“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.”
— John Locke, Second Treatise on Government
Comments welcome.
Today I learned that the Biden administration has been holding secret talks with Iran to discuss how to bring Israel to heel, starting with toppling Israel’s government.
To my many left-leaning Jewish friends: have you seen enough yet? Are you still voting Democrat?
Bill Vallicella has just published a sharp, brief post about the confusion that atheists and many leftists (a Venn diagram with a large intersection) share about the nature of religion, and the nature of the human need for it — which ultimately cannot be satisfied by material or social goods.
We read:
Leftists, and atheists generally, typically have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.
No higher religion is about providing natural goodies by supernatural means, goodies that cannot be had by natural means. Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can think only in material terms and believe only in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in this life. What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives. It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.
We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder. We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don’t have and wouldn’t satisfy us even if we had it. We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived. It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse. It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul. You say none of this applies to you? Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave. You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.
Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil. No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do.
Describing the horrors of 20th-century Utopian schemes in his book Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quotes (indirectly) Vasily Rozanov:
“The deeper reason for all that has happened is that vanishing Christianity has created enormous cavities in the civilized world and now everything is tumbling into them.”
Read Bill’s piece here.
Having had, last night, a lively conversation over dinner with a woman who chid me (and sought to correct me) for insisting that sex is indeed binary, I think a clarifying post is in order.
Before I begin, I’ll pause to express surprise and dismay at how stubbornly fashionable, and how prevalent, denial of the fundamental dualism of sex has become, and remains; it’s a distressing symptom of the radical deconstruction and obliteration of all objective principles and categories that has grown, from small clouds of doubt at the beginning of the Enlightenment, to the ruinous tempest now smashing everything in the West to rubble. To insist, in these times, on the objective reality of the sex binary is to make oneself (as, for instance, J.K. Rowling has done) a heretic and a pariah. Nevertheless, there it is.
What is sex? Why does it exist? Why does it seem to be, in all species, a driving force whose urgency is second only to — if not primary to — the will to survive? Why does every human tradition always and everywhere, without exception, distinguish between male and female, not only as essential biological types or social categories, but as fundamental — and binary — divisions of transcendent metaphysical order?
The universal (until five minutes ago) human consciousness of the centrality of sexual duality, and its inclusion in the traditional systems of every culture, surely indicates something vitally important. I want to make this case as simply as possible, though, with the broadest possible appeal in this secular era, so I’m going to leave tradition and metaphysics out altogether — but not before I point out that duality and polarity are the very essence of sex; it is only the existence of the twin concepts of male and female that give the idea of sex any meaning at all. That said, though, we can imagine all sorts of binary concepts — hard and soft, black and white, awake and asleep, tall and short, loud and quiet, beautiful and ugly, friend and enemy, etc. — that are extremes of continua, and allow for the existence of intermediates. Biological sex, however, is not like that.
Why does biological sex exist at all? The answer: it exists, simply and unambiguously, as a mechanism of reproduction. It is how most multicellular organisms, and some unicellular organisms, reproduce. The mechanism involves the fusion of two sex cells, or gametes, each carrying half of the complete genome of the newly created organism (which before subsequent division is now a single, fertilized cell called a zygote).
In all multicellular organisms, with the exception of some yeasts and fungi, gametes come in two (exactly two) strikingly different forms. This is called anisogamy, and it is probably at least a billion years old. The male form is sperm; it is small (too small to see with the naked eye, and first observed by pioneering microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677), and it is motile. It has a tiny head, and a long whiplike tail that it uses to swim. The female form is the egg, or ovum; it is one of the largest human cells, and is large enough to see with the naked eye. It has a volume ten million times that of a sperm cell, and unlike the sperm, it is unable to move on its own.
These two kinds of sex cells — the two complementary components of human sexual reproduction — are all there is. There is no intermediate form, or mixture, or chimera, nothing halfway between a sperm and ovum. All human gametes are one or the other, and in biological terms, the combination of sperm and ovum to create new life is what sex is. There’s nothing cultural about any of it, and nothing that is a matter of opinion. As far as objective scientific facts go, this is as solid as it gets.
Those claiming that sex is nevertheless non-binary will now point to the indisputable existence of hermaphrodites, both human and animal. There are people with all sorts of ambiguous sexual characteristics, and there are animals that switch sexes during their lifespan, or even instantiate both sexes at once. Doesn’t that mean sex is a continuum?
No.
It’s important at this point to reiterate, and keep in mind, what sex is: a mechanism of reproduction involving the fusion of male and female gametes. The embryonic development, morphology, and life-cycle physiology of animal bodies can vary, and be disrupted, and make errors, in various ways, but the underlying mechanism of sex itself never changes at all.
Biologically, there are three forms of hermaphrodites — comprising two forms of “true” hermaphrodites, sequential and simultaneous, and what are called “pseudohermaphrodites”.
— Sequential hermaphrodites are animals that produce female gametes at one stage of life, and male gametes at another. Protogyny is when they start out as female and become male; the opposite is protandry. Some species go back and forth! (All three of these sequentially hermaphroditic forms can be found among reef-fish such as clownfish and wrasses; sometimes the changes appear to be induced by social-dominance hierarchies. The details are fascinating.)
— Simultaneous hermaphrodites are animals that can produce both male and female gametes at the same time. This is mostly found among snails and slugs, but there is one known vertebrate species — the mangrove killifish, Kryptolebias marmoratus — that pulls off this trick. Animals that can do this can do sexual reproduction all on their own.
— Pseudohermaphrodites produce only male or female gametes, but exhibit secondary morphological characteristics of the other sex. The example usually given is the female spotted hyena, which has what appears to be a penis, but is in fact an enlarged clitoris that functions as a birth canal.
Regarding humans: nearly every instance of “intersex” morphology is pseudohermaphroditic. Sequential hermaphroditism does not exist in any terrestrial vertebrate (and so not in humans), while simultaneous hermaphroditism — known formerly as “ovotestis” — is vanishingly rare; only 500 cases or so have ever been reported, and the bulk of those merely involve the presence of both male and female gonadic tissue, with actual production of both sperm and ova being even rarer (I haven’t yet to be able to determine if any examples of that have ever been seen at all).
What should be clear after looking at all of this is that even the various forms of hermaphroditism — even having both ovaries and testes — provide no counterargument to the underlying duality of sex. They offer no examples of any sort of intermediate, hybrid components of the essential, binary mechanism of sex; they are merely various ways of producing one kind of gamete or the other (or both). This stubborn duality means that biological expression of the mechanism of sex only exists in four, clearly delimited forms:
1) The production of male gametes;
2) The production of female gametes;
3) The production of both;
4) The production of neither.
If sex were truly “non-binary”, there would be a vast continuum in between all of this, a vague and fuzzy biological domain in which sexually reproducing beings used something other than sperm (male) and ova (female) — some spectrum of gametes that are neither wholly one nor wholly the other — to create new life. But in the billion years of sexual life on Earth, such a thing has never existed, and it doesn’t exist now.
Sex is binary.
About that pier we built in Gaza: don’t be surprised if it later turns out to have been built not to bring supplies to Gaza, but to evacuate Gazans to the West.
I note with deep sadness the death of saxophonist David Sanborn, who died on Sunday at the age of 78. I’d known Dave for decades, and worked with him often (including having engineered much of his Grammy-winning 1999 album Inside).
