We appear to be doomed. A history lesson from Victor Davis Hanson.
Watched. Read. Wept.
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Premodern Diversity versus Civilizational Unity
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Belief in God
Wish-fulfillment or inducement to strenuous living? Freud versus James. Top o' the Stack.
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Mike Pence ‘Suspends’ his Campaign
Here:
"I came here to say it’s become clear to me this is not my time. So after much deliberation I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today," he said onstage. "
It'll never be your time, pal. You're a superannuated relic of a time long gone. Good riddance. Your use of the weasel word 'suspend' fits well with the slipperiness of the professional pol. It beggars understanding that anyone would fund your campaign.
Pence called for federal abortion legislation to establish a 15-week minimum national standard . . . .
The fool seems unaware that the abortion question was returned to the states by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. To call for federal abortion legislation after the 2022 Dobbs decision makes no sense at all. Or am I missing something? It is hard to believe that a seasoned and well-connected politician such as Pence could be either that stupid or that ignorant.
Is it not more likely that I am missing some nuance of the law?
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‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Hoplophobia’
A very polite Substack chiding of the stupid and often vicious use of these terms. My entry shows how to make a point rationally and stylishly without any use of invective and only the slightest trace of sarcasm. You have to cultivate the ability to write in a civil and respectful way. But you must also know how to pummel and deride scum like the present POTUS and his sorry entourage who, in their willful self-enstupidation, mindlessly repeat phrases they have heard with nary a concern for what they mean or ought to mean.
Different strokes for different folks. Sweet reason for some; the hard fist of unreason for others. The 'hard fist' comes in two flavors, one verbal, the other meta-verbal.
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The Second Amendment and the Origin of Rights
Over at Substack.
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Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House
Mike Johnson appears to be a good pick for Speaker of the House. And better than McCarthy. Matt Gaetz vindicatus est.
The Gaetz Gambit, to give it a name, led to a win. A 'win for White' I am tempted to say, pursuing the chess metaphor, except that that way of putting it will be condemned by the benighted as 'racist.' So let me put it this way: The Gaetz Gambit led to a win for the forces of Light over the forces of Darkness.
Here Johnson is grilling that master of Orwellian mendacity, Alejandro Mayorkas. Why 'Orwellian'? Because, as Mayorkas said on a different occasion, 'The border is secure as we define secure." That sort of verbal malfeasance is characteristic of the Orwellian inversion. Other examples: War is peace; freedom is slavery; dependence on welfare is self-reliance. The pattern: X, which is not Y, is Y.
And here Johnson exposes that lying crapweasel Merrick Garland. As Speaker of the House Johnson cannot refer to Garland as a 'crapweasel,' and probably would not in any case given his personable and mild-mannered style of self-presentation. But Johnson on Hannity's 26 October show did say, and I paraphrase from memory, that Garland is the worst Attorney General in the history of the republic. That interview was fabulously good. Is it online yet?
UPDATE 10/31
Johnson is driving the Left crazy:
Ahead of his sudden ascension to House speaker late last week, the media had little time to vet Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., thoroughly. And because he sucks in so many ways, it's been hard for his critics to settle on one of his many evil inclinations to focus on. He's a Christian nationalist. He's an election denier. He wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security. He's a fan of neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. As Brian Beutler of Off Message writes, "typecasting an opposition leader" may be tedious, but it's politically necessary. Democrats have benefited from the fact that the most famous Republican villains have one standout trait that defines their personality: Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is a pugnacious bully. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a loudmouthed Karen. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is a spineless suck-up.
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Chess is Racist!
Proved beyond a shadow of a doubt over at Substack.
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Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws
This surprised me.
Why would Jews, who are smart, be so stupid about firearms? The Jews in Israel are surrounded by people who do not hide the fact that they intend to exterminate them and who believe that they are required to do so by their benighted religion. How could anyone fail to grasp that the right to life, which is an individual, not a group, right entails the individual's right to self-defense and therewith the right to acquire appropriate means thereto? How could anyone fail to grasp that no government could possibly protect every citizen needing protection from lethal threats, especially the citizens of a state beleaguered by ruthless enemies on all sides? Read on for some insight into the roots of this madness.
One response to “Israel’s Draconian Gun Laws”
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LiChess: A Free Chess Site to Rival the ICC
Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. Thanks to Traitor Joe and the chucklephuckery of his supporters, we are teetering on the brink of WW3. It is an exciting time to be alive in part because it may prove to be an exiting time. If you need a break from the madness, Caissa's arms beckon.
I've been patzin' around at LiChess the last few days under the handle, SeldomSeenSlim. My preferred time control is three-minute blitz with a two-second increment. That way, I do not take too much time from my other, my main mistress, fair Philosophia.
