tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47314067944907168172024-03-26T23:37:54.826-07:00The ImmigrantA blog allows one to pontificate without the additional inconvenience of having to be Pope. Bless you, my children (in the nicest, most secular way, of course).
This blog records the admittedly often cranky reflections of a retired Professor of Philosophy with strongly conservative inclinations. The reflections range over a wide variety of topics that include philosophy, history, biography, and language.
Please refrain from sanctimony -- thank you for stifling any tempting platitudes.The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.comBlogger153125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-30382460414306940592021-09-17T15:33:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:33:56.753-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2020/11/17/152-american-jinos-israelis-and-the-election/">#152:
American Jinos, Israelis, and the Election</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">November 17, 2020</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Why do American Jews and Israelis have such different political
inclinations?</p>
<p class="JPS2">American Jewry is absorbist (“assimilationist”), while
Israeli Jewry is nationalist.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I</p>
<p class="JPS2">About 5,000 years ago, living among the Hittites, Abraham
famously said to them, “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">And until recently in living memory, all his descendants lived
exactly as he did, as strangers and sojourners in foreign lands. The
friendliness of those lands varied enormously, but even when it was there, it
was never reliable. So, what were Jews to do and what are Jews to do now?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Their options have always been very limited: 1) remain
unapologetically identifiable, 2) be absorbed (commonly called “assimilated”),
or 3) escape to a friendlier venue. Each of these options has always had
attendant costs and benefits.</p>
<p class="JPS2">All things considered, American Jews have seen option 2),
absorption, as the best. Putting it in religious terms, option 1) is that of
living Orthodox, which can be risky. Option 3) has involved a lot of risky
relocations and only in recent times has had the shelter of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
available. This has left only absorption, which has taken the form of being
either Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist. According to PEW research,
90% of American Jews are non-Orthodox.</p>
<p class="JPS2">On the other hand, in Israel, according to Wikipedia, in a “2010
a report released by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics showed that 8% of
Israel’s Jewish population defines itself as ultra-Orthodox, 12% as
Orthodox, 13% as traditional-religious, 25% as traditional, and 42% as
secular, on a descending scale of religiosity.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">However you parse those numbers, it’s clear that Israeli Jews are
anywhere from three to five times as religious as American Jews. This alone is
enough to indicate two different cultures. One is thus tempted to ask:</p>
<p class="JPS2">Why are Israeli Jews more religious?</p>
<p class="JPS2">But this question is instructively wrong. The better question is:</p>
<p class="JPS2">Why are American Jews less religious?</p>
<p class="JPS2">I say that this is the revealing question because, on the face of
it, American Jews are making counter-intuitive political decisions which seem
to correlate with their (lack of) religiosity. The more religious they are, the
more their political stances make sense; the less religious, the less they make
sense. This has been the case since the Russian Revolution, but has never been
seen in such stark clarity as in the current presidential <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> election.
The Democrat Party has never been as explicitly anti-Semitic as it is now, and
Jews have never seen an administration as explicitly pro-Israel as that of
President Trump. Yet, American Jews voted 70% for the Democrat, Joe Biden. On
the other hand, 83% of the Orthodox voters voted pro Trump. In addition, most
Israelis love not only President Trump, but Evangelicals as well.
This suggests that there is something about the non-religiosity which is
determining non-rational counter-intuitive political behaviour.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And the answer, I think, is that absorption is seen as
the strategically most attractive option in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region>
but not in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And absorption inevitably involves abandoning the element which
has unified the Jewish people over thousands of years, specifically
their religion. This movement is supported by increasing marriage
outside the faith, loss of Hebrew, and the collaboration of American rabbis
with the anti-Semitic Protestant churches.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Alternatively, the state of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> is supported by a
nationalism based on a common language and a common religion, a nationalism
which is strategically essential to its survival.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And one of the less appealing costs of absorption, an otherwise
attractive option, is that of having to vote sometimes against your own
interests. It’s simple, really: if you wanna be a member of our club, then our
enemies are your enemies, whether you like them or not. That’s the deal! And
give up that old-timey religion! It leads to nationalism, and we
don’t like nationalists here, even if, or especially when, they’re
Jews!</p>
<p class="JPS2">There’s a complex relationship here between religion, absorption,
and nationalism. For more on Jewish nationalism and the international Left, see
my blog post #143.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Staying alive suggests different decisions and such different
decisions lead to different cultures. As the Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is
local.” So, what are the local cultural differences?</p>
<p class="JPS2">II</p>
<p class="JPS2">Jews living in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> live in a sea of non-Jews
containing varying degrees of anti-Semitism. But this anti-Semitism varies
greatly with time, place, and, most important, the degree to which a Jew
is identifiable. Being absorbed means above all else being merged
into the environment. Since the road to success in recent decades in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> has been
through academe, assimilation has meant merging and blending with the dominant
academic culture, a culture which is almost universally secular.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In other words, being blandly Jewish/Protestant secular has been
incentivised by the American environment and Jews have predictably responded
positively to this offer: give up your identity and enjoy the material benefits
of success.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The numbers seem to suggest that Israelis are more
resistant to the siren call of material success, but nothing is farther from
the truth. Israelis are easily as materialistic as any other group. The
difference between the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region>
and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region> for Jews is not
that one group is greedier than the other, it is rather that there does
not exist in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region></st1:place>
the same incentive to assimilate. But there does exist an equal and opposite
incentive to nationalism.</p>
<p class="JPS2">To put it another way, Jews in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> also live in a sea of
anti-Semitic non-Jews. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
has been and is surrounded by Islamic hostiles. But while assimilation is a
rational way of dealing with anti-Semitism in the American context, it is most
certainly not in the Islamic context. It is quite possible to
become a faux Protestant and live comfortably with that, if bad faith
is your thing. It would be immeasurably more difficult to become
a faux Muslim in, say, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Jordan</st1:place></st1:country-region> and live comfortably (or
very long) with that. Though, of course, the
Spanish Marranos did manage with varying success to pull it off with
Christianity in the 15th C.</p>
<p class="JPS2">On the contrary, there exists in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region>
an important and opposite incentive to retain the Jewish identity
since the very existence of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
is precisely as a Jewish State. And a Jewish State is one
with Jewish citizens. Recognizably Jewish
citizens. Nationalism is absolutely essential to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s
survival within its geographical context. Only nationalism gives the Israeli
citizenry the will to persist against overwhelming surrounding hatred and
enmity.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III</p>
<p class="JPS2">There are a number of factors which reinforce the impulse to be
absorbed, just as there are factors in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> reinforcing the impulse to
retain cultural/religious difference.</p>
<p class="JPS2">For example, it is not surprising that the Episcopalian church
has been wrestling with inside forces intent on using the Church in support of
the anti-Israel BDS (divestment) movement. Are these forces motivated by moral
concerns over the Palestinian issue? Perhaps. But since these same voices never
speak out against Palestinian terrorism, the idea is suspect. Is it rather
simple old fashioned anti-Semitism? Possibly for some, but perhaps underlying
it is this: assimilate or die! The good news on this is that it would
mean that the Episcopalian anti Semites are not racial anti Semites;
the bad news is that they’re still religious anti-Semites.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Here’s the bottom line: Protestants are happy to accept Jews as
long as they don’t insist on being “Jewish.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">But the Episcopalians and other Protestants pushing absorption
are not preaching to a hostile audience. American Jews look down their noses at
the Evangelicals who love them as they are, but they suck up embarrassingly
to the “elitist” Protestants. I guess, if you’re going to sell your birthright,
you may as well make it worthwhile by selling it to the “upper class.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">In addition, American non-Orthodox synagogues are all-in with the
Protestants on pushing the Leftist “social justice” agenda. Their excuse is
