Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Summer

    Some of them, just a few, in keeping with my Summer Slowdown of '23. More later.

    Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City, 1966, with period-appropriate video.

    Joe Cocker cover.

    Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain

    Bob Dylan, Summer Days

    Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues, 1959


  • Voluntary Segregation

    Substack latest.

    Related: The Answer is Division


  • Summer Slowdown

    "Blogging will be light," as we used to say in the early days of the blogosphere. I have a couple of books I need to finish and some practical business to attend to. But this won't be a total unplug as in earlier years. I plan to blog on both here and at Substack, but at a more leisurely pace.

    Enjoy your summer!


  • Krauthammer’s Fundamental Law Repealed

    Substack latest


  • James Soriano at The American Thinker

    His latest on Ukraine is America's 'Revolutionary Moment.'

    What follows is his response to the comments made here on his earlier article Do Not Underestimate Russia's Resolve:

    I just read through the comments this weekend.  There certainly was a spirited debate.  

    The comments divide into two kinds, with Michael Brazier and Dimitri raising points about how I’ve mis-measured Russia’s intent and its imperialistic history.  Dimitri seemed to be somewhat surprised that a retired Foreign Service Officer wasn’t better informed about Russian history.  Since when is the State Department required to have a firm grasp of history?  That principle has never applied to it in the past and I see no reason why I should conform to it now.  Ha! 

    Ben made very good points pushing back against the Russia bogey.   His comment about Churchill and Roosevelt approving the inflow of Russian power into Eastern Europe is noteworthy.  That fact is typically ignored when an anti-Russia speaker talks about how the Soviet bloc was really a modern replication of the Russian Empire.  It is as though Russia was the only actor on the scene and Eastern Europe was merely putty in its hands.  But events were shaped by other actors as well, especially the Anglo-Americans who agreed to Russia’s westward advance (although they may not have liked it), as well as local Communist parties which looked to Moscow for support. 

    The other kind of comments were about the realist/idealist schools of foreign policy, with Russia playing Aristotle to America’s Plato.  Elliott picked up on it and you seconded.  
     
    Oz linked to a NYT article on why the most prominent anti-war voices seem to be on the right.  That may be so, but I think the real story is the bipartisan consensus for fighting undeclared war against Russia.  Fair to say that US assistance to the Ukrainian army has killed more Russian soldiers than the Ukrainian army acting alone.  Many a “conservative” voice can be heard on the U.S. war wagon.  I’m sure you know the story about Lindsey Graham who approvingly told Zelensky recently that “Russians are dying” and that US support for Ukraine was the “best money we’ve ever spent”.  Shame on him.

    Joe Odegaard made a good point about Russia fighting to fend off the imperial reach of the West’s Woke agenda.  That story’s out there in the blogosphere in various forms.  It’s a two-part story:  there’s the U.S. push for globalizing Woke, which R.R. Reno wrote about recently at First Things, and then there’s the resentment against it in the patriarchal and traditional societies of the so-called “Global South.”  I think that’s one reason the Global South has not signed up to sanction Russia.  It likes the idea of having a strong Russia and China around to curb American excesses.


  • France’s Agony

    Rod Dreher reports on the ravages of the allowance of the mass immigration of unassimilable elements. Will we learn? Little chance of that. Dreher concludes:

    I feel strongly that one reason so many of us in the West — including many conservatives — cannot bring ourselves to deal with realities like those posed by mass migration is because the things we would have to face in order to deal effectively with the situation make us sick, or at the very least confused. We thought the world was one way, but it’s not. There is a direct line between the hubristic, cruel, catastrophic US invasion of Iraq to make it a liberal democratic bastion, and the disaster France (and Europe more broadly) has brought onto itself, and continues to bring onto itself, through mass migration, coupled with a woke elite that detests their own civilization.

    UPDATE (7/2): 'Migrants' destroy French public library. But it's only property damage. No big deal, right? A guy I know raised the question whether our Christian values have made us unfit to survive in a world of savages aided and abetted by 'woke' leftist globalists.  Are the decadent French getting what they deserve?  But we are right behind them, just a little less decadent.