David was a towering musician — one of the most influential players of his era — and a smart, funny man. I can’t believe he’s gone. (It’s also hard to believe he was already seventy-eight. How did we all get so old?)
My dear friend Steve Khan has written an eloquent tribute, here.
Rest in peace, Dave. You were a gift to this world, and you will be missed.
I missed it, somehow, when it happened back in April, but I’ve heard it now (h/t to Radio Derb): the Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s rousing speech at CPAC’s convention in Budapest.
Her message to the ancient peoples of the West?
“Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for us to put on the full armor of God, fight back, and win.”
Full transcript here.
PS: by 2009, when I still leant toward atheism (I no longer do, as described in the series of linked posts beginning here) it had already become clear to me that secularism is maladaptive, and a source of weakness. Fifteen years later, its corrosive effect has progressed to the point that Europe is now on the verge of complete cultural and demographic collapse. So to those of you who agree with Ms. Vlaardingerbroek’s message, but flinch at her call to “put on the armor of God”, maybe it’s time to “update your priors”. You won’t get many more chances.
To live more consciously begins with reversing the direction of the arrow of attention between awareness and the senses.
The State of Georgia’s Election Board is grilling Fulton County over missing 2020 ballot records, in particular ballot images and .SHA files (these are digital fingerprints more generally known as hash-files, which are widely used in information security). We’ve known since the night of the “election” that things were awfully fishy; the stink is now getting harder to ignore, even for those who’d prefer to.
The investigator here, Dr. Janice Johnston, is patient, methodical, and relentless. I don’t think she’s going to let this one go.
“Then let’s look at the paper ballots.”
Secretary of State office: “No.”
You can’t say your proof is the paper ballots…and then not show anyone the paper ballots.
Especially when there is no electronic proof (.SHA files) for hundreds of thousands of votes pic.twitter.com/eqrQiwNHIm
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) May 7, 2024
In my previous post I commented on the spectacle of pampered students and faculty at our elite colleges and universities cutting class, donning keffiyehs, LARPing as oppressed Palestinians (at the top of their lungs, and as disruptively as possible, which is always fun and exciting), and calling for the extinction of the Jewish state. (As far as I can tell, the extinction of the Jews themselves, as long as we’re at it, wouldn’t bother them much either: nobody’s saying much about where the Jews themselves are supposed to go, once the area is Judenrein “from the river to the sea”, but from what I’m hearing I get the impression that if they just kind of ceased to exist it would be a not-unwelcome lagniappe.)
We white males are by now well-accustomed to calls for our erasure, of course, but I think that suddenly a lot of blue-state American Jews — of the type for whom not voting Democrat would be a far greater offense to their faith than a bacon cheeseburger with a side of fried clams — are aghast to behold the monster they’ve nurtured. My post was, for the most part, a comment on watching this coalition on the Left fracturing and beginning to eat itself, along with some remarks about how the protests were obviously well-funded and highly coordinated, with the stroppy students acting as little more than an easily biddable mob, their excitable young brains washed clean of everything other than “Who?” and “Whom?“.
Although I hadn’t said much about the conflict in Gaza itself, our friend and always-insightful commenter Jacques joined the conversation, to focus on which side in that war might in fact hold the higher moral ground — which is of course relevant to how we should react to the protests.
As a thought experiment, imagine that no western kids had ever been subjected to woke indoctrination. Imagine that all of them were ideally rational and moral young people. How would we expect these kids to react to what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians? Would these rational and moral kids just shrug? Would they think it was entirely moral and decent to exterminate tens of thousands of civilians, including children, in the hope of killing a much smaller number of guerilla fighters? Would they have no objection to Israeli politicians referring to Arabs as “Amalek”? I think some of these imaginary ideal kids would be protesting too.
Jacques, is several places, indicts Israel for the severity of its military response. For example (my italics):
I don’t agree that the Israelis are doing much to avoid “unnecessary” civilian casualties. It looks like their goal is maximal civilian casualties. (As you’d expect when Israeli leaders openly invoke “Amalek” and the genocidal moral code of the Jewish bible.)
Is this true? Israel is at war. How does its conduct compare to other historical examples of warfare, especially urban warfare? It certainly isn’t hard, throughout the ages, to find examples of cities being totally annihilated — men, women, young and old — in the fury of war. It is also difficult — and I’ll come back to this — to draw a bright line, either in military or ideological terms, between civilians and Hamas; it could easily be argued that Hamas itself cares far less about the safety and well-being of Gaza’s civilians than Israel itself does, and that Hamas knows very well that every image or account of civilian victims is potent ammunition against Israel in the court of world opinion. (In the comment-thread at the previous post, I linked to a thread on X arguing that Israel is, at the very least, certainly not trying to maximize civilian casualties. I’ll link it again here; make of it what you will.)
Regarding “Amalek”, the term refers to an ancient people who were implacable, mortal enemies of Israel. Is the term inaptly applied to Hamas, who marinate their children from birth in the belief that the greatest possible good is the destruction of Israel and blood-vengeance against all Jews?
I should probably at this point make some sort of summary of my own thoughts about this war, and more generally, about the intractable conflict in the region that has festered since before I was born, and even more generally than that, about war and conflict as a whole:
First, I’ll say that I generally support the idea of distinct, cohesive and homogeneous peoples having homelands. The kind of Diversity worth wanting, I think, is the kind where one culture or ethny does things their way over here, and another does things differently over there, and every people gets to have a place where they can feel at home, create as much civic trust as possible, and let their commonalities of folkways, language, religion, cuisine, art, history, and myth shape their shared public life as much as their private lives at home. (I’ve written about this for years; see for example, my brief essay Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration, from eleven years ago.) This arrangement preserves all the fascinating, distinctive characteristics of each culture in its own fertile soil, rather than throwing them all together into a gigantic global grinding machine to pulverize them into dust. The right way to experience real, “enriching” diversity in a healthy world is to travel. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Unlike the “Palestinians”, the Jews constitute an ethnically distinct people, with a specific (and highly influential) cultural history originating thousands of years ago in the land they now occupy. I endorse their wish to have a national homeland. (I won’t call it a “right”, because most talk of “rights” is just a mess of conflicting opinions, but I’m glad to see them have a place of their own.)
The land area of Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and it is surrounded by neighboring Arab nations compared to whose vast expanses Israel is a tiny speck. These Arab homelands — Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and others — could easily have absorbed the displaced Arabs from what became Israel; there were fewer than a million in 1948. But none did, not then or in the following 75 years; the answer, instead, was war, in 1948, 1967, and again in 1973. After that, the interests of the pan-Arab cause, apparently, were better served by maintaining Gaza and the West Bank as a festering wound, as a bloody shirt to wave, and as a sensational public theater of oppression, than by succoring, resettling, and assimilating the fellow Arabs living there.
In 2005, Israel ceded control of Gaza to the Gazans, who found themselves with twenty-five miles of prime Mediterranean seacoast, a seaport, abundant international aid, and the political freedom to arrange whatever sort of government they liked. In the election of 2006, they chose Hamas, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood whose charter is essentially a manifesto for ceaseless, exterminationist jihad against Jews, and against the state of Israel. There were no more elections after that.