that the Torah is all about “living the moral life.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">IV</p>
<p class="JPS2">I’ll end with mentioning that religiosity has been under assault
since the European 18th C Enlightenment when the burgeoning science
identified the church as its competitor and enemy. This was not the birth of
merely a branch of knowledge, it was the birth of an all encompassing new faith
which was mandated to resolve all human problems including the moral and
political. It is no coincidence that Marxism represented itself as a
“scientific” solution to humanity’s problems. Marxism was the lineal descendant
of the Enlightenment.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Russian intellectuals and aristocracy thought of themselves as
the pupils of Europe, primarily of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Many of them could speak
and read Western European languages and consumed the post-Enlightenment
literatures which were increasingly socialistic, even well before the
“Communist Manifesto.” More and more, these European doctrines filtered into
the Russian downtrodden masses which included more and more Jews.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Those Jews tended to reject their ancestral religion as primitive
superstition and took on the new European anarchist socialist doctrines as
their new religion. They thought they were abandoning the
superstitious religious past and committing themselves to the new modern non
religious scientific doctrines of the advanced Europeans. They didn’t see that
they were simply redirecting their religious needs and passions to a new
narrative which didn’t include the word “God.” The transition was easy since
traditional Judaism contained a strong moral component which resembled the
messages of socialism. These Jews in effect retained their ancestral religion,
gave it another name, shifted from the bible to Das Capital, and became
its fanatic acolytes. It was a religion, nonetheless, and they gave it all the
mindless uncritical passion and loyalty that is the hall mark of the religious
devotee.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Many, many of these anarchist socialist devotee were among the
Jewish masses who found their way to the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place> from around 1880 to
around 1910. Their children and their children’s children find assimilating to
the American Protestant culture an effortless transition, they have
become Jinos: Jews in Name Only.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This does not augur well for the future.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-6769537097381819992021-09-17T15:32:00.005-07:002021-09-17T15:32:49.045-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2020/10/13/151-originalist-vs-living-document-justices/">#151:
Originalist vs Living Document Justices</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">October 13, 2020</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">This is a follow-up on my last post which dealt with RBG.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Over the last hundred years or so, a meme has gradually taken
root in public consciousness that there are two legitimate “philosophies” of
jurisprudence which members of the SCOTUS may have, an “Originalist” or a
“Living Document” philosophy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Constitution of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> is its fundamental governing
document which over-rides all legislation, federal or local. The Supreme Court
of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>
is the institution charged with adjudicating potential conflicts between
legislation and the Constitution.</p>
<p class="JPS2">“Originalists” believe that the document should be read literally
for the meaning intended by the writers; “Living Document” types believe that
what was written then must be “interpreted” in terms of current social and
political “realities.” The first believe that what is written means what it
says, the second that what is written means whatever we want it to.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Getting the lay public to accept this concept was the first
victory in a war to nullify the Constitution.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The second victory was getting the lay public to accept the idea
that the two “philosophies” should be “balanced” on the court.</p>
<p class="JPS2">As in my prior post, my central point here is that a commitment
to the “Living Document” view of the Constitution must be a disqualification
for serving on the SCOTUS. The reason is that a Living Document candidate for
membership on the court is nothing other than a “Manchurian” Candidate, an
attempt at a hostile insertion into the Court intent on the Court’s
nullification.</p>
<p class="JPS2">How do we know this?</p>
<p class="JPS2">We must ask ourselves what it is precisely that makes liberals
fight so ferociously and vulgarly for Living Document justices?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The answer is so very simple, yet it reveals all.</p>
<p class="JPS2">They want Living Document justices because their initiatives fail
the constitutional test in an originalist court.</p>
<p class="JPS2">That is, their initiatives are unconstitutional when
the Constitution is read literally.</p>
<p class="JPS2">It follows that what liberals need and want are justices who are
willing to IGNORE the constitution.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Some may argue that this is unfair, since they do not intend to
“ignore,” they just want to “read the text within the modern context.” But this
argument, if it is one, is either naive or disingenuous. Once the literal is
left behind, the door is open to whatever the imagination can conjure, and
sometimes the imagination is servant to a political agenda.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In the view of liberals, the Constitution is no more than an
inconvenient, quaint, antiquated legacy which cannot be removed, and thus must
be “worked around.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Living Document justices are constitutional “work arounds.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">That great Constitutional law professor, Obama, implied as much
in his statement to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014: “On
issue after issue, we cannot rely on a rule-book written for a different
century.” And in this view, he was merely expressing the general feeling among
liberals at large.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Living Document justices are anti-constitutional, and thus
should never be admitted to the Court.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-69233435950172028232021-09-17T15:32:00.000-07:002021-09-17T15:32:00.322-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2020/09/26/150-ruth-bader-ginsburg/">#150
Ruth Bader Ginsburg</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">September 26, 2020</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Before I start, I want to make it clear (full disclosure) that
unlike Obama I am NOT a Constitutional Law Professor. However, since, like
Obama, I have no published articles on any legal matters on my cv, I feel as
free as he might to venture my opinions.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The adulation being heaped upon RBG is nothing less than
nauseating. It appears to be a function exclusively of the fact that she
was female and “progressive.” Some would say also because she was Jewish, but
given that the adulation is generated mostly by left-wing political
considerations, her Jewishness is a plus only by current convenience.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What makes her canonization particularly offensive is that she
was not merely an undistinguished jurist, but that she was actually a player in
the Left’s program to transform the Court from its Constitutionally defined
function into a supra-Congressional legislative body.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Make no mistake about this: a “progressive” member of the SCOTUS
is an inside enemy of the SCOTUS.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The great victory of the post-WW II Left in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> is that of
transforming a revolutionary ideology into a mere “policy
disagreement.” Progressivism is not a “loyal opposition” on the British
parliamentary model, it is an ideology intent on, in Obama’s words, a
“fundamental transformation of the society.” This means destroying what there
is and building something new on the smoldering ruins. Treating Progressivism
as a friendly partner in societal improvement is like assuming the Palestinians
want to find a way to live together in peace with <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>. We’re watching the true
face of Progressivism being revealed on a daily basis in the burning <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> cities. In
effect, the Lefties have come “out of the closet” and what we see is not
pretty.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The notion that “conservatism” and “progressivism” somehow
“deserve” to be, “need to be,” “balanced” on the court makes both the former
and the latter political. In fact, the former should not be or
be considered political, while the latter definitely is.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What I mean is that SCOTUS conservatism is nothing other than the
position that the Constitution should continue to play the role defined for
itself by the Constitution, that it should continue to exist in the form
envisioned by the framers.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Progressivism, on the other hand, is committed to making the
court an unofficial extension of the legislative process, precisely
the opposite of what the Framers had in mind.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Thus, the idea that there are two “philosophies” of the SCOTUS is
a convenient Leftist strategic fiction. There are not two
“philosophies, there is just either governance by the Constitution or
governance without one.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The SCOTUS was originally meant to perform an intentionally
limited role, that of deciding whether a law is consistent with the principles
enumerated in the Constitution. Yes or no.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The fact that the appointment of a new jurist is an object of
violent contention shows in stark contrast that the Left has succeeded in
turning the court into a political institution.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Progressives have a problem with the Constitution (Obama said
that it is “outdated” and should be removed, and he was a “Constitutional law
professor”). The problem for these revolutionaries is that the Constitution in
its original form is an impediment to their totalitarian statist ambitions.
