As in the case of Joe Biden and those who support him.
Conservative or Counter-Revolutionary?
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.
You may look away . . .
. . . but it won't make the madness go away. Still, "Out of sight, out of mind" is a way to peace of mind. But is such peace worth wanting if its price is ignorance of imminent threats to your life, liberty, and well-being? Can you afford to ignore the sheer suicidal insanity of the Left? Examples are legion.
Here is a recent one: Illinois law requires landlords to sell or rent to illegal aliens.
The Republic is on its last legs when law is used both to undermine the rule of law, and to punish productive citizens who accept the risk of buying properties, refurbishing them, and then putting them up for rent or sale.
The Purpose of Kamala Harris
Actually, she has two.
The first is to make Joe Biden appear articulate by comparison.
Her main purpose, though, is to insure that Biden not be removed from office.
The Underground Grammarian
If you think that I am a language Nazi, then pay a visit to the Underground Grammarian. His stern visage reminds me of a passage near the beginning of Franz Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz, "Before the Law." The protagonist seeks entry into the Law, but at the door stands a guard who warns:
Ich bin maechtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Tuerhueter. Von Saal zu Saal stehn aber Tuerhueter, einer maechtiger als der andere. Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich ertrage.
I am powerful. And I am but the least of the gatekeepers. From room to room there are gatekeepers each stronger than the next. Not even I can bear so much as the glance of the third. (tr. BV)
Related: Fellow Language Nazi William Sullivan reports on the case of Arizona Republican Eli Crane. Crane got into trouble with the 'woke' contingent when he inadvertently used 'colored people' instead of 'people of color.'
A point Sullivan did not make, but I will, is that the two phrases, while synonymous in objective intension, are semantically distinct in subjective intension. They differ in connotation despite sameness in denotation.
Requite Good with Evil?
Or with justice? And what is justice? 'Equity'?
Substack latest. The short piece ends thusly:
You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.
Oriana Fallaci on Writing
From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:
I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.
This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!
It Passes All the Same
No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence — it passes all the same.
Are There Aptronymic Initials?
I should think so. Bernie Sanders' initials are 'B. S.'
The man is a destructive fool, though not as destructive or as foolish as Joey B. Proof here.
It's a funny world. In the private sector it is often the very best who rise to the top; in politics, the very worst. Is there anyone in the Biden (mal)Administration who does not illustrate my point?
Morality and Legality: Three Principles
On my view morality and legality are both 'notionally distinct' and 'extensionally distinct.' Thus I maintain both that the concept or notion of a morally qualified action is distinct from the concept of a legally qualified action, and that there are instances of each concept that are not instances of the other. If the following three principles are defensible, then the notional and extensional distinction between morality and legality is defensible.
P1. Not everything morally impermissible should be legally impermissible.
P2. Not everything morally obligatory should be legally obligatory.
P3. Not everything morally permissible should be legally permissible.
Ad (P1). This could be put idiomatically by saying that not everything morally wrong should be illegal. I hope you will agree with me that drinking oneself into a stupor is morally wrong. It's a Friday night, you are alone, you stay in your house the entire time, but you down a quart of whiskey. I hope you will agree with me that this is morally wrong. (I could give an argument, but it belongs in a separate post.) Though morally wrong, such behavior should not be illegal. If you don't like my example, you are invited to concoct one of your liking that makes the same point.
Why should not everything morally wrong be illegal? The positive law is made by human beings and enforced by state power. But it is notorious that human beings are to varying degrees morally corrupt and that they are therefore strongly tempted to misuse any power that they acquire. Note that I do not say that power tends to corrupt its possessors, but that our antecedent corruption inclines us to the misuse of such power as we possess. (Lord Acton take note.) This misuse of power is especially clear in the case of the agents of the state. (Ever have a run-in with a cop, a sheriff, an IRS agent who overstepped the bounds of his legitimate authority?)
Given the egregious violations of individual liberty including mass murder that state agents have been known to commit, reasonable people support limited government. One way to limit government is to restrict its sanctions to behavior that impinges upon public welfare. Thus there needs to be laws against drunk driving. But laws against private drunkenness (as in my example above) tend to give too much power to the state, besides being unenforceable. Laws that are unenforced, however, tend to breed disrespect for law. Without widespread respect for the rule of law, all the laws in the world will not contribute to public well-being.
Laws should be few in number, rational in content, understandable by the average citizen, enforceable, and enforced with credible sanctions. So not everything morally wrong should be illegal.
Ad (P2). If you morally must do (ought to do, are obligated to do, have a duty to do) X, should the positive law require it of you? I answer in the negative. Consider the philosophical/religious duty to worship no such 'false gods' as money, power, sexual pleasure, Lady Luck, but to worship or devote yourself only to worthy objects such as God, truth, justice, benevolence, and the like. I would argue that it is morally impermissible to worship any such thing as money, sex, etc. and morally obligatory to apportion your highest concern only to worthy objects such as truth and justice. But these views of mine, thought rationally defensible, can be opposed with a show of rationality by sincere people. A hedonist might sincerely and thoughtfully maintain that pleasure alone is the good and that there can be no grounded distinctions among pleasures, and that therefore the pursuit of sexual pleasure among consenting adults is a perfectly legitimate and morally permissible object of pursuit. I would consider it better if people devoted themselves to truth over sexual pleasure, but the abuses that would result from using state power to enforce that view of mine would be worse than the positive outcomes would be good.
For a second example, consider the moral obligation to maintain one's physical health by the usual measures including good diet and vigorous exercise. If you value individual liberty and understand what I wrote above, you will not want laws that mandate these measures. (By the way, this is why 'universal health care,' i.e., government control of the delivery of health services ought to be opposed: a government that controls health care will be in a position to demand 'appropriate' behaviors from people including not engaging in activities deemed risky.)
Ad (P3). If an act is morally permissible, should it also be legally permissible? No. Surely there are circumstances in which running a red light is morally permissible. Suppose at three in the morning you slowly and cautiously coast through a red light at a deserted intersection in the proverbial 'middle of nowhere.' Surely that is morally permissible. Yet it ought not be legally allowed: a well-crafted law cannot have a clause that reads, "A motorist shall not run a red light except when it is safe to do so."
For a second example consider that is it morally permissible for some 15- year-olds to drive. But it ought not be legally permissible for 15-year-olds to drive. The same goes for voting. There are 15-year-olds more mature than some 50-year-olds and more fit to cast a vote. Yet it ought not be legal for 15 -year-olds to vote. Finally, it seems obvious that some marijuana use by some people in some circumstances is morally permissible, but it scarcely follows that marijuana use ought to be legalized. What is harmless for some will be dangerous for many. Laws crafted for the common good cannot take into account individual differences.
Victor Davis Hanson on Tribalism
Top o' the Stack
Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama
In less than eight minutes.
To Write Well, Read Well
The example of William James. Excerpt:
But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.
As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.
Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness
Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing." A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.
Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing. I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"
How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.
For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity — you are this indigent material thing right here — but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness, a being for whom there is a world.
As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.' You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.
Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV. It is true now at 12:45 PM. What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.
Political Action
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien
The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.
Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration: Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.
Read more at Substack.