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.)

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. 

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?

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.

Political Parsimony

Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity.

William of Ockham: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

William of Alhambra: Inimici non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Enemies are worse than friends are good. The enmity of the enemy is more to be feared than the friendship of the friend is to be desired. But show me a man with no enemies, and I'll show you a man with no character. We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable are distinguished by our enemies, in two senses of 'distinguish':  we are set apart from them and we are set above them.  A man is judged by the nature of his enemies — and by the nature of his friends.

The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism

We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one

. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.

Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious.  That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)

Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter.  Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.) 

As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man. 

I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.

And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.

Spiritual Mountebanks

Substack latest. Hold onto your wallets, muchachos!

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good example from the '80s.