More specifically, it is that the Constitution explicitly allocates to the
federal government ONLY the powers and functions allocated to
it by the Constitution. And what is not allocated to the federal
government belongs to the individual states to decide. The document
intentionally and explicitly places a definite limit on what the federal
government can do. Even a “constitutional law professor” like Obama should be
aware that the Framers were intensely aware of the states’ hostile suspicions
of a central federal government and that they crafted the Constitution as a
bulwark against federal power. The Constitution is intended to be for the
protection of the individual states against the federal
government, not an instrument of federal power. But the goal of
Progressives is specifically the incremental augmentation of federal power with
themselves in charge.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Progressivism attempts to deal with this inconvenient restriction
by arguing that the Constitution must be thought of as a “living document”
which must take into account issues of which the founding fathers were simply
unaware. Such a change would have the effect of defeating the precise intention
of the framers, since it would allow (as it frequently already has) the court
to address issues not given to the federal government by the Constitution. This
is the neutralizing of the Framers’ intent.</p>
<p class="JPS2">They argue that the Constitution is “living” in the sense that
what is written there can be “interpreted” as meaning either more or less what
a literal reading of the words would support. But this is not what “interpret”
means in this case. The intended role of the SCOTUS ab initio was to
check whether legislation met Constitutional requirements, nothing
more. The written decisions of the court accrue to the original document
and become, in a sense, an extension of the document. Thus, each
court must check challenged legislation against the original document as
well as against all relevant subsequent decisions. This is, by intent, a
purely scholarly, academic project, politically neutral.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Of course, times have indeed changed and the founding fathers
knew nothing about the current state of, for example, reproductive science and
its possibilities.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The key question here, however, is precisely what is the
relevance of this fact to the nature of the SCOTUS and the Constitution?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The answer is: nothing.</p>
<p class="JPS2">All the changes of the modern world can be accommodated from a
legal point of view exactly where the founding fathers located them: within
state and federal legislatures. Of course, the Congress still retains the
ability to legislate nationally on all matters explicitly granted to it.
And, really, it can rightfully pass any laws that are not rejected by
supreme courts, either those of the states themselves or that of the nation.</p>
<p class="JPS2">From this point of view, RBG should not be lionized;
rather she should be considered someone who should never have been
appointed to the court in the first place. There should only be people on the
court who are committed to the existing Constitution and its intended role.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Any fair minded observer must note that RBG is the very perfect
model of an activist Judge, which is a judge who brings her personal
political preferences to bear on her decisions. She made her feelings about
Donald Trump public while still in office. What judge who takes the role of the
Supreme Court seriously does that? It’s appalling and by itself sufficient to
warrant contempt for her. And yet, while Lefties carry on about how she was
afraid that President Trump would be able to fill her seat, her massive ego was
such that she remained in office during the Obama years! Surely, were
her Progressive objectives so important to her, she would have resigned at that
time. After all, she was already in her 80s when President Trump took
office. </p>
<p class="JPS2">A second point. According to the Constitution, the President has
complete power to nominate a person of his choice at any time within
his term. The Senate can refuse to consent. But what must be emphasized is that
the only legitimate ground for a refusal is that the nominee does not
have the scholarly credentials to review legislation in the context
of the Constitution and its written history of decisions. And even here, since
every jurist has a small army of “clerks” who are expert and competent, this is
a weak ground for refusal. RBG had around 150 clerks spread over her many years
of obstructionism on the Court.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In effect, the very act of refusing a nomination implies that the
real role of the court is being ignored and that the real issue is that of
placing someone on the court who will represent a
particular political point of view.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And for those, who like RBG don’t like the Constitution the way
it is, they always have the legal expedient of attempting a revision or the
creation of an entirely new one (the French are on their fifth one).</p>
<p class="JPS2">But it rather suits the purposes of the Left to retain the SCOTUS
and the Constitution as a hollow pretense while using it to rule on whatever
suits their personal moral and legal fancies.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Goodbye, RBG, RIP and may we never see your like again.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-18777542752876012222021-09-17T15:30:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:30:41.541-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/two-thoughts-on-the-coronavirus/">#149:
Three Thoughts on the Coronavirus</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">May 1, 2020</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">I have three reflections on covid-19, one specific to N.Y.C., one
on the government mandated lock-downs, and one grim final thought.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I. N.Y.C.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Many have speculated on the very high numbers of infected and
dead in N.Y.C. in comparison with other cities and most of those speculations
seem plausible. As in most cases, phenomena are most likely determined by
multiple causes. I want to add yet one more such speculation, as well as what
seems to me would be a reasonable precaution if it is true.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yes, N.Y.C. and more specifically <st1:city w:st="on">Manhattan</st1:city> are among the most densely
populated places on earth and sheer density might well make some contribution
to infection and death rates. But I would suggest that the general notion of
density conceals a more specific and even addressable causal
factor: elevators.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We now believe that the virus is airborne as well as on surfaces;
we also believe that the virus can survive for possibly days outside a host.