With its natural assets, international aid flowing in, oil and gas resources, and assistance from Arab brethren around the region, Gaza could have become a solvent, even prosperous place, with a healthy tourist industry. But having Hamas in charge meant that the bulk of whatever assets became available would be diverted, not to the prosperity of the Gazan people, but to the jihad against Israel, in the form of weapons, tunnels, and of course the personal enrichment of the party elites. And because there’s nothing that unifies a people as well as an external enemy, millions of Gazans were raised to think of little else than their bitter anger against the Jewish nation next door. Israel now “had the wolf by the ears”; for it to relax its vigilance would be catastrophic.
And so it was. On October 7th of last year, Hamas launched an assault of almost unspeakable horror — indiscriminately and mercilessly attacking, raping, slaughtering, torturing, mutilating, and kidnapping Israeli civilians, male and female, from infants to the elderly. Picture the most gruesome and bestial atrocities you can imagine anyone unrestrained by conscience or decency carrying out upon another human being, and you likely will not have imagined half of what happened that day.
It is hard to imagine that any nation in history, so attacked — especially given that Hamas has steadfastly refused to give up the hostages it took (who include, by the way, several Americans) — would fail to rise up in incandescent fury, considering also that nearly three-quarters of Gazans stand in support of what happened on that day in October. And so Israel has. They will not tolerate the existence of this threat on their doorstep any longer, and they will not cease until Hamas is destroyed. (I think, honestly, that if any one of us were in Israel’s place, we would feel the same way.)
Hamas asked for a war, and so they have got it — and in Gaza, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of daylight between the combatants and the civilians. There is no plausible scenario in which Israel relents before this hydra is slain. The suffering is Gaza is awful, but war is war, and this is war. Had Hamas not done what they did in October — a truly monstrous eruption of the blackest cruelty and evil — this would not be happening.
Having said all that, however, my own feeling is that this war is not our war. Israel is rich and technically advanced, and has a top-tier military — its Iron Dome, for example, appears to be a better anti-missile system than our own. It also has access to a worldwide network of very wealthy people and institutions. It has been our stupendous folly to invite the world’s ancient feuds and grievances to play themselves out in our own cities and institutions, and we are now seeing right here at home the strife and disintegration that were the inevitable result.
Between our shameful meddling in Ukraine, the disastrous result in Afghanistan, and widening war in the Near East, this hasn’t been — to put it mildly — a very good few years for U.S. adventurism abroad. Perhaps we might, before further hell breaks loose, take a moment to reflect on the advice John Quincy Adams (then Secretary of State under James Monroe) gave the nation in 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and
her prayers be.But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence,
she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy,
and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
Over to you, Jacques. Am I seeing all of this wrongly?
The spectacle unfolding at elite universities these in these last weeks has dominated the news.
On one hand, it’s been gratifying to watch the coalition of the Left coming apart, and to see factions that used to march in step now turning against each other. Writing seven years ago, I compared the tensions that would form within the Left as they spiraled deeper into their ideological gravity-well to the tidal effects that rip moons apart as they get too close to the planets they orbit:
I (and others) have argued that because of the radical skepsis at the heart of the modern Left — the legacy of the Enlightenment, in which nothing is exempt from the most withering and critical scrutiny — that there is no limiting principle, no bedrock, upon which this implacably descending ideological movement can ultimately come to rest.
(Two years ago I likened this to the collapse of massive stars. We might also borrow a different astronomical metaphor: it’s as if the Left, as it approaches its own singularity, is now crossing its Roche limit, where tidal forces begin to tear it to pieces.)
If, as the process accelerates, the Left continues to delaminate and disintegrate, perhaps only a smaller and smaller core will tumble into the abyss — as others … find bedrock, at last, below which they cannot descend.
I also wrote about this using a different metaphor — that grievance is “fractal” — back in 2014:
You start with the most basic grievance of all: everybody else against white males. That works for a while, but soon the fractal process gets to work, and next thing you know it’s blacks and hispanics against homosexuals — and if you let the algorithm run for while, and crank up the magnification a bit, before you know it you’ve got black women vs. gay men.
So yes, it’s nice to see dissension in the enemy’s ranks. (Auron Macintyre argues that the Right should just stand back and let the campuses fester, as an example for all.) On the other hand, though, the murderous anti-Semitism nakedly displayed at these events is horrifying, and I can hardly blame local authorities for using actual force to quell these disturbances. (It would have been nice, and might have prevented billions in property damage and a good deal of injury and death if they had also seen fit to do so in 2020, but that’s water over the dam at this point.
It’s important to understand what these kids are doing. Having grown up under the spell of our contemporary secular cryptoreligion, they have a gaping hole where all previous generations had a sense of a transcendent order to which they are connected — and because human nature, like Nature itself, abhors a vacuum, they needed something else to take the place of the sacred, and a way to order the world into good and evil. In this truncated, Earthbound universe, then, evil becomes Oppression, good becomes The Struggle, and the Victim the holiest of beings.
Just as in other religions, in this one the path of spiritual advancement is to move toward the sacred. And lacking anything genuinely transcendent to offer as a model, the shabby, sawn-off “religion” these crusaders follow impels them to become one with the sacred Oppressed. And so this is the posture they must adopt. On with the keffiyehs, comrades!
Donning the mantle of the Oppressed really takes some doing, though, if you’re a pampered student at one of the world’s most prestigious universities; in your heart you know you aren’t the real, sacred thing at all — and so you have to LARP with extra ferocity. (You have to do things like, having taken over a college building, start demanding that people provide you food as a matter of “humanitarian aid”.) This is why all of this zealotry is burning its hottest in citadels of privilege like Columbia and Harvard.
I have to say, though, that despite the outpouring of disgust from every corner of the Right, I actually feel kind of sorry for these kids. It isn’t their fault that they were brought up in such an educational, spiritual, moral, and political dung-heap; they’ve had nothing to guide them toward anything real or true or lasting or genuine, nobody to teach them how to be adults instead of spoilt children, and they’ve had none of the social and behavioral scaffolding that helped all previous generations find their place in a harmonious social order. How can we really expect them to behave like civilized men and women, if nobody’s ever shown them how?
I must apologize for not writing much these past few weeks; we’ve had personal matters to attend to, and have had to travel back and forth between home (the far end of Cape Cod) and New York several times (300 miles of driving each way).
There’s a lot I want to write about when I can find enough quiet time to do so; in particular I want to discuss a couple of books that I’ve just read. I also owe Bill Vallicella a response on a political topic that came up some weeks ago. But all of that will have to wait a little longer. I’m hoping to have some quiet time this week.
Meanwhile, I will comment on something I’ve been noticing for a while, but which, on my recent trips along Route 95 this past couple of weeks, seems to have gotten sharply worse: the collapse of proper driving on the highways.
The principles of driving on multi-lane highways are few, and they are simple. One among them is paramount, namely that you keep as far to the right as you can, moving to the leftward lanes only a) to overtake a slower vehicle or vehicles; b) to let vehicles enter the right lane from on-ramps; and c) to give a wide berth to cars and people stopped in the breakdown lane. It’s a simple system, and done right, it keeps things moving along as well as possible.
If you drive in Europe, you’ll notice that everybody there seems to understand how this simple system works. It’s never been adhered to as well here in America, but over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that it seems to have broken down completely. On my last two round trips to New York I was really shocked (and more than a little irritated) to see how often I ended up having to go around slow drivers by passing them on the right — and even more annoyingly, how often people would sit in the left lane going exactly as fast as the vehicle next to them in the right lane, thereby creating a rolling blockade, with blithe indifference to being flashed at from behind. Even big-rig truck drivers, who generally used to drive more competently than the average civilian, seem to be doing this all the time now as well.
