A spectacularly clear example:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education.
Exercise for the reader: explain the bias.
Victor Davis Hanson explains why.
Are you ready? Or are you a pollyanna like the foolish Israeli woman who didn't see or want to see what was coming and easily predictable?
Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The trio declined to give a definitive "yes" or "no" answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik's question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.
More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed onto a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.
However, Gay received support from some of her colleagues at Harvard. Several hundred faculty members last month signed a petition asking school administrators to not bend to political pressure to fire the school's president over her testimony.
Gay has also been hit with accusations of plagiarism. She planned to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.
From the journal of a cat man.
The cat is happy to reside within his limits: he does not aspire. He is incapable of hubris. There are no feline tragedies. A cat can be miserable, and so can a man, but only a man can be wretched. A man is an animal, but an abyss separates him from the other animals. It is this abyssal difference between man and animal, a difference appreciated from Genesis to Heidegger, that justifies the distinction between animalic misery, which man shares with animals, and spiritual wretchedness, which he does not.
Fear and anxiety
A cat can experience fear (Furcht), but he cannot experience anxiety (Angst). I borrow Heidegger's terms for a distinction already to be found in Kierkegaard. The cat, however, experiences fear and does not merely exhibit fear-behavior: an animal is not a machine. Philosophical behaviorism is as false of the cat as of the man. A cat can feel and show fear and other emotions just as a man can. 'Just as a man can' does not mean to the same degree or in the same way as a man can; it means that both man and cat feel and show fear and other emotions. Both suffer and enjoy mental states. Cartesius take note.
But a man can fake emotion-exhibiting behavior without feeling the corresponding emotions. This is beyond the cat. He cannot dissemble, not because he is sincere, but because he is beneath dissemblance and sincerity.
Respect
A cat can neither feel nor show respect. A man can feel respect, show respect, but also dissimulate by faking respect. Do I respect my cats? If respect is of persons, then I respect them at best analogously: cats are not persons. Some of us have and express self-respect; no cat does either. Since a cat cannot respect himself, he cannot disrespect himself. Respect is connected with standards and norms and ideals that a man feels himself to be under and beholden to.
Ideals and time
Having no ideals, the cat does not face the problem of false ideals. This is because he does not strive or aspire. His life is not a project in pursuit of Jungian individuation or any other form of self-integration. He remains within his natural limits in the moment. He cannot feel anxiety in the face of death, for he has no future. But he also has no past. He abides in the abode of the Now. He cannot, however, experience this Now as a nunc stans, the standing Now of eternity. For he is time-bound to the core. A man, as a spiritual being, is not time-bound to the core: he is not spiritually bound to any particular time, and he is not spiritually bound to time in general. Man is a pan-optic, syn-optic spirit, capable of surveying the entire ontological 'scene' including himself and everything else. He is "a spectator of all time and existence." (Plato)
But he is at the same 'time' — speaking analogically — embedded in the biotic. For he too is an animal. He is a spiritual animal. No cat is a spiritual animal. And so no cat shares the human predicament. Life for a man is a predicament, not a mere condition. 'Predicament' suggests a state that is unsatisfactory, problematic, transitional: not a status finalis, but a status viatoris. 'Predicament' suggests a condition from which we need to be released or saved if we are to become what we most truly are. Man is homo viator, on the way, spiritually speaking. A cat may be on the prowl, but no cat is on the way. No cat is in statu viae. A pilgrimage is a physical analog of a man's being metaphysically on the way. But no cat makes a pilgrimage. For what could be his Mecca, his Jerusalem, his Santiago de Compostela? Buddy the cat may be on the road, but he is not on the way.
I said that the cat abides in the abode of the Now, but not the standing Now, but the moving Now. That is not to say that he experiences the nunc movens, the moving Now: if he did he would feel regret for the past and both hope and fear for the future. Have you ever met a regretful cat, or a hopeful one?
Self-degradation
Unlike a man, a cat cannot degrade himself. This is because he is an animal merely, unlike a man who is a strange hybrid of animal and spirit. Belonging to both orders, a man is neither an animal merely nor a spirit merely.
And so he is a riddle to himself. The human condition is a predicament; the animalic condition is not. A man asks: What am I? and Who am I? These are two different questions that no cat poses.