    8 responses to “France’s Agony”

  • Galen Strawson on Zombies

    Top o' the Stack

    What are they? Where do they come from? What good are they?


  • David Berlinski on Evolution

    Under three minutes.  Nice production job.

    Related: David Gelernter, Giving Up Darwin.  Wasn't Gelernter one of the recipients of a Unabomber package?

    Part of being an American conservative in my sense of the phrase is a commitment to the respectful but critical evaluation of whatever passes for orthodoxy in science, in religion, in philosophy, in literature and the arts, and wherever else.  Of course, that is not to say that the heterodox, as such, is credible.  In fact, being conservative, I am open to the notion that there is a  defeasible presumption in favor of the orthodox and traditional. If you have no idea what 'presumption' means, see Presumption and Suspension of Judgment

    Note the adjective 'respectful'; it goes a long way toward distinguishing my type of critical stance from that of the leftist.


    2 responses to “David Berlinski on Evolution”

  • Why Secure the Border?

    For many good reasons, none of them 'xenophobic' or 'racist.' Here is one that will certainly be ignored by the Sino-compromised Biden administration. Gordon G. Chang reports.

    I'm no socialist, but here I present — wait for it — a socialist argument for border control. 


  • Cat Blogging Lives! Tuxies at the Door

    The tuxedo cat is the most 'iconic' of cats; so it is  only fitting that Max Black and his brother Manny K. Black should guard the entrance to the inner sanctum.

    Felix was a tuxie as was Sylvester. And who can forget Socks the presidential pussy when the Clintons occupied the White House? 

    Like all cats the tuxie has nine lives; what distinguishes him is that he is always dressed to the nines. All dressed up with nowhere to go.

    Tuxies at the door


    6 responses to “Cat Blogging Lives! Tuxies at the Door”

  • How to Write a Good Comment

    I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment:

    Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.

    (5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.

    And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."

    As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.

     
    Time, Death, and Existence
     
    Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”
     
     
    JUNE 27, 2023
     
    ……………………….
     
    So what makes my comment good?
     
    1. I interact directly with what the  author has written.
    2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.
    3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.
    4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.
    5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.
    6. I try to be helpful.
    7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.

  • Politics and Philosophy

    Top o' the Stack

    By the way, don't confuse politics with political philosophy. The latter is philosophy; the former is not.


  • Separation Anxiety

    I hope I don't consume half the day pondering this excellent but disturbing entry by Malcolm Pollack. Important internal linkage. Comments are good too.  A nasty, but welcome, time-sink. Thanks, Malcolm!

    UPDATE:  Malcolm informs us here that Michael Anton has replied to Anonymous.


    3 responses to “Separation Anxiety”

  • Leftism Exposed

    The following statement is both well-written and accurate in every particular (emphasis added):

    Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity. That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him.

    Let me add a second example to the one the author gives in illustration of the general point expressed in the italicized passage. His example is that equality of opportunity is not enough; a new goal must be posited by the 'progressive' who cannot rest content with anything, the goal of so-called 'equity' or equality of outcome, and this in defiance of the ineluctable reality of individual and group differences in attitudes and abilities.

    My example is the one presently paraded before us by the so-called 'pride' contingent. Unsatisfied with being tolerated and left alone, they now demand to be accepted, affirmed, and celebrated for their depravity and corruption of children. But even this won't be enough for them: driven by a vicious intolerance at odds with the toleration they initially demanded,  they aim to replace the superior culture whose excesses spawned them and whose decadence is seemingly impotent to stop them. But it ain't over til it's over and we who are sane and reasonable have not yet begun to fight. Too many of us, lost in our private lives, have yet to wake up to the 'woke' madness. But wake up we will.  

    But who made the statement quoted above?  You may be surprised.  I was. I now hasten to add that the truth of a statement and the soundness of an argument are logically  independent of the psychology of the one who makes the statement or gives the argument. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.


    One response to “Leftism Exposed”

  • Grievance and a Life Well-Lived

    A life well-lived cannot have grievance as its organizing principle.



Latest Comments


  1. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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

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

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

  5. 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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