What the highway pattern looked like on these last couple of trips was a great sea of dozy, incompetent drivers drifting along like floating clumps of seaweed in whatever lane they happened to find themselves, while a smaller subgroup of agile and frustrated drivers (like me) did their best to flit and dart in and out of whatever little temporary gaps might appear in the slowly shifting pattern. There were also always a few who were obviously at the end of their patience — tailgating, weaving through tiny openings at top speed, and often taking really audacious risks.
I’ve been driving on American highways for fifty-two years now, and it’s never been like this. What’s going on? Is it just part of the overall collapse of competence in every aspect of life? Is it just another aspect of the Great Enstupidation? If so, it’s a particularly annoying one.
With a hat-tip to Charles Murray on X: The Seven Tribes of Intellect.
(One has to wonder: what must it have been like to be John von Neumann?)
… and rightly so. We should be pushing back as forcefully as we can against this: we should be creating a climate in which whatever demonic influence corrupted this poor woman into such hideous self-mutilation can no longer gain a foothold on weak minds and vulnerable souls.
I have no idea why she is unable to get a job. I’m seriously stumped. Can y’all weigh in as to why you think she’s struggling to secure a job? pic.twitter.com/MZV70fABKH
— Just Mindy ? (@just_mindy) April 19, 2024
I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality.
In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, evolutionary theory, and religion — Daniel Dennett was a huge influence on my own intellectual development. This was not because I ended up persuaded of the truth of his positions (for years I was, regarding some of these topics, though not any longer) — but because he always did such a splendid job of defining, framing, sharpening and clarifying the essential questions, which is exactly what philosophers are supposed to do. I, and many many others, owe him a substantial debt of gratitude for that. (My first encounter with him was his book Consciousness Explained, which I read when it came out in 1987, and I subsequently read most of his other books, and many of his published papers.)
Dr. Dennett had been on my mind just this past week, because he had very recently given an interview to Jordan Peterson that I’ve been meaning to watch. You can find it here.
P.S. I’m sure my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, will have something to say about Dennett’s passing, and I’ll link to it here when he does.
P.P.S. I just ran across someone on X called “Zoomer Alcibiades” who remarked that “Daniel Dennett has died, but as he had no qualia in the first place this is a relatively minor change for him.” (Harsh, but fair.)
Well, actually there’s rather a lot happening — among other things, Israel attacking Iran (on Ali Khameni’s birthday), jurors seated in the unbelievably outrageous show-trial against Donald Trump, the death of Dickey Betts, and the impending arrival of trillions of zombie cicadas. But I thought I’d just post this instead:
Do you think he slept on the couch? pic.twitter.com/Fi11LS6Xn0
— NahBabyNah (@NahBabyNah) April 19, 2024
We’re in NYC for a couple of days, where my lovely wife is having surgery for one of those damned basal-cell carcinomas that seem to afflict so many people these days.
Back soon.
In a development that has medical and longevity experts scratching their heads, the recording/mixing engineer, former martial-arts instructor, acidulous opinionator, and bibulous curmudgeon Malcolm Pollack celebrated his 68th birthday on April 13th.
Asked to comment, one leading expert said that the news has “made us wonder if we have to re-examine some of our most basic ideas about what the human body can withstand — especially when it comes to beer-drinking, putting up with bothersome people, and enduring the stupidity of mass culture. I mean, let’s face it: according to our current theories, this guy should never even have made it to fifty, let alone sixty-eight. We really have no idea what’s made this possible, but I will say that at this point we can’t rule out that it might simply be something to do with sheer bloody-mindedness.”
Adult-beverage stocks, both in the U.S. and worldwide, rallied on the news.
Fifty years ago, I lived with some friends in a rented farmhouse on Cider Mill Road, in East Amwell Township, New Jersey. It’s still mostly farmland out there.
I was looking at the old place on Google Earth just now and saw this, just a mile or so away. (Click to enlarge.)
Warmed my heart.
Well, the Eclipse has come and gone, and as far as I can make out, there’s no sign of either the Rapture or the Apocalypse. (I realize such things might take some extra time to reach us here in the Outer Cape, but even on social media things just seem to be blaring away as usual.)
We had about 93% totality here, which just meant that things got eerily dim for a few minutes (even 7% of the Sun produces an awful lot of light.) The weather was perfectly clear, so we all got a good look at it with our funny little glasses. And that was that.
What’s really amazing about this whole eclipse business — a thing so extraordinary that it almost seems to be more than one could expect from mere coincidence, and wants some more satisfying explanation — is the fact of the Sun, which is 93,000,000 miles from Earth, and the Moon, which is right in our backyard, having almost exactly the same apparent size in the sky. (The Sun’s size varies from 31.6 to 32.7 arc-minutes, while the Moon’s goes from 29.3 to 34.1.) This could so easily have been otherwise that it really seems quite astonishing that it should be so.
Anyway, a bit of a fizzle for all you millenarians out there; life goes on. Sorry.
The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote:
Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
The Concept of the Political (1932), p. 26
Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.
Ibid, p. 37
In healthy and cohesive societies, with high homogeneity and trust, and the commonalities of culture, heritage, language, folkways, philosophical axioms, and moral principles that bind mobs into nations, the realm of the political can remain relatively small, confining itself to questions about which policies will most effectively implement generally agreed-upon goals. When, however, these commonalities break down, the sphere of the political expands to include almost every aspect of life, especially in large, managerial states, such as the United States has become, in which power once largely distributed to local communities has mostly been surrendered to the central government.
This has two important consequences. First, because decisions that affect everyone are now administered by the central State, control of that governing apparatus matters far more than it does in more subsidiarian societies. Second, as more and more of civic life is forced into the realm of the political, the essential characteristic of the political — the “friend-enemy distinction” — comes increasingly to the fore, and those with whom you might once have simply disagreed about, say, highway-budget priorities or zoning bylaws now become your enemy.
This in turn has further consequences. It’s in the nature of how we think about enemies that we seek to simplify them, to reduce them, to boil off their human complexities in order to avoid the natural tendency, in decent human beings, to have qualms about wishing others harm and ill-fortune. It’s also part of human nature for this to become easier the more we see other people in our own social or tribal group doing the same; this is why mobs are so often capable of violent and destructive behavior that most people, if acting as individuals, would find abhorrent.
In order to reduce our enemies to simplified, depersonalized models, one of the first things we do is to find a handy term to refer to them, not as persons, but as instances of a type.
Such a term is “Trumper”: a convenient, dismissive catch-all that reduces all who might, for any number of good reasons, vote Republican in November to cult-like followers of a man whom those who use the term see only as a horrifying avatar of the Enemy. So reduced, such people become mere soldiers in the opposing army, and — most importantly of all — far easier to hate. (And let’s be clear: this happens on both sides of deep political divisions; where Blue myrmidons have “Trumpers” and “MAGATs” to loathe, the Red team have “libtards” and “Demonrats”.)
Barring some “Black Swan” event between here and November, I’ll be voting for Donald Trump: not because I’m besotted by the man’s personality, intellect, or moral rectitude (though the grotesquely corrupt Joe Biden is certainly in no position to claim moral or intellectual superiority, especially in his current condition), but because I’m deeply concerned about a variety of destructive trends that I believe will, if unchecked, result in the utter collapse of the American nation. (To list them all here would take a post of its own, and I’m not going to bother; we all know what they are.)