This suggests to me that elevators are excellent contamination chambers,
retaining exhaled viruses from both symptomatic and unsymptomatic passengers
well after those passengers leave the elevator.</p>
<p class="JPS2">If this is correct, then we ought first to modify our notion of
social distancing by extending it from space to also time. Not only ought we be
cautious of spatial proximity, but also temporal proximity. While we don’t want
to be immediately next to another person in an elevator, neither do
we want to be immediately after a person on an elevator. Wearing a
mask may well be more important when entering an elevator than it is when
taking a walk outside.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The consideration of elevator based contamination is of special
importance when considering hospital elevators. If elevators are contamination
chambers generally, then they are even more so when located in hospitals.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Secondly, if it is true that ultraviolet light destroys covid-19
viruses, then it would be prudent to have elevators equipped with ultraviolet
lights which turn on automatically whenever the elevator is empty. This could
be done by linking the lights to the panel controlling the elevator motion: the
lights would be programmed to turn on whenever no floor destination has been
chosen.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II. Government Mandated Lock-downs</p>
<p class="JPS2">There is now considerable discussion of the reasonableness of
lock-downs. Since the spread of the disease is clearly from person to person,
in the absence early on of an understanding of the virus’ mode of operation,
keeping people away from each other seemed the obvious if crude solution to an
immediate and crushing problem and, hence, reasonable.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But what had to be kept in mind was what was understood to be the
clear and present nature of the crushing problem. According to the daily
reports from state and federal governments the crushing problem being attacked
was not the number of deaths and/or infections per se, but
rather the overwhelming of available health resources.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is an extremely important point when considering mandated
lock-downs since it gives us a measure of the justification of those lock-downs
as well as a measure to be used in adjusting the lock-downs.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Hospital beds and PPE equipment are currently far more available
than at any time during the crisis. This would suggest that by the government’s
argument for locking down, it is time to unlock.</p>
<p class="JPS2">At the same time, many are suffering and likely dying of
non-covid related conditions which really should be addressed by the health
care system. And this does not take into account the health implications of the
catastrophic effect the lock-downs have had on the economy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Since we know now that the threat of death applies almost
entirely to the elderly with co-morbidities, our policy should clearly be the
following.</p>
<p class="JPS2">1) Focus protection on on nursing homes and on the education of
the elderly. And</p>
<p class="JPS2">2) Open the economy in stages, monitoring the impact covid cases
on the health care system. In other words, we should use covid hospital
usage as our instrument for governing the rate and extent of lock-down release.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III. One final thought</p>
<p class="JPS2">Since it is becoming ever more clear that the virus is not only
present in far more people than previously thought (and most probably is still
spreading at an exponential rate), we need to ask why it would be that in many
places, the death rate is either stable or dropping. Is this evidence that
social distancing is working? Possibly. But perhaps more likely is the grim
possibility that the virus is slowly running out of victims. </p>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">We may wind up with an entire elderly generation dead
and the remaining population infected, but not suffering.</span>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-45616050052938399062021-09-17T15:29:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:29:46.081-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/148-computer-models-and-chicken-guts/">#148:
Computer Models and Chicken Guts</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">April 10, 2020</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">During this pandemic, I, like many others, have been watching the
daily corona virus update and have been not a little disturbed by the huge role
that government has given to computer models in setting public policies. This
is frightening.</p>
<p class="JPS2">It’s frightening because it reminds me of steering by chicken
guts, among other entrails, in ancient times. Alexander, for example,
represented then common practice by consulting his horuscipator before each
battle.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Should I do this or should I do that? Is the timing of this
battle good for us? Etc. etc etc.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, said the horuscipator, Just check the guts,
stupid!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Of course, no horuscipator ever called Alexander “stupid,” at
least not twice.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We’re rightly unimpressed by this way of making important
decisions, studying steaming animal guts just doesn’t seem a very reliable way
of choosing direction. Though, to be fair, Alexander did ok for quite while
steering by guts. Maybe he was using other decision strategies as well.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Is the use of computer modeling just the modern form of chicken
guts?</p>
<p class="JPS2">This question raises two other ones.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Is computer modeling a better decision maker than chicken guts?
And</p>
<p class="JPS2">If neither of these methods are any good, why have we ever used
either one?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Those of you who have been loyal readers of my blog already know
that I am very skeptical of the use of computer models in decision making. In
post #43, I introduced the adjective “scientistic” for arguments which have the
trappings of science without the actual features of science which make it
compelling of belief. That was in 2009. I revisited the theme three more times,
the last being post #144 in 2018. I’m nothing if not consistent. The last time
I brought it up was in connection with the great climate hoax in which computer
models play a central role. [please remember, I am not denying that
climate changes are occurring. I am also not denying that human
activity has a role in that. I am denying that we know anything about
that beyond what our senses tell us.]</p>
<p class="JPS2">Recently, the major player in the daily briefing, Dr. Anthony
Fauci, downplayed the reliability of computer models because, as he ostensibly
said, there are too many variables. Too many variables?? Duh, Dr. Fauci,
we really needed an expert in epidemiology to tell us that?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Who has not watched the weather channel when a hurricane was
being mapped for landfall and not seen the computer modeled paths
diverge? Which one, the people on shore can be heard to cry, “which one of
the models is the right one?”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, what all of this watching of computer models has taught us,
I think, is this.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The models increasingly converge on the truth the closer they get
to the event.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This means that the only computer model that actually gets it
right is the one on the day of the fact. Sadly, that’s exactly the time we no
longer have any need of an accurate prediction. Going back, the further from
the day of the fact, the more the models diverge ever further and we
have no way of knowing which one is closer to the eventual outcome than
the others.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This means, pardon the French, that computer models are nothing
more than today’s steaming chicken guts and absolutely no @#$%ing use in
predicting the future!</p>
<p class="JPS2">But why computer models rather than chicken guts? The reason, I
think, is not a mystery. Horuscipation by chicken guts is excluded from today’s
tolerated bullshit sphere. It’s certainly not that bullshit is no longer
tolerated, but that if bullshit is to be tolerated, it must be
appropriately dressed. Primitive animistic religious bullshit does not market
well anymore; however, modern scientistic bullshit is very popular.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Which leads me to the second question. If neither chicken guts
nor computer models have any reliability in prediction making, why do we use
them?</p>
<p class="JPS2">I only remember one thing from Hannah Arendt’s The Human
Condition; she wrote that the statesman is in the terrible situation of
being forced to make far reaching plans and decisions knowing full well at the
time he makes them that the conditions which prompt them will change in utterly
unpredictable ways from the first moment of their implementation. And that this
is true for whatever adjustments he introduces in response to the changes.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This insight on Arendt’s part seemed both true and tremendously
important to me at the time and still does. It means that governmental
management is at its very best a lucky groping towards the future, not a
competent piloted steering towards a clearly discerned goal.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is a terrible stress on the inner life of any leader who
understands his situation and it is understandable that he would reach out for
and cling to any straw, no matter how insubstantial, that gives him at least a
cover story for what he did if circumstances turn in a bad direction.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Many things have changed from ancient times to the present, but
human nature does not. No one wants to be the one left holding the bag,
everyone wants a cover story. Computer models are today’s chicken guts.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Fauci made the ultimate political gaffe, he accidentally told the
truth: there are too many variables! This means that neither he nor anyone
in his cohort had the remotest idea of where the pandemic would lead and, in a
panic, they chose the chicken guts with the most extreme predictions to guide
their policy suggestions.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, countries all around the world struggle with the
consequences of policies based on the colors, shapes, and distributions of the
steaming guts of innocent chickens.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-31094965262763853632021-09-17T15:27:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:28:24.771-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/147-modern-antisemitism-and-the-left/">#147:
Modern Antisemitism and the Left</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6pt; line-height: 150%;">May 8, 2019</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">A number of my friends have expressed concern over the way in
which Antisemitism is flourishing around the world, but particularly how it is
becoming accepted as the “new normal” in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place>. I must confess that while I’m
saddened and upset by this, I’m not really surprised by it. For anyone with any
awareness of history, this must really seem like deja vu all over
again or, for a more contemporary reference, like Groundhog Day. Really, we’ve
been here before, even to the use of the demeaning cartoons.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Current events remind me of Tom Lehrer’s lines in his song “National
Brotherhood Week”:</p>
<p class="JPS2">“Oh the protestants hate the Catholics</p>
<p class="JPS2">and the Catholics hate the protestants</p>
<p class="JPS2">and the Hindus hate the Muslims</p>
<p class="JPS2">and everybody hates the Jews, …”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, yes, almost everybody does hate the Jews. The far right
hates the Jews, the far Left hates the Jews, and the smarmy upper-crust
Protestants in the middle hate the Jews. Even many Jews hate the Jews. Only the
Evangelicals and Trump don’t hate the Jews.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What I write below is largely the body of an email I sent to a
close friend who complained that identity politics just creates “boundaries
between people, resentment, and anger” and that this should stop. My friend is
quite right, but it won’t stop, not at all; it’s too useful.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We all know that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
was founded by people with a strong Socialist ideology, an ideology which is
now pretty much on the ropes there. But the fact that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> began
with that ideology obscures the fact that this tiny state embodies perfectly
what modern Socialists most utterly hate. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s reason for being, its
essence, is to be precisely a Jewish state. Not just another
interesting small democratic state, but a specifically Jewish state.