Rights
Do cats and other non-human animals have rights? Here is a quick little argument contra. Rights and duties are correlative: whatever has rights has duties. No cat has duties; ergo, no cat has rights. But if so, then no cat has a right to life or a right not to be harmed which would induce in us the obligation not to harm him. Does it follow therefrom that it is morally permissible to torture a cat? Kant faces the difficulty. Jonathan Birch:
Kant himself grapples with this problem in the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1797/2017) although he does not, I think, appreciate its gravity. He offers a partial solution: we may not owe obligations to animals, but we can have obligations in regard to animals that we owe to ourselves. The idea is that, in torturing animals, killing them inhumanely, hunting them for sport or treating them without gratitude, one acts without due respect for one’s own humanity. Why? Because mistreating animals dulls one’s “shared feeling of their suffering and so weakens and gradually uproots a natural predisposition that is very serviceable to morality in one’s relations with other human beings” (Kant 1797/2017, 6:433).
Kant’s position is not simply that in mistreating animals I make myself more likely to wrong other people. It is rather that, in mistreating animals, I violate a duty I owe to myself by weakening my disposition for “shared feeling”, or empathy. From the formula of humanity (discussed in more detail in the next section), I have a duty to cultivate morally good dispositions, and I violate this duty if I erode dispositions that are “serviceable to morality”. This has come to be known as the “indirect duty” view.
More on this later, perhaps. I will give Schopenhauer the last word:
To which I add: A man who is gratuitously cruel to men is not a man at all but a demon. Homo homini lupus does not capture the depravity to which humans can sink. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man.
It is perfectly stupid to refer to a human savage, such as a Hamas terrorist, as an animal. Again, no animal has the power of self-degradation: that is a spiritual power.
Had enough of doom and gloom, politics and perfidy? Try this Substack article on for size.
I examine a point of dispute between Alvin Plantinga and John Hick, two distinguished contributors to the philosophy of religion.
The Substack article also relates to my earlier discussion with Tom the Canadian, here.
(I am protective of my commenters, especially the young guys; I don't demand that they use their real and/or full names. I don't want them to get in trouble with the thought police. Never underestimate the scumbaggery of leftists.)
Not even the Hamas sexual atrocities recounted on the basis of a NYT report by Alex Berenson justify Jewish disproportionality:
On Thursday, The New York Times recounted in awful detail the sexual atrocities the men of Gaza committed during Hamas’s October 7 raid into Israel.
I know Jeffrey Gettleman, who had the piece’s lead byline. He is a serious reporter who served with distinction for many years in Africa. He doesn’t exaggerate.
Which is good, because the Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport:
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
—
Every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
Moral equivalence, anyone?
Happy New Year, everybody. Not that there is much to be happy about. As as our great republic approaches its end, whether with a whimper or a bang remaining to be seen, Irving Berlin's "The Song is Ended" seems an appropriate way to convey the thought that happiness in the coming year is more likely to be found by an inner path. "Take your happiness while you may." Here's a hipster version, my favorite.
Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.
Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one and put Floyd Cramer on the box. You were young. Custodia cordis was not in your vocabulary, let alone in your life. Years had to pass before it entered both, and serenitas cordis supervened.
Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.
At Last, Etta James.
Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.
Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel.
Last Call, Dave van Ronk. "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."
(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.
This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.
The Nelson sons here jam with Nelson's legendary sideman, James Burton, master of the Telecaster.
Burton with Orbison and Co. Burton cuts loose at 2:42. There ensues a duel with Bruce Springsteen.
Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.
Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.
Not enough nostalgia? Try this.
The Twilight Zone marathon is in progress at the SyFy channel. One of the best episodes of the series which ran from 1959-1964 is The Obsolete Man (1961). Rod Serling's opening narration is eerily prescient and eerily relevant to our present police-state predicament:
You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.
"Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."
An accurate summation of the Biden regime. The most recent example of illogic: the defense of democracy requires the destruction of democracy by banning the popular front-runner from the ballot on trumped-up charges when, as is obvious, the physically decrepit, mentally incompetent, morally corrupt, and political destructive Biden is the one who ought to be banned from the ballot if anyone is to be banned, not that I am saying that any one of the current contenders should be banned from the ballot. For Biden is a traitor in plain dereliction of duty. If the Republicans were not lousy with feckless RINOs, Traitor Joe and his noxious entourage would no longer be befouling the White House. The Republicans' inability, or rather unwillingness, to give as good as they get is exasperating. Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but instead of learning from him and engaging the enemy, too many of them waste their time and energy attacking the only man who can turn things around. The well-fed Christie, flaccid in body and mind, is a USDA prime example.
As for the assault on truth, the main players in the Biden administration are proven serial brazen liars: Biden, Mayorkas, et al. Liars, plagiarists, Orwellian language-abusers: scumbags all. Is there even one member of that 'team' who does not exhibit one or more of the modes of mendacity? Got an example? Let me hear it.