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Three Notes on David Mamet
Top o' the Stack.
The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:
It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.
It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.
Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:
Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert."
Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.
PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.
12 responses to “Three Notes on David Mamet”
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Don’t Vote for ANY Democrat
That may sound extreme, but it is not extreme at all.
The Dems vote as a bloc. They are under party discipline. They are made to toe the party line and punished if they don't. To understand the contemporary Democrat party you need to study communism. Frank S. Meyer's The Moulding of Communists is one of the best works with which to begin your education.
The CPUSA couldn't win under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, but they are winning under the sign of the Jackass. So don't be a jackass. Don't vote for any Dem at any level, federal, state, local.
Vote the party, not the person.
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Young Man’s Bible, Old Man’s Bible
When he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.
And he says a prayer for the soul of a lonesome traveller who quit the via dolorosa on this date 54 years ago thereby securing his release from the samsaric meat wheel and the granting of his wish:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).
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The State of Things When the ‘Leader’ of the ‘Free World’ is a Puppet
I asked Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, whether Donald Trump's being in office would have made any difference to the present geopolitical mess, and this is what he wrote:
As for the present miserable state of the world, I think that had Trump remained in office neither the war in the Ukraine nor the war in the Middle East would have occurred, or if the former occurred, it would have been resolved on the basis of a territorial compromise concerning the Crimea and robust autonomy for the eastern, Russian majority oblasts. Leaving aside the origins of the conflict (US interference in the internal politics of the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO eastward), Trump would have put Zelensky and company on tight rein. As for Israel, can we doubt that the appeasement of the Obama-Biden regime towards Iran encouraged the reemergence of terrorism? Now, the plan is to provide public support to Israel, while privately restraining her once again to conduct the war in a way that would deny the complete victory that she requires. With Trump, the war would have not occurred, and if it did, he would not have tied Israel’s hands.
As for the danger of WWIII, it appears to me that the Ukraine mess is a potential trigger for it. There is no way that the Ukraine can defeat Russia, and I fear that a protracted conflict could lead to further American involvement and the real chance of a great power clash.
With regard to demons and such, I call your attention to what appeared on the Vatican Synod website this week (page 29): “What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” Thus, the diabolical evil that first showed its face with the Pachamama desecration of St. Peter’s advances further in the Bergoglian Church.
I agree in the main, but Caiati's final sentence prompts me to ask: Is Bergoglio proposing mercy for demons in which he believes? Or is the truly Bergoglian termiticism and diabolism due to his tacit denial of the reality of demons?
No doubt demons are creatures, but does Bergoglio and his fellow clerical termites believe in their existence? I don't know but I suspect he doesn't and they don't. How many Catholic priests today believe in the preternatural? I suspect it is a minority. The preternatural is the sphere within which demonic agents operate. It lies between the natural and the supernatural. See Ralph Weimann, Sacramentals: Their Meaning and Use, p. 196: "In the period after the Second Vatican Council, and under the influence of rationalism, it was increasingly considered 'unscientific' to speak about angels and even more unscientific to speak about demons."
At a time when the RCC should be standing as a bulwark against the anti-civilizational forces of Chinese Communism, Islamism, and Leftism, it is transforming itself under the termitic influence of Bergoglio & Co. into just another pile of secular leftist junk.
But how could anyone in this enlightened age believe in such medieval superstitions as the existence of demons? Hasn't humanity finally put paid to this old nonsense? Maybe not. Maybe there is no naturalistic explanation of the depth and depravity of human behavior. Perhaps an adequate explanation must posit the preternatural. See my Substack article, The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence wherein I write:
As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms. There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has a metaphysical ground. Call it Satan or whatever you like.
In that passage I am using 'supernatural' to cover both the supernatural proper and the preternatural. 'Preternatural' would have been the better, because more specific, word choice. But then I would have had to explain 'preternatural' which would have lengthened the piece. Brevity is the soul of Stack and not just of blog.
Now I would like you to take a gander at this Daily Mail article and rub your noses in recent Hamas-Islamist barbarity. Could the source of this evil be merely natural?
13 responses to “The State of Things When the ‘Leader’ of the ‘Free World’ is a Puppet”
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Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion
Substack latest.
One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works and what is wrong and what right with the resulting philosophy of religion. Since OLP can be understood only against the backdrop of LP, I begin with a brief review of LP.
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Left and Right: Morally Equivalent?
Leftist evil-doers are becoming ever more brazen in 'outing' themselves. I hand off to Hinderaker:
My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions that Israel hasn’t even taken yet. People who are so twisted that they witness the Gazan atrocities and can only fault Israel are moral monsters. Many liberals have self-identified as such.
The case of Dr. Mika Tosca can stand for many others.
3 responses to “Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House”