This, the Left cannot allow.</p>
<p class="JPS2">First, creating boundaries between people, resentment, and anger
is not just an accidental by-product of a political strategy: it
is the political strategy. Fragmentation, frustration, rage are a
central OBJECTIVE of the Left, not a regrettable collateral side-effect.
Remember Rahm Emmanuel’s infamous line: “you never want a serious crisis to go
to waste.” People laughed wryly at that, they should have thought a little
further. The corollary of his thought is this: “create, celebrate, and
encourage a crisis whenever you can, it is the path to internationalist,
socialist victory.” The Left sees the existence of a national identity based on
inherited values and myths, as its biggest challenge in gaining world hegemony.
And, make no mistake about it, world hegemony is what they’re after.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And the Jews have always had a national identity, even when
they didn’t have a nation. They are the nationalists par excellence.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Left, on the other hand, is in its
essence internationalist; internationalism is not just one of its isolated
party platform items, it is defining of it, just as nationalism is defining of
the Jews. [Please note that the media (and even well-intentioned conservatives)
allow the Leftists to choose the political vocabulary: thus the
“internationalism” of 1930s Leftie scribblers has been lost and replaced with
the anodyne “Globalism” to disconnect it from its Leninist/Stalinist past.]</p>
<p class="JPS2">Thus, fragmenting polities is essential to the
dissolution of the Left’s targets. To see this, one must understand that the
Left, from the time of its inception, has not ever been a “friendly competitor”
on the world stage capable of “agreeing to disagree” with it its political
neighbors. Au contraire.</p>
<p class="JPS2">If you want to conquer the world’s nations, you can try to do it
by military means, like Hitler tried, but, even if you succeed, they’ll fight a
never-ending war of attrition against you. Far better to destroy what makes
them nations: their cultural identities. Dissolve their cultural boundaries.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Their idea is simplicity itself: once populations’ cultural
differences are erased, the physical boundaries will fall of themselves. But
Jews insist on their differences. And so do Christians. In Hussein
Obama’s famous line, they “cling” to their religions. Since the Lefties’ target
is the West, these Western religions must be undermined. Check. Patriotism
must be undermined. Check. Sexual identity must be undermined. Check.
Use of a single national language must be undermined. Check. Common
national narratives and icons must be undermined. Check. And so it goes.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The modern Left has learned the lessons of imperial colonialism
and the Austro-Hungarian empire well. Political governance of multi-cultural
components has always proven impossible, the components simply refuse to remain
governed and wage irredentist wars against the empires. This was true for hard
military control of the kind in French colonial <st1:place w:st="on">Africa</st1:place>,
and it was true of Austro-Hungary’s relatively benevolent rule of its ethnic
components. The Left has seen this and understood; its solution for this
problem is simply to attempt the destruction of those cultural identities. The
war, then, is between Socialist a-cultural internationalism and
mercantile cultural nationalism (whether totalitarian or
democratic).</p>
<p class="JPS2">The existence of Nazi Germany and its defeat made it possible for
the Left to claim the moral high ground, however, not only for democracy,
but for the new Internationalism as well, i.e.
“Globalism.” It’s no coincidence that the post-war Leftist
intelligentsia’s postmortem identified specifically and
exclusively nationalism as the source of the Nazi horror. They didn’t
write about French nationalism, of course. And the British? No nationalism
there either, eh? But the Leftie scribblers still found the virus
in nationalism. No more nationalism for the world! they cried.</p>
<p class="JPS2">PLEASE NOTE: By abjuring nationalism, the Left is not
abjuring world take-over, it is just abjuring world take-over by a particular
national culture. It’s goal, apparently, is to protect us from being tyrannized
by a national culture by tyrannizing us without one.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, Hitler learned a lot from Lenin and Stalin, especially their
mistakes. He did NOT reject Socialism, he improved Socialism to avoid the
commies’ mistakes. Thus, he did not take over industries, he made them
partners. Today’s Western Socialists are following that part of the Hitler
model. Giant Western industries and the Socialists BOTH want internationalism
(“Globalism”) and the industries are in partnership with the Socialists to
achieve that. Unlike Hitler, they prefer to gain their ends
by eroding national boundaries rather than by obliterating them with
tanks and explosives. Modern popular liberalism is a cultural
anti-national identity weapon and it is wielded by and through the social
media. Bottom line: internationalism is actually imperialism and
colonialism (Lefties ought to have severe cognitive dissonance over this).</p>
<p class="JPS2">After WW II, Lefties all agreed that totalitarian socialism (viz.
Nazism or Communism) was not the way to go. Rather, it was what they liked to
call the “third way,” or “Democratic Socialism.” In fact, what it was was an adaptation
of Hitler’s model: Socialism in partnership with giant industry (like the EU).
Conservatives missed the boat at that point. If the third way was Hitler’s
partnership of state and industry, only lacking the nationalist element, surely
(they should have noticed) that the third way was necessarily
internationalist, i.e. bent on world revolution and hegemony. And surely they
should have noticed that that the plan would involve the systematic attack on
Western cultures to make way for a homogeneous world population of worker
drones.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Returning to our starting issue, these reflections lead me to a
modest conclusion on Antisemitism.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There are many converging forces leading to Antisemitism, the
attack on Jews is and has always been a perfect storm. But, I think, one of the
most potent of these ever present factors is that of the Jews
insistence on retaining their distinct identity. Socialists have never
seen a Western democratic cultural identity they didn’t hate. It’s
obviously true that people were murdering Jews just for being Jews for a very
long time before the late 18th century (when arguably Socialism was spawned),
but that doesn’t mean that a significant factor in anti-Jewish hatred
throughout history does not figure also in a modern political theology. Jews
have always been hated for insisting on their difference, yes, and people have
always attacked them for their difference. What I’m saying is that this
propensity in people to hate the different group among them converges perfectly
with the Socialist hatred of cultures. And if supporting Antisemitism in
barely disguised ways causes more fragmentation and societal dissolution, say
the Socialists, all to the good!</p>
<p class="JPS2">I think only liberal Jews are blinded to the Antisemitism on the
Left. The rest of the Lefties simply are Antisemites. Antisemitism
was the one thing that 1930s Nazis and Sozis (Social Democrats) agreed on. Add
to that the American upper crust Protestant Antisemites. American Jews have
short memories. They have come to think that <st1:country-region w:st="on">America</st1:country-region>
is safe for Jews, but they forget how recent Jew “acceptance” has been in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place>.
From the 1880s to the 1950s (and beyond) Jews were NOT flavor of the month,
barred from professions, clubs, neighborhoods, etc. That kind of baked-in
Antisemitism does not disappear over a few decades. AND, not a small thing,
when the Democrat party went to Identity Politics, it automatically bought
Antisemitism with that package because the Democrat identity voting base is
itself already deeply Antisemitic! So, from a political point of view, Jews in
the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place>
are facing a double whammy from the Democrat party: 1) ingrained cultural
Antisemitism, and 2) minority identity based Antisemitism.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A couple more points. There was some grudging American Brahmin
Protestant sympathy for the Jews in the early 1880s, though the grudging
gradually increased and sympathy decreased by 1914. Similarly, there was
grudging sympathy after WW II, with the same gradual shift. Even in the 1960s
when I was in graduate school, I noticed a certain coolness in my chairman. I
was the only grad student not invited to soirees at his house and, I was told
by “sources”, it was because he was worried about me being near his daughter!