Serling via the Meredith character puts librarians in a good light. Rod in 1961 was no doubt thinking of Nazi book burnings. A mere 16 years had passed since the collapse of the Third Reich. But times have changed. Librarians are now too often anti-biblic in their banning of books and anti-civilizational in their promotion of pornography and other species of cultural garbage. Librarians now are mostly leftist termites. We have our work cut out for us.
. . . I will say a prayer for you.
You don't even need the 'closet' referred to at Matt 6:6:
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)
Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum in abscondito: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi. (Biblia Vulgata)
Related words: closet, claustra, enclosure, claustrophobia, exclaustration.
Another MavPhil public service message: Don't walk around with your head up your app!
You're a dumbass with a smartphone if you don't understand that it is perhaps the greatest enemy of situational awareness.
And if you pack heat, bear this in mind: if you have to go to guns, there's probably been a failure of situational awareness. (Steve Tarani) Head on a swivel! (Sebastian Gorka)
Memorize and implement Colonel Jeff Cooper's situational awareness color codes!
Don't be a pollyanna. (And don't confuse her with polyanna, an Anna with multiple personality disorder.)
One of the exciting things about living out here in the Arizona Territory is that all too many local hombres love to greet the the New Year with a hail of gunfire aimed heavenward. It adds a nice Middle Eastern touch to the Copper State.
Part of the problem is the sad state of science education in these United States. There are people who do not understand that a falling projectile poses a threat. (I have actually met such people.) They understand that they cannot catch with their bare hands a round fired at them; but they don’t understand that that same round, falling on a human head from a sufficient height, will kill the head’s unlucky possessor.
Let’s see if we can understand the physics. If I jump from a chair to the floor, no problem. Same if I jump from a table to the floor. But I shrink back from neighbor Bob’s suggestion that I jump from my roof to the ground. "Just kick away the ladder, like Wittgenstein, and jump down." Nosiree Bob! But why should it be any different? The mass of my body remains invariant across the three scenarios. And the gravitational field remains the same. But the longer I remain falling in that field, the faster I move. A body falling in the earth’s gravitational field falls at the rate of 32 feet per second PER SECOND. Thus the body ACCELERATES. The body’s velocity is ever increasing. Now the momentum of a moving object — which is roughly a measure of the amount of effort it would take to stop it from moving — is the product of its velocity and its mass. So a small mass like a bullet, left falling for a long enough time, will attain a high velocity and thus a high momentum, and so do a lot of damage to anything it comes in contact with, a human skull for example.
A reader who likes my alliteration found this specimen in a post from 2010:
The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social . . . .
Perhaps I overdo it. An argument against alliterative excess is that it could distract the reader from the content.
A good writer attends to his style, but does not permit style to get in the way of content.
"Style is the physiognomy of the mind," wrote Schopenhauer to open his great essay, On Style.
Here is a long list of literary devices. There I go, alliterating again. I did not do it intentionally! It just came out like that.
To tolerate and excuse Harvard president Claudine Gay's plagiarism has been cited by some as an example of the so-called 'racism of reduced expectations' (RRE). For what you are then doing by your toleration and excusal is lowering the standard for blacks when, or rather on the assumption that, they are as capable as any other group of meeting those standards. Such a slighting of blacks would indeed be racist.
But is the assumption true? The assumption underpinning RRE is that blacks as a group are the equal of Jews, Asians, and whites in respect of intelligence, intellectual honesty, love of truth, interest in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, commitment to the traditional values of the university, respect for high standards of scholarship, and the like. If this is the case, then it is indeed racist to tolerate and excuse the bad behavior of blacks such as President Gay, and in her case 'sexist' as well.
So whether there is racism here or not depends on whether the underlying assumption is true. Most establishment conservatives believe that it is. They believe that blacks are the equals of the other groups mentioned in respect of the attributes mentioned. I don't doubt their good faith. Jesse Watters a few nights ago played the RRE card: to tolerate and excuse President Gay's plagiarism is to treat her as either incapable or unwilling due to her race of being objective, truth-seeking, and intellectually honest. It is to suggest black intellectual and moral inferiority when they are not inferior. Hence the racism of reduced expectations. But if blacks as a group really are inferior when it comes to the appreciation and implementation of the values in question then the reduced expectations are justified and there is no racism of reduced expectations.
My point is that reduced expectations are racist only if the assumption is true. If the assumption is false then a reduction in expectations is in order and there is no racism. One is entitled to play the RRE card only if one has already shown or given good evidence for the truth of the assumption.
Top o' the Stack.
I'll bet that most of you don't know what 'Kronstadt' refers to. If so, this article, clearly written, and not too long, will help.