The point is this: there are thousands of individual issues, policies, axioms, and principles upon which we might have nuanced and divergent opinions, but under our current system of government (which is itself a subject of widely divergent opinion) we have a binary choice to make in November. We must throw everything in the scales and choose either what Biden and the Democrats represent (and we’ve seen it in action over the past four years), or Trump and the Republicans.
Nothing is perfect — and to be frank, given how irreversibly degraded and broken the American nation, and the American spirit, have already become, nothing is even cause for much hope — but to reduce merely to “Trumpers” those scores of millions of decent Americans who will, for so many complex reasons, choose Trump over Biden is a symptom of exactly what Carl Schmitt described: the wholesale transformation of “religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other” antitheses into the political, and the accelerating division of America into friends and enemies.
Buckle up, folks. 2024 is just getting its boots on.
This is all over social media today: Richard Dawkins, one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and author, in 2006, of The God Delusion has now admitted that he likes Christendom, and suddenly sees it as a thing to be promoted and defended. Here’s a clip from the interview that’s getting all the attention:
This is quite something: Richard Dawkins, undoubtedly the world's leading atheist, the author of The God Delusion, comes out as "cultural Christian" and calls for the UK to promote Christianity as opposed to Islam, which he calls "not a decent religion".pic.twitter.com/NuQBh2R3cw…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 1, 2024
It is impossible not to enjoy a little schadenfreude here; a great many of us haven’t been shouting from the ramparts about this for a very long time now. If you like living in the fine house your ancestors built, then you shouldn’t go around pulling out the bricks and timbers.
This hubris is a constant amongst world-saving intellectuals: they look at the complex systems of the world, and imagine they can just yank out the bits they don’t approve of, or can’t be bothered to understand. And when their simplified model (which, more often than not, they try to impose by force once they’ve been given an atom of power) collapses in ruins, they generally simply walk away, or blame the rest of us for not trying hard enough. (To Dawkins’ credit, he now seems genuinely to begin — just barely — to grasp that he failed to understand how important religion was for the creation and preservation of the culture he took for granted.)
Churchill knew Dawkins’ type well:
Historians have noticed, all down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people which has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle. The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?
What makes Dawkins’ failure to understand the extent of his debt to Christianity particularly piquant is that Curtis Yarvin, the former “Mencius Moldbug” wrote in an influential 2007 essay — one of the ur-documents of neoreaction — that Dawkins, for all his affectation of lofty rationalistic immunity to religious “delusions”, was really just a rebellious twig on a particular branch of a very old Christian tree:
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.
The essay (really a series of essays) was called How Dawkins Got Pwned. It’s long, but you really should settle in somewhere comfortable and read it, because at this point Moldbug’s essays, and the rest of the NRx canon, have had such a broad (if subterranean) influence, and understood what was happening so clearly, that they are an important part of our rapidly evolving cultural history.
Meanwhile: Professor Dawkins, you should have stuck to what you did so well. (And he did do it well. Did you know, for example, that Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, invented the idea of the “meme”? The term has now been degraded to refer just to snarky little graphics for poasting online, but the original idea — that little packages of cognitive content can replicate themselves in minds by jumping from host to host, and can compete with other memes in a selection environment in a way that is very much like what genes do — was itself a brilliant meme that has proven his point by its own success.)
Writing about Ukraine at the Asia Times, David Goldman — the analyst formerly known as “Spengler” — commented last week on the desperate strategic fantasy that continues to hold the GAE and NATO (but I repeat myself) under its spell.
Goldman is a very smart guy, one of the few global-strategic-assessment pundits actually worth paying attention to. The article opens with this:
Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation.
I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A Bailey at the National Security Council. That was the peak of the Cold War and the too-realistic Able Archer 83 exercise nearly set off a nuclear war.
The piece goes on to describe a group of people whose opinions and analysis command extraordinary influence in the halls of Western power, and who are completely and willfully in denial of reality. Goldman illustrates this in disturbing detail.
He closes with this:
Facts weren’t the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.
They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.
The article isn’t long, and it’s well worth your time. Read it here.
Over American Greatness, Jeremy Carl discusses Steve Sailer’s new book, and the man himself. (If you don’t know who Steve Sailer is, you should; he is arguably the sharpest and most influential American thinker and writer of the last quarter-century, and were it not for the suffocating taboos enforced by our cultural commissars, he would be as famous as he deserves.)
The White House has decided to dedicate this Sunday to its malevolent, Gnostic project of obliterating every sacred thing, every natural category, and every stone in the foundation of the American nation.
“But wait,” you say, “this Sunday’s Easter!! Couldn’t they at least have picked some other day?”
Gosh, you’re right. I’m sure they’d just forgotten.
“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
– C.S. Lewis, Learning In Wartime, 1939
What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: he reads broadly, understands what he reads, and everything he puts out offers clarification, useful synthesis, and good common sense. (He also seems to be a likeable fellow.) In a recent video (you can watch it here), he discusses the idea of accelerationism, as described in Nick Land’s 2017 essay A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction To Accelerationism.
In Land’s essay, the focus is not on whether we should ourselves be accelerationists (MacIntyre, like me, has concluded that we oughtn’t), but on a key feature of the process itself: namely, that as the rate of change increases, and things happen faster and faster, while the time it takes for us to think about them, especially in distributed political systems, remains constant, the result is that our “decision space” effectively “implodes”.
Land connects this “implosion” to the “explosion of the world”:
Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)
I’ve been commenting on this for more than a decade now, with the difference that I characterize what Land calls “the explosion of the world” as an implosion as well: namely, that the exponentially accelerating interconnection of everything with everything else has had the effect of making the world drastically, and very rapidly, smaller, in a way that can be modeled with surprisingly deep metaphorical accuracy by the compression of a gas inside a piston. I wrote about this first in these pages in 2013, and then published a condensed version at American Greatness in 2020.
Here was how I described, in 2013, the “implosion” of “decision space”:
In short, the smaller and hotter the world is — in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles” will impinge on each other in a given time — the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy” it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace — the legislative processes of large democracies, for example — to respond effectively to innovations and crises.
At the same time, however, the shrinking distance between any two points in the world-network makes it possible for governments to monitor people and events, and to exert sovereign power, with an immediacy and granularity that is without historical precedent. This creates a powerful centralizing influence: the more a government can see, the more it will want to control, and an accelerating trend toward consolidation of government power at the expense of local control is evident everywhere in the developed world. The result is that modern democratic governments are able to supervise their subjects far more closely, and extend their power over them far more directly and individually, than even the most autocratic despot could have managed a hundred years ago. Our smaller world may well provide increasingly fertile ground for technological tyrannies of the sort foreseen by Orwell (although ubiquitous access to communication networks may also make it easier to organize an effective resistance).
… We now see governments expanding and centralizing, due to the exponentially increasing coverage and immediacy of all forms of monitoring and communication. As this happens, the scale and scope of government, and the depth and breadth of the administrative and legislative tasks that government must perform, increase rapidly as well. But the capacity of a finite number of human legislators, administrators, and civil servants to operate this expanding hierarchical apparatus, across all its parts in real time, does not “scale up” at the same rate, and so the ability of these increasingly vast hierarchies to respond flexibly and effectively to accelerating change falls farther and farther behind.
Something, sooner or later, has to give. What might happen?