When job time came around, he offered me an interview at <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Wilberforce</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place>. But
that is an all black University, I responded, I’ll be eaten
alive (this was the woke 1960s). Take what you can get, he
replied, we fought WW II for you people, the least you can do is be
grateful.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Right. They fought WW II for “us people.” I didn’t take the
interview, and I was grateful … to be alive, that is, and in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>
(even though I was not going to be allowed to violate his daughter). Which
brings me to a second personal reflection.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I was around a year old in 1942 living with my family in <st1:city w:st="on">Marseilles</st1:city> when <st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region>
fell, as has been its habit since <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Waterloo</st1:place></st1:city>.
Our lives were saved by the timely help of the American Society of Friends, the
Quakers, who arranged for our escape via a harrowing trip into the relative
safety of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Switzerland</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
For years, I harbored a deep and abiding respect, admiration, and gratitude for
the Quakers. Doing a bit of research recently, I discovered that the current
Quakers are virulently pro-Palestinian and purveyors of the most extreme
anti-Zionist propaganda in the form of video documentaries among
others. What’s this all about, I cried, bitterly disappointed.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, there’s the usual. You know, anti-Zionism isn’t
Antisemitism, we’re not “against” Jews, just what their government does, blah,
blah, blah.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But what’s offending them? Probably many things, but here’s just
one.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We know that progressives like ethnic victims. There
are many reasons for this. But one is that the alien ethnicity is an effective
solvent of the host country’s culture. Introducing pockets of utterly different
ethnic populations into the host is a way of incrementally destroying the
host’s ability to preserve itself as a distinct cultural entity. The more
primitive, the more alien, the more deranged, the better they serve the Leftie
purpose. And <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
is the nation-state most notable for insisting on its cultural identity.
Progressives hate that. So, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>
must be destroyed.</p>
<p class="JPS2">All that said, it can’t be escaped that the Jews and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Israel</st1:country-region></st1:place>
are heir to their own historic infatuation with Leftism. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region> was born
in Socialism and has lived with it since its inception. What this means is that
Jews everywhere are dealing with both cognitive and emotional dissonance within
themselves. How should we live? they ask. Should we assimilate,
gradually relinquish our distinct identity? Should we retain our
uniqueness within the host culture? Should we make aliyah and make the journey
to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Jerusalem</st1:place></st1:city>?</p>
<p class="JPS2">If they assimilate, they lose their character after five thousand
years. If they remain a ghettoized population within a larger one, the larger
will inevitably turn on them. If they return to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>, they face the same
questions of cultural identity all over again. The Israeli Socialists will
lean, as all Socialists do, towards internationalization and the inevitable
blending of cultures and persons. The war between the homogenizers and the
nationalists exists everywhere, from the micro environment to the macro. There
is no escaping this dilemma, not even in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Right now, Trump and the U.S. Evangelicals are the only friends
Jews have on the North American continent. Sadly, the vast majority of
Left-wing Jews are too ideologically brain damaged to realize that.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-81005362531728107192021-09-17T15:26:00.000-07:002021-09-17T15:26:02.317-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/146-politics-discourse-and-dog-whistles/">#146
Politics, Discourse, and Dog Whistles</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">April 3, 2019</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">What’s a dog whistle? Non-metaphorically, it’s just a whistle
used for communicating with dogs. It’s only special feature is that it emits
sounds above the human audible spectrum. In other words, it’s a whistle that
dogs can hear, but humans can’t. However, the notion of a dog whistle has
become a metaphor for words and phrases alleged to have special meanings for
specific groups; such “dog whistles”, it’s alleged, make it possible to
communicate “hateful” ideas with those groups (the “dogs”) without the rest of
us, the “woke” and “near woke”, being aware of it. Leftist activists have made
the “dog whistle” accusation an attack against any speech not consistent with
their agenda. The “dog whistle” accusation is an attempt to cripple discourse,
to make discussion or debate or even mere conversation impossible.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The “dog whistle” meme has a long genealogy. Words and phrases
have often been used for special social or political purposes. Possibly the
earliest example of such a usage that of the password, as in the well-known
“shibboleth” of biblical fame. But there have also been groups who if not at
war, have been clandestine. Such groups invented such membership identifiers as
secret handshakes, signs, symbols, and even names. Peoples have always faced
the challenge of identifying each other in public spaces. Probably best known
of such are the Freemasons, but the use of such identifiers ranges across many
more groups. Any group looked at with suspicion or worse has been accused of
having such, so Jews were thought to have them, Knights Templar, homosexuals,
witches, communists, and members of the Cosa Nostra among many, many others.
People have always been hostile to “others” in their midst and those “others”
have almost always found ways of keeping their “otherness” secret. Secret
identifiers were a necessary way of allowing themselves to function without
attracting the attention of their their hostile hosts.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But while the use of secret identifiers served the
“others” group in question, it was quickly understood to have another
deadly use as well. The others, on the one hand, used the identifiers
to recognize their fellows, but the members of the host group, on the
other, could use the mere idea of the existence of such identifiers as a weapon
against anyone at all. The assumption of the existence of secret identifiers
was actually a gift to paranoiacs and malevolent actors capitalizing on
(sometimes justified) popular fears. The fact that the identifiers were
necessarily secret made this use of secret identifiers a perfect weapon. In
fact, it was soon clear that any group could be accused of using
secret identifiers, whether or not they were; after all, the identifiers were secret, that
is, invisible. Any sign, symbol, hand-motion, facial expression, etc.
could be singled out by a malevolent actor and attributed
to any group as evidence of their secret, malevolent conspiracies.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But up till now, I have been talking about the weaponizing of
putative secret identifiers by a host against a clandestine group within it. It
should be clear that the clandestine group was not characteristically using the
identifiers as a weapon against the host, even when it was an enemy of the host;
rather, the existence of possible identifiers was used by the host or elements
within it against some sub-group in the population (real or not).</p>
<p class="JPS2">But this is not the end of the story. Once a weapon is used, it
becomes accessible to everyone, even to the targets it had previously been
directed against.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This has happened in a BIG way with Socialists in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
They were once accused of using secret words and phrases to identify one
another (and probably were). They were the “other” group within a larger host.
But no more.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The “love that dare not speak its name” has now become
mainstream. No, I’m not talking about homosexuality, that’s been mainstream for
the past twenty years. Hell, it’s not even mainstream now,
it’s privileged mainstream. No, I’m talking about … Socialism!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Socialism has come out of the closet, and it’s come dressed for
war. And one of its main weapons is the secret identifier accusation. But now
the secret handshake has been turned around to become the “secret coded
message.” Since the 1920s the West has been seriously nervous about embedded
Socialist cohorts and has attacked whomever it suspected (often correctly) of
being a Soviet agent. These agents were thought of as using secret methods of
communication which included secret identifiers. Socialists, therefore, were
the targets of the secret identifier weapon.</p>
<p class="JPS2">When a host turned on one of its groups this way using the
identifier accusation, the purpose was to turn one or more people into enemies
of the host. You used the secret sign X, this means you’re a Socialist;
Socialists want to take our savings and give them to their supporters. In
this usage of the weapon, the host remains intact, the
unwanted others are “justifiably” killed, jailed, or exiled.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But with Socialism, the others worm has turned. The
Socialist uses the secret identifier accusation against the host and much
more, he extends the concept of the secret identifier to that of the
secret coded message.The Socialist claims that people of the host are sending
secret coded evil messages to their supporters, messages that the good and
decent people cannot hear or see.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is a strategy aimed at a central Socialist objective.</p>
<p class="JPS2">That objective is to wreck the nation-state in which he resides.
