Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
David Edmonds, in his superb biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (Princeton UP, 2023, p. 160) reports,
Parfit once summed up the history of ethics in four neat steps:
1) Forbidden by God.
2)Forbidden by God, therefore wrong.
3)Wrong, therefore forbidden by God.
4) Wrong.
Personal versus political identity.
Top o' the Stack.
A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.
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You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.
Part I Under 12 minutes.
Their difference explained at Substack.
What are you proud of? Your paraphilias? Is that what your 'pride flag' signifies? Does the plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ signify the inclusion of every paraphilia? Might that be taking 'inclusion' too far? Is every focus of erotic interest legitimate? Should every mode of (what has traditionally been considered to be) deviant behavior be normalized? Should every factual abnormality be viewed as normative?
Are you really proud of your pedophilia, pedovestism, coprophilia, necrophilia and anthropophagy?
Here:
The parade that capped off June’s Pride events in New York City proclaimed the movement’s actual intentions quite clearly. The message was chanted all along the route, repeatedly and at high volume:
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
Now, there’s a sentiment that should make your blood run cold. It gives the lie to all those innocent protestations you’ve heard for years: “Gee, all we want is to live our lives and love who we love.”
It’s well past time to wake up and recognize the truth. We are living in a very dangerous time filled with threats to our physical and mental health, and to our immortal souls.
The pedophilic words chanted by a corps of New York drag queens were as vivid a wake-up call as can be imagined. This was perversion on proud display. It was an assault on childhood innocence, on family life, on decency, on religion, on basic human reality. It was as vivid and unignorable as a declaration of war.
You might call it our “Gender Pearl Harbor.”
The time for kindness and tolerance has passed. These people must be opposed on every level in every way.
The problem, of course, is that the gender movement has secured alliances among the leadership of government, business, finance, media, the arts — virtually every institution of society. The country has been severely compromised by this pervasive and insidious gender ideology.
On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.
I beg to differ. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am now dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p. For they they do know that they are dreaming despite their being asleep and dreaming.
And so Ludwig Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.
I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was, as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house, and that coyotes had dug her up and had consumed her rotting corpse.
And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. Neither is their "force and vivacity" to borrow a phrase from Hume. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the third-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning were in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.
Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire, when one is lying in bed, is not consistent with knowing its truth.
So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.
My point, again, is that Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.
Substack latest.
From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me. It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'
The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.
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Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly. To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case.
Substack latest.
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"Toleration" is not a dirty word, contrary to what a growing number who misuse the term, seem to think. Now leftists are the kings of language-abuse, but conservatives are not immune to it either. The current trend toward the misuse of 'toleration' needs to be vigorously opposed as I do in this latest Substack article.
As in the case of Joe Biden and those who support him.
Christopher Rufo made an excellent contribution to Mark Levin's "Life, Liberty, and Levin" last night. I will put one of his points in my own way with my own additions and 'flourishes.'
One can conserve only what one has, not what one has lost. We conservatives have lost control of our institutions including the universities, the schools, the churches, and the Fourth Estate. The Left's "long march through the institutions" has been successful thanks to their energy and our inattention. Since there is little or nothing left to conserve, we must take back what has been stolen. While we may continue to call ourselves conservatives, we must think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries. Counter-revolutionaries, not reactionaries. 'Reactionary Right' is a phrase to avoid. He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts. We need action, not reaction.
As for the 'post-liberals,' it is not clear what they are about. But to the extent that they support a 'throne and altar' response to the Left's depredations, in the form, say, of integralism, then they are but another impotent form of reaction.
https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Watched. Read. Wept.
Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!
Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…
Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…
You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…
if you do nothing else in what remains of this year, read that essay. please.
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
From the Jacobin article: >>Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists”…
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence >>Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable…
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