I went on to describe various possibilities: collapse, disaggregation, and “Butlerian Jihad”. One that I did not dwell on, but which is far from implausible, is sharply tightening totalitarian control (although that might not be so easy to engineer, and might still not solve the problem of collapsing decision space).
That was eleven years ago, and we can see, by now, that the problem is only worsening (and may get very much worse indeed, very soon). But for those of you who haven’t really thought much about this, I recommend you put on some headphones, go outside for a walk, and have a listen to Mr. Macintyre’s excellent overview, here.
Victor Davis Hanson, move over. It doesn’t get any more concise than this:
This woman KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE PARK?!
I double dare you to give her a listen.?
— ?? Pismo ?? (@Pismo_B) February 24, 2024
Looking back over the past decade or two, I’m reminded of Churchill’s remarks in 1938:
I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little further on there are only flagstones, and a little further on still these break beneath your feet.
Something I ran across online earlier today reminded me of a project I worked on long ago (late 1985), when I was a staff engineer at Power Station. It was a record by the great Japanese pianist and singer Akiko Yano, and I hadn’t heard it, I think, since the album came out in early 1986. So I dug it out for a listen, and thought I’d share the memory here.
There was a time in the mid-80s when a lot of Japanese artists came to New York to work with elite American studio musicians, and during that period I ended up at the console for a lot of these sessions. (Usually they’d take the projects back to Japan for mixing, but sometimes they’d mix in New York as well, and in 1987 I even ended up going to Tokyo for a month for an album by Ryudo Uzaki.)
Even though Akiko wasn’t well-known in the States, she was a big star in Japan (she still is), and was very well-respected by New York’s session players. She was also married to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who even then was internationally famous. (Ryuichi, A.K.A. “The Professor”, died in March of last year; I’d worked with him too, on a live album also released in 1986. A talented couple!)
Anyway, Akiko came to New York to spend a few days doing overdubs in what I still think is the best recording room in the world: Power Station’s Studio A. Here’s a picture of that room, if you’ve never seen it (click for larger view):
It was all a long time ago, but what I recall is recording drummer Steve Ferrone, contrabass guitarist extraordinaire Anthony Jackson, and guitarist Eddie Martinez (you may not know these names, but believe me, you have heard their playing, as you’ll see if you check the links).
One thing that stood out in my memory has to do with the way we recorded the drums. Back in the 80s we were experimenting with all sorts of weird processing for drum-kits — and in particular, a fashion of the time was to do something called “gated reverb”: you’d dial up a long reverb to put on the snare, but then rather than letting it decay naturally, you’d run it through a “gate” that would shut it off right after the beat. The result was a big and strangely unnatural sound, and we all used it to death for about ten years or so; it’s probably the most distinctive feature of that “80s Sound”.
I knew Akiko’s record was going to be mixed back in Japan, but while we were tracking the drums I fiddled around a bit to set up a gated reverb in the monitor mix just to give everyone some idea of what the final processing might sound like — and just for fun I also ran the snare-drum reverb through a pair of rack-mounted MXR flangers as well, to produce a goofy stereo effect. Akiko liked it so much that she asked me to print the reverb on a separate pair of tracks, so that the mix engineer (I think it was Ryuichi himself who supervised the mixing) back in Japan could add it to the mix. (I was flattered, and when I heard the record I was surprised to hear how much of it they’d used.)
Anyway, I found the album on YouTube, so here it is. (Headphones or good speakers, please!) You can really hear the drum-reverb effect I’m talking about on the first track, “A Girl Of Integrity”. (The lead vocal on that tune, by the way, isn’t Akiko, but a singer named Yosui Inoue.)
The whole album is, at this point, a “time-capsule” — nobody makes music quite like this anymore — but the talent of Akiko Yano and Ryuichi Sakamoto really shines through, I think. It was also a real pleasure working with both of those lovely people. (Akiko, if you should somehow happen to read this, I hope you are well!)
I love the Outer Cape, where I live, but the prevailing ideology out here is as “blue” as it gets. (Aside from the occasional reactionary like me, there is also a subclass of people around here who build and fish and dig and pave and fix things — in other words, who earn a crust by coming into daily contact with the stubborn and concrete realities of the world — but these folks mostly keep to themselves, do their work, and quietly prepare for the day when the Gods of the Copybook headings “with terror and slaughter return”. We recognize one another almost instinctively — there is a type of “gaydar” that helps such “deplorables” spot one another out here, and there are in fact quite a lot of us. But as far as the visible local culture and politics are concerned, this might as well be Portland.)
Here’s a recent opinon piece from my local paper. The item bears the title “Choosing Between Democracy And Theocracy”:
The Wellfleet Community Forum met on Feb. 26 to discuss how we might bring more civility and efficiency back to our town. Moderator Dan Silverman reminded us that conflict and disruption were as much a part of our town history as civility and community. At the same time, the fact that we had that forum is an indication that what is happening to the nation at large filters down to our local community and that even here we need to vigilantly defend our basic values.
Ten days before that meeting, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are persons and hence enjoy the protection of the state. At roughly the same time, the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, said in a podcast that “God created government. And the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it’s heartbreaking for those of us who understand.”
Parker is part of a national movement to overturn our understanding of the nature of legitimate government. His view flies in the face of our nation’s founding documents. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states: “…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.” The founders were positing that government did not come from God, as was argued by those who believed in the divine right of European monarchs, but was a human creation.
The U.S. Constitution, which does not include the word “God,” begins with “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, … do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” The writers made it clear that it was the people, not God, who ordained and established the nation.
Judge Parker would have failed a beginning civics class, but his ignorance is his personal shame. What is more disturbing is that his comment reflects a larger historical shift. Even in the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and 1840s or the fanaticisms of the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s, the nation was not at as great a risk of losing its meaning and ideals as it is today. Parker’s comment must be seen in the context of a Supreme Court whose majority favors fundamentalist Christian ideals over long-established secular values.
It should also be seen in the context of the presidential contest. For the first time in our nation’s history, we have a major-party candidate who has been found guilty of sexual assault and has been recorded talking about grabbing women’s genitals, and who openly attempted to thwart the peaceful transition of power. Even the Federalists did not do that, though they feared and detested Jefferson and believed he would destroy the country.
Such a candidacy would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The political landscape is littered with candidates who failed because of far milder accusations. And so we must ask ourselves what has changed in the country, and what does it tell us about the future?
The change is that Donald Trump has managed to forge an alliance with a right-wing Christian movement singularly focused on gaining power in order to transform the nation from its liberal (in the classical sense of that word) and secular ideals into a theocracy. Trump has managed to pull together white discontent, nativist hostility to immigration, male fear of female equality, and a general anxiety about sexuality into a movement centered on his persona. Despite the fact that Trump the person is a corrupt, racist sexual predator, the persona behind Trumpism is the manifestation of a march toward a nation dedicated to white male hegemony and secure in its righteousness.
Trump’s ultimate success will depend not only on his mobilized base but also on the inaction, indifference, exhaustion, or petty differences of those who have not drunk the Kool-Aid. If you do not think this is a serious threat, look closely at today’s Republican Party and at the number of people who a decade ago would have been seen as conservative institutionalists and are now bending their knee to an anti-institutionalist theocrat. And consider that 676 of our neighbors in the four Outer Cape towns voted in last week’s primary for an authoritarian sex offender.
