{"id":5557,"date":"2017-05-03T13:41:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T13:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/05\/03\/word-of-the-day-delope\/"},"modified":"2017-05-03T13:41:36","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T13:41:36","slug":"word-of-the-day-delope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/05\/03\/word-of-the-day-delope\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: ‘Delope’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia<\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Delope<\/strong><\/em> (French<\/a> for "throwing away") is the practice of throwing away one's first fire in a pistol duel<\/a>, in an attempt to abort the conflict.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some days I half-seriously think that dueling ought to be brought back. Some liberal-left scumbag slanders you, you challenge him to a duel, and then there is one less liberal-left scumbag in the world.  That would be a fine 'upshot,' no?<\/span><\/p>\n

(Interesting side-question: should it be one fewer<\/em> liberal-left scumbag? But 'one less' sounds fine to my highly sensitive ear.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Schopenhauer undermines the philosophical foundations of dueling in the section on honor in the fourth chapter<\/a> of his The Wisdom of Life<\/em>, entitled "Position, or A Man's Place in the Estimation of Others." Schopenhauer is among the most penetrating of the commentators on the human predicament. No one can consider himself educated who has not read him.  He writes beautifully, drawing on vast erudition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where did I find 'delope'? In a piece by Roger Kimball entitled Trump Critics Exude Desperate Political Nihilism<\/a>. It ends thusly:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, Ludwig Wittgenstein warned that \u201cA picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it.\u201d There is a kindred sort of madness about the anti-Trump stalwarts. They are held captive by a picture. Reality had to be a certain way. Trump had to be a certain way: a sort of repository of everything small, and mean, and malevolent.<\/span><\/p>\n

His unforgivable tort was to act normally, conventionally. Sure there were the tweets\u2014they were something the Left could love to hate\u2014but in a larger sense his behavior has been. . . presidential. Issuing executive orders, nominating judges and justices, encouraging legislation to further the agenda he had outlined on the hustings, generally doing things to keep the promises he had made. Trump\u2019s opponents keep telling us how \u201cangry\u201d his supporters are. But their hysterical behavior reminds me of nothing so much as the famous duel between Settembrini, the suave humanist, and Naphta, the Jesuit radical, in Thomas Mann\u2019s great novel The Magic Mountain. <\/em>When Settembrini delopes, Naphta screams \u201cYou coward\u201d and shoots himself in the head. I sometimes think some of our more extreme anti-Trump crusaders are only a few adjectives away from that unfortunate eventuality.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia:  Delope (French for "throwing away") is the practice of throwing away one's first fire in a pistol duel, in an attempt to abort the conflict. Some days I half-seriously think that dueling ought to be brought back. Some liberal-left scumbag slanders you, you challenge him to a duel, and then there is one less … Continue reading “Word of the Day: ‘Delope’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,268,280],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-schopenhauer","category-vocabulary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}