He goes about this by breaking down any and all unifying systems of value,
narrative, and myth. He attacks the dominant and formative religion of the
nation-state (in this case Christianity); he attacks the values of patriotism
and family; he attacks all of the state’s existing identity structures; he
attacks by dividing wherever he finds unity. Men and women have unity in sex
and family: turn women against men, destroy the white male identity as far as
possible. Turn the poor against the rich. Turn the black against the white.
Whatever common ground you find within the society, wreck it.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The objective is to reduce a society to it’s constituent
particles: it’s solitary individuals.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Socialists have been at this for a long time. This is the real
purpose of “identity politics.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Using a metaphor from chemistry, Socialism can be thought of as
a decomposition reaction catalyst. A catalyst is a chemical which
generates a chemical reaction in other chemicals without being itself changed.
A decomposition reaction is the breakdown of a chemical substance into its
constituent parts.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Take any successful, prosperous, cohesive society with shared
values and a shared understanding of its own history and mythologies, place it
in a beaker, add Socialism, and watch the bubbling and steaming begin. The
society begins as an organic whole, a form of life, and it ends as a lifeless
aggregate of inorganic elements decomposed on the beaker’s floor.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, how does the Socialism catalyst work?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Socialist has clearly understood that the power of the coded
message accusation comes from the fact that it is secret. The accused says in
vain that he was “just shaking hands! No message! Nothing!”. Since coded
messages are necessarily secret, the accuser can easily respond: “Of course,
you’d say that, we couldn’t see the secrets in the handshake.” It is
the secrecy that is the secret essential ingredient in the coded
message accusation.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Understanding this fact about coded messages, the Socialist has
deployed an entirely new and far more devastating version of the weapon: the (drum
roll) … Dog whistle.</p>
<p class="JPS2">An actual dog whistle emits a sound whose frequency lies above
human hearing, but within canine hearing. Thus, when a dog owner blows on his
whistle, the dogs in the area can hear it, but not other humans.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Socialist now accuses anyone with whom he disagrees of using
metaphoric “dog whistles” of racist, homophobic, white nationalist,
anti-gay(etc), all bad stuff rhetoric aimed at his evil followers. Needless to
say, we can’t hear these secret messages because he’s using secret “coded”
English expressions.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But here’s the punch line.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The objective of the dog whistle weapon goes far beyond merely
tagging some individual with evil communications; it goes to making people
afraid to communicate at all.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is the ultimate social decomposition reaction catalyst.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The dog whistle weapon attacks language and discourse itself. It
creates a world in which words do not mean what they mean; they mean anything
and everything anyone wants them to. In a world in which what one says means
only what someone else insists it means, speaking itself becomes an act of
courage.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Socialist wants to make speech itself, any speech,
a frightening event for a speaker. In this world, no matter what you
say, it may not mean what you think it means, it may only mean what
some mob on twitter insists it means, a mob led by a Political Commissar.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This has the Socialist’s desired effect of reducing the society
to a non-society, a mere aggregation of solitary, frightened individual
societal particles huddling in the dark avoiding all association and verbal
interaction.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-25671555318250085172021-09-17T15:24:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:24:54.573-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/145-is-god-a-utilitarian/">#145:
Is God a Utilitarian?</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">February 7, 2019</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">The relation of God to moral good is difficult to understand. The
conundrum is simple to state, but impossible to answer well. Are the moral laws
God gives to man good because He gives them, or does He give them because he
recognizes their intrinsic and absolute truth. Either way there are problems.
On the first disjunct, the moral laws appear to be no more than the arbitrary
whim of a supremely powerful being; his claim to human love thus seems
unsupported. Satan seems different only in being less powerful. Not a desirable
outcome. But on the other disjunct, it seems there’s something out there that
has authority over God and His only role is that of an enforcer and He is
himself subject to that authority. Kierkegaard famously draws attention to
these problems in his writing on Abraham and Isaac. Also not a desirable
outcome.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Nonetheless, for at least the Judaeo-Christian God, morality is
centrally important in His teachings. God spends an enormous amount of time and
energy telling us in the greatest detail what is morally good and what is not.
Thus, it seems fair to ask what God’s own morality is.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There are really only just two moral theories and the question of
which one, if any, informed God’s cosmogony is made even more difficult because
he seems sometimes to rely on both, but they are incompatible.</p>
<p class="JPS2">So, is God a Utilitarian or a Deontologist?</p>
<p class="JPS2">A Utilitarian is willing to sacrifice the good of an individual
for the sake of the good of the group, while a Deontologist takes the good of
the individual to be equal to the good of the group. A Utilitarian accepts the
existence of collateral damage in the form of human suffering for the sake of
the group’s greater good, a Deontologist does not.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Alternatively, in Utilitarianism, human value is multiplicative,
while in Deontologism it is not. Thus, two people are worth twice as much as
one for a Utilitarian, while for the Deontologist one person is equal to the
worth of any number of people greater than one.</p>
<p class="JPS2">So, is he a Utilitarian?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The problem of evil is unquestionably the most powerful argument
against the existence of God and at least Christianity’s response appears
Utilitarian. You know how the argument goes: There is evil on earth;
either God can’t fix it or he chooses not to. God is supremely powerful, so
it’s false that he can’t fix it; therefore, he chooses not to fix it.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But why is this his choice?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Of course, the ways of God pass all human understanding and His
providence is utterly mysterious. Blah blah blah. But if He’s going to stick
with that, He’s going to lose a LOT of His followers who are expecting a bit
more explanation. “Trust me” is not working so well anymore.</p>
<p class="JPS2">If He’s at all rational in his decision making, it must be
because He judges that a world with evil in it is better than a world without
it. This is certainly Leibniz’s view, who argues that this is the best of all
possible worlds. It seems to him that this must be the case, since God created
the world and God can’t create anything less than the very best. OK, but what
makes it “the best”?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, it’s the best because in it Man has freedom of the will. A
world with free humans, it’s argued, is better than one with controlled humans.