This wildly pugnacious and overwrought essay is pretty much “par for the course” around here. I was unable to refrain from sending a brief note to the editor:
It was awfully disingenuous for [the opinion’s author] to quote the Declaration’s observation that “governments are established among men” without mentioning why the Founders believed that should be so, as explained in that document’s preceding passage — namely, the “self-evident” truth that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, and that the purpose of government, therefore, is to “secure these rights”: an understanding that, far from excluding the Creator from government, simply places him directly upstream.
Regarding the Constitution, moreover, John Adams had this to say:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(It strikes me that currently we are neither, which goes a long way toward explaining why we have been so poorly governed for so long now.)
The author of the article quotes, as an obviously religious absurdity, the Alabama Court’s position that “frozen embryos are persons”, which is in fact a view that can be reasonably asserted and defended without invoking any religious assumptions at all (and far more reasonably and self-evidently, I might add, than current orthodoxy mandating the denial and obliteration of obvious natural categories, which seems to have at least as much of the odor of “theocracy” as anything realistically on offer from the Right).
Finally, can anyone really imagine that Joseph Biden — Joe Biden! — can lay any claim to moral superiority over his opponent?
I realize that this post is nothing more than a groan of exasperation; I know how these things are, and none of the above is anything out of the ordinary these days. American political life is now stripped to its essence, precisely as Carl Schmitt describes (my emphasis):
Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
Never mind the vital importance, for the structural stability of the nation, of belief in a transcendent metaphysics as the philosophical bedrock of America’s founding axioms. Never mind Joe Biden’s serial plagiarism, his hair-sniffing, his constant lying, his obvious caducity and cognitive enfeeblement, the plausible accusations of rape, the classified-document crimes disclosed by the Hur report, his catastrophic border and energy policies, and the growing, reeking pile of evidence of bribery, perjury, and influence-peddling by his personal crime-syndicate. None of that matters now. All that matters is who is the friend, and who is the enemy. And if you have any doubt about that, well, just pick up a newspaper.
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below:
1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
2. The hypocrisy of liberals: “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”
3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”
4. It’s impossible to even have a personal identity without social relations: “We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.”
5. In 1998, Salon asked Roger Scruton about censorship. He said: “Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that’s the difficulty.” Then he laughed. (He was talking about censoring porn.)
6. Tribes need Gods: “Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”
7. Love is the source of the conservative worldview: “The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment.”
8. Tradition is never arbitrary: “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”
9. Real art is always meaningful: “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”
10. Liberty inevitably leads to inequality and people obsessed with equity have no answer to this conundrum. Scruton: “If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead?”
11. The entrepreneur who builds matters more than the bureaucrat who manages. Scruton: “The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.”
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified today for the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry. I haven’t had a chance to review the testimony itself — but hoo-boy, his opening statement is a corker. (Some clips from the hearing are here.)
(Don’t get too excited, though, or start imagining there will be actual consequences. After all, what do you think this is, the United States of America?)
Tony Bobulinski is a brave man, and he has put himself in a world of danger for our sake, and for the nation he loves. I sure do hope he’s taking sensible precautions against falling pianos, brake failures, and unexpected suicide.
We’re away in NYC for a few days. Back soon. (Will be glad to get home.)
A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count the number of times my family and I were on that train, at that station, during the forty years we lived in Brooklyn before Nina and I sold the house and moved out in 2021.)
This happened as the city moves gradually toward martial law, with National Guard troops deployed to the subways to search peoples’ bags. I noted a week ago that this was not likely to be effective:
Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person?
Forgive me if this seems radical, but I’m starting to think that it simply isn’t enough just to make violent crime illegal. I’m beginning to believe that to solve the problem, it needs to be frowned upon.
I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday (about twelve hours in the car) to pick up my Nina, who had been in Hong Kong for two weeks visiting our daughter and the grandsons.
I did watch the SOTU, but I had nothing to say that wasn’t obvious, i.e., that it was shockingly angry and strident, packed wall to wall with lies, and that Joe Biden was obviously seriously hopped up on some sort of speedy drug cocktail. The one time he told the plain truth — that the killer of poor Laken Riley (whose name he couldn’t even get right) was an “illegal” — got him in so much trouble with the Democrat Party’s Jacobin base that he had to spend the whole next day apologizing for it. (If he’d been smart about it, could could have used even more accurate language during the speech, such as “human cockroach” or “vile demon-spawn”, which might have picked him up a few votes from normal, decent, undecided Americans, and then walked it back to “illegal” the next day.)
I’ve been reading a really fantastic book:Seeing Like A State, by the Yale anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott. I’d heard for years that it was a must-read on a par with the work of, for example, Burnham and Higgs, and boy is it ever. I will have more to say about it when I’m done. I’ve also just read another really remarkable book, on the pathology of modernism, that I’ve only now got around to, though it’s been influential since its release (under unusual circumstances) in 1995. I’ll write a post about that as well, sometime soon.
There’s lots more going on that I’d normally be commenting on, but for now I’ll just leave this item from X, and ask you to imagine where all this will be in another five years:
With OpenAI, Figure 01 can now have full conversations with people
-OpenAI models provide high-level visual and language intelligence
-Figure neural networks deliver fast, low-level, dexterous robot actionsEverything in this video is a neural network: pic.twitter.com/OJzMjCv443
— Figure (@Figure_robot) March 13, 2024
Back soon.
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system:
Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?”
I don’t know what song that is, but:
So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, to secure my own position, and to do what I can each day to sound the alarm and wake people up.
We should all, however, be doing a great many other things as well:
We should be connecting with groups of capable and dependable people in our communities, and to the extent that we can, we should try to make a difference in local government. We should help our neighbors.
We should be preserving knowledge that may soon be lost, especially physical books. Teach others what you have learned.
We should notice the extent of our dependence on complex and brittle systems, and try to reduce it.
We should be doing what we can to take good care of ourselves, physically and mentally. We should build and sustain normal, healthy families. We should reconnect ourselves with nature, including human nature. Get outside. Take walks. Fight laziness.
If you are the sort of person who can fight, if necessary, to defend what must be defended, learn to do so. Strengthen and train your body. Understand that you have a duty to do your part if things really fall apart, and acquire the equipment and skills to do so.
Don’t consume rubbish, of either the cultural or alimentary variety. (Be careful with the impressions you allow in: they are a kind of food, and can be just as unhealthy.)
Stay curious. Never stop learning.
Seek truth.
Stop lying.
Learn to get out of your own way so as to open yourself to the higher influences that are always trying to reach you. Remember that the best way to improve your life, and the lives of those around you, is to improve yourself.
Be civil to others.
Cultivate gratitude, every day. Cherish the people you love, and the blessings of this astonishing civilization you’ve inherited: built by ancestors long dead, working for the future, working for you.
Play. Have fun. Listen to music. Get together with friends. Laugh. Expose yourself to beauty, and drink it in. Remember that this life is short, and don’t waste it.
Do what needs doing.
Take responsibility for your actions, and your situation. Someone said that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything.” Don’t do that.
My mother, whose maiden name was Calder, grew up in Scotland. The motto of her clan, Campbell of Cawdor, is short and good:
Be Mindful.
Work on living more consciously. Whenever you can manage to do it, remember yourself. Stop for a moment and examine your present state. Notice your posture, your point of tension, the rhythm of your breathing, the contents of your thoughts. Feel yourself inhabiting your body, here, now. Sense your feet on the floor, or the weight of your body in your seat. Do this as often as you can remember — which won’t be often, until you manage to make a habit of it.
A saying I recall from an esoteric school is “your being attracts your life.” Think about what that might mean.
