you have a right to one whether the right is constitutionally protected or not: 2A or not 2A, that is not the logically prior question.

    But why would you need one? See here.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  2. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  3. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  4. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

  6. https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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