I could go on and on; really, instead of a blog post, I could make this a book. But that’s enough for now.
Thanks for asking.
Our reader and commenter ‘mharko’ has left some excellent remarks on a thread at Bill V.’s place about our worsening political situation. Go and have a look, here.
(Sorry not to have responded myself, mharko. I’m still quite foggy and unwell with this damned respiratory virus I’ve been battling, and it’s been all I can manage to get a few words on the page over here every day or two.)
In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting mandatory, random bag-checks.
So: the military will now be in the subways, with the power to detain and arrest, rummaging through women’s purses and through whatever else riders might be carrying. The Governess, when asked whether citizens had the right to refuse to be searched (perhaps you have some personal item in your bag that you don’t want soldiers to be pawing at), said “Yes, and we can refuse them. They can walk.”
Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person? With this in mind, will there also now be pat-downs?
What about profiling? In order to avoid charges of Discrimination, the vilest sin imaginable, will these “random” checks mean that seventy-year-old grandmothers will be spread-eagled against the wall while disheveled, gibbering young men with the flame of predatory madness in their eyes walk by? I guess we’ll have to see.
Meanwhile, on Long Island, the discovery of scattered body parts, beginning with a woman’s head and a man’s arm, led to the arrest of four people:
The gruesome foursome allegedly tried to conceal the corpses in a scheme so grisly that the drains, toilets, sinks and showers stopped working in the Amityville home where three of the accused had just moved weeks earlier, prosecutors claimed in Suffolk County court.
They have been released without bail.
Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.
In related news, a judge has refused to dismiss manslaughter charges against Daniel Penny, who valiantly subdued a menacing lunatic on the subway last year. (Penny is, of course, white, and the violent madman he restrained, with fatal consequences, was black.)
Here’s another story you might have missed (my italics):
Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app. (See links to prior CIS reports at the end of this post.)
But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”
Despite the shameless gaslighting about crime we are about to hear in this evening’s State of the Union address, it should be clear to all Americans that the ancient contract between ruler and ruled has not only been broken, but willfully so, and “with malice aforethought”. Does this make you angry?
If it doesn’t, God help us.
I note with grim satisfaction the retirement of the maleficent Victoria Nuland, the meddlesome witch whose machinations in Ukraine gave us the Maidan revolution in 2014, and everything that has happened since. In my opinion she has the blood of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of the Ukrainian nation, and the useless expense of many scores of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars on her talons.
Her withdrawal as the disaster she created enters its terminal phase is her tacit acknowledgement of what we’ve been saying here all along, namely that Ukraine’s prospects in this war were hopeless from the beginning. Having wrecked the place beyond recovery, and having sent the flower of its manhood to be maimed and slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands, she will now simply walk away — which seems to be business as usual for our State Department these days — to a well-padded life in corporate boardrooms, ivied campuses, and excellent restaurants. Rest assured that the Imperial Court, and the Mouth of Sauron, will assign the blame elsewhere.
Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the same problems, of course; there would be a division of labor, with different individuals or groups tackling a wide variety of questions and projects. What would make this distributed effort possible is that they will all be building on the same foundation of previously established theorems — so they know that as they strike out in new directions, whatever results they come back with will, if they have done their work carefully, will be consistent and coherent with each other’s work, and with the great edifice of mathematics that already exists.
The reason this sort of distributed cooperation is possible is that the entire framework is built, brick by brick (i.e., theorem by theorem), upon a consistent set of axioms. These axioms are few in number, and they are by definition unprovable. (If they could be proven, then they wouldn’t be axioms, but theorems, and they would in turn have to rest on even more fundamental, and ultimately unprovable, assumptions.) In other words, the regress has to stop somewhere, and where it stops is with a bedrock of postulates whose truth, although unprovable, is self-evident.
This means that for our imaginary mathematical society to be able to hang together and do useful work, its members have to agree on its axioms. (This is also what makes it possible for them to check and correct each other’s results.) If they cannot agree on axioms, they might as well split up, because they will disagree about everything else they try to accomplish, and the whole thing becomes at best a waste of time, and at worst an arena of bitter conflict.
The same is true of societies. If there is a shared framework of moral and civic axioms, then policy-making can proceed in a generally orderly and productive fashion. There will of course be disagreements, sometimes lively ones, about balancing priorities and choosing methods, but in broad terms the goals of the work will be in general alignment, because everyone involved is working from the same set of axioms.
In our ongoing conversation over at the Maverick Philosopher’s website, commenter Joe Odegaard offered a short list of aims that, throughout American history, have been our sturdy, and axiomatic, foundation:
• Strengthen the family
• Return self-governance to the people, and reduce the administrative state
• Defend national sovereignty and borders
• Secure liberty and freedom.
He then directed our attention to an article at Salon that decries each and every one of them as a wickedness to be resisted, as horrifying manifestations of “Christian nationalism”.
Lincoln, quoting Matthew 12:25, said “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The truth of that postulate should be self-evident as well — and if isn’t already, I believe it soon will be.
In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted a link to the article in Bill’s comment-thread. It seems relevant enough today that I’ll take the opportunity to repost it here as well.
You can read the essay here.
Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally.
Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, a career criminal and drug addict who died of a heart attack, brought on by obesity, cardiac disease, and a fentanyl/methamphetamine overdose while violently resisting arrest by a police officer who was using standard restraint procedures. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was crucified in a kangaroo court and sent to prison, where he was recently stabbed nearly to death.
George Floyd’s funeral — with his corpulent remains solemnly paraded in a white, horse-drawn hearse — was broadcast with reverence by all of the nation’s major media outlets, and his coffin then went on a national tour to lie in state in several of the nation’s major cities, as if he were a martyred saint or a fallen national hero, rather than a recidivist hoodlum who, among his other crimes, had once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint.
As far as I can tell, none of our broadcast media are paying any attention at all to the funeral of Ms. Riley, a young nursing student who had her head smashed to a pulp by a murderous alien who should never have been here at all. She had been jogging on the UGA campus when she was attacked.
When I was a schoolboy, we pledged our allegiance to “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Are any of those still true?
I’ve been nursing a surprisingly debilitating cold (or flu, or something) for the past few days. It makes it difficult to summon up the energy to do much of anything, and I’ve been unable to concentrate the little grey cells enough to write anything worth reading. (I did manage another comment or two in that thread over at Bill’s place, but am unfit for anything more substantial.)
Back soon, I hope.
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer
With that observation in mind, have a look at this item from Michael Lind.
American media consumers have been soaking for years in a poisonous marinade of lies about our role in Ukraine.
With a hat-tip to Dave Benner at Twitter, here is RFK Jr with an antidote: a history lesson that is brief, concise, and accurate.
For a decade, US involvement in Ukraine has been based on a pack of lies. pic.twitter.com/qZPgnDF7eS
— Dave Benner, Nemesis of Neocons (@dbenner83) February 26, 2024
On the road. Back Tuesday.
Update, Tuesday evening: I’m back home, but after dropping the lovely Nina at JFK last night for a 1:35 a.m. flight to Hong Kong (to visit our grandkids), and then driving five hours back to Wellfleet, getting to bed just before sunup, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, I’m feeling more than a little “under the weather”. (I am, apparently, not quite as young as I used to be.) Will resume normal operations soon.
P.S. I did manage to add a couple of comments today to a post over at Bill Vallicella’s place, if you’re interested.