Freedom is a good thing. Unfortunately, a consequence of this good thing is
that there exists evil in the world. Free men (and women!) do some really evil
things. It’s man’s freedom that is the source of all evil, and not God. Q.E.D.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This implies that God made a moral or ethical decision in his
creation of the world. Even knowing as He does all the consequences of His
decisions, His providence intentionally includes human freedom and the
inevitable suffering of the innocent for the sake of mankind’s greater good,
namely freedom. This is a Utilitarian decision on His part.</p>
<p class="JPS2">God’s choice is interestingly the moral version of Adam Smith’s
doctrine on the functioning of markets. Smith’s thesis is that a free market
benefits the whole more than a controlled market, though there will be losers
in it as well as winners. Overall, the principle of free competition yields the
best possible of all economic circumstances, it is an “invisible hand” that
ensures the optimal outcome.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Perhaps God also thought that an “invisible hand” would operate
within man’s free, lustful, greedy, and deranged history to assure that the
greatest good would be achieved. So far, not so much.</p>
<p class="JPS2">[What makes this particularly and poignantly interesting is that
Communism (and it’s sanitized cousin, Socialism) are also happy to accept the
collateral damage associated with decisions aimed at the greatest good for the
greatest number. Just ask the peasants and kulaks of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">USSR</st1:place></st1:country-region> from 1927
to 1934. Sure, they starved … but it was for the greater good.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The difference between Smith and Stalin is that Stalin had no
confidence in the “invisible hand” and replaced it with the visible hairy hands
of brutal doctrinaire commissars. How’s that worked out, Miz Ocasio-Cortez?]</p>
<p class="JPS2">In any case, God’s (or Leibniz’s) response to the problem of evil
seems to be Utilitarian.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But, is He also a Deontologist?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, to some extent it depends on what He’s doing. When He’s
practising cosmogony, He’s a Utilitarian. But when He’s campaigning, He sounds
like a Deontologist. His message on the stump, as it were, is that He loves you
qua individual. Love Him, He says, and He loves you right back, in fact
He gives you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Even more, in the Christian
version He even sacrifices his only son for your sake, qua individual. You
couldn’t ask for more. And, by the way, for all those still on the Abraham and
Isaac problem, let me point out that the Christian God could defend his demand
of Abraham by pointing out that He didn’t ask anything of Abraham that He
wasn’t willing to do himself. Abraham, He asked, sacrifice your only
son for your love of Me. Later, He sacrificed His own only son for the
sake of His love of <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Man.</st1:place></st1:state></p>
<p class="JPS2">Still, it can be argued that in both the Abraham and the Jesus
case, He is still in the Utilitarian mode. His Deontological turn is almost
exclusively rhetorical and cosmetic, designed just for campaign events.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Remember that He’s willing to accept collateral damage in the
form, first, of Isaac and, second, of Jesus. In both cases, there’s a greater
good involved. In both cases, a person is treated as a utensil, as an
instrument towards some special end. Abraham is made the father of a people
special to God because of his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and Jesus dies
for “all our sake.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">On balance, for good or for ill, it does seem most likely that
God is a Utilitarian.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-77699843342883049432021-09-17T15:23:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:23:57.000-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/144-fake-science-and-the-explanation-vacuum/">#144:
Fake Science and the Explanation Vacuum</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">August 9, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">You’ve had your fake news, now get ready for your
… Fake Science.</p>
<p class="JPS2"> What is it, and why do we have it?</p>
<p class="JPS2">I.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Modern people are generally agreed that hypotheses respecting
natural events must be confirmed before being believed. Such confirmation is
expected to take the form of prediction with consequent empirical verification.
But this formulation conceals an important complexity. We tend to be so focused
on the verification of simple empirical hypotheses that we forget
that methodology must itself also be confirmed. Descartes was the
first to draw our attention to the importance of method in the
acquisition of knowledge. His views on scientific method can certainly be
criticized, but not his extraordinary insight that knowledge-seekers must be
reflectively and critically aware of the method(s) they are applying.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This insight is as important today as it was in the early
17th century. The reason is that the successes of empirical science have
made it an attractive camouflage for academic grifters, purveyors of fake
science. Hence we find the existence at most universities of faculties of
“social science” and departments which falsely designate themselves as
sciences. The most transparent and egregious of these bogus sciences is the
ever more popular “Political Science,” ubiquitous among 16 year old hormonal
girls aspiring to be social justice warriors. The use of “logy” as a suffix is
also an attempt to borrow empirical science’s prestige, the suffix standing for
“theory of.” Thus, we have “logies” like Psychology and Sociology and
Anthropology. “Theory of” has seemed so remarkably powerful that some at the
academy have introduced departments simply called “Theory.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">And, of course, now we have (drum roll) … “Climate Science.” (Ta
Dum!)</p>
<p class="JPS2">II.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The effort to pass for “science” is not limited to only the
borrowing of a word. The effort also involves taking on the trappings
of fake science methodology.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There is no doubt that the progress of the empirical sciences has
been in the largest part due to the progress in our ability to
render qualitative changes in quantitative terms. The history of
empirical science has been largely determined by the increasing power and
sophistication of mathematics. But this has made it natural for the imposters
to couch their doctrines in numerical terms.</p>
<p class="JPS2">So, how exactly do the snake-oil salesman coming into town
package their fraudulent products? Well, they wrap them up nicely in paper
featuring lots of “scientific” looking symbols and especially ones “borrowed”
from math. Two areas of mathematics have been particularly useful to the
academic grifters: statistics and computer modeling.</p>
<p class="JPS2">If statistical reporting were disallowed, the so-called “social
sciences” would virtually disappear. They exist on the basis of the endless
reporting of correlational data without any discernible causal significance.
This is nothing other than fake-science and I call such
“data” scientistic rather than scientific, where my term
intends superficially resembling science without
actually being science. That the “results” of these “studies”
are scientistic rather than scientific is borne out by the
fact that, in psychology at least, over half the “results” of published papers
are not reproducible
[https://futurism.com/study-finds-half-psych-research-not-reproducible/]. There
is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is as true for the other
“social science” disciplines as it is for psychology. And reproducibility
of results is a necessary condition of a study being scientific!</p>
<p class="JPS2">But I digress. People have been suspicious of statistics for
quite some time, nothing really new here. Mark Twain famously distinguished
lies into “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Just to forestall the high-pitched screams of protest from real
scientists who use statistics in real science, I do not mean to deny the real
utility of this mathematics in a wide array of applications. However, it is
precisely the fact that such genuine uses exist that makes it possible for so
many empty correlational “studies” to be published. It is the focus,
determination, and effort required to distinguish the real from the dross that
allows fake science to survive. And the fake can be found not only in the
“social sciences,” it can also be found in important places like medicine.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Computer modeling is, however, less widely recognized to be an
instrument of academic grifters. And what makes it more insidious is that its
position as a legitimate scientific methodology is rarely challenged. Who would
challenge it? Academics? And why would they challenge something so very useful
in cranking out nonsense subsidised with enormous research grants? Perhaps
computer modeling is “just too big to fail.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">What is a computer model? It is nothing other than a “virtual”
simulation of some natural sequence of events. That is, it’s an effort to reproduce
the circumstances of some feature of the natural world in the form of digital
information. The digital information includes facts of some initial state along
with a set of putative natural laws governing those facts.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Thus, for example, we could attempt to identify the relevant
starting facts of the 1929 market crash and enter them into a computer
database. We could then enter what we considered to be the “laws” acting upon
those starting facts. And, finally, we could “run” this simulation and check
whether those data and those “laws” actually yield a market crash on the
computer.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The methodological fantasy here is that once we have adjusted the
model so as to produce the wanted effect, that we can then proceed to use the
model to actually make predictions in the real world. But having once adjusted
the starting facts and so-called laws precisely to yield the wanted effect, we
have absolutely no assurance that this model would work in any other
situation. The second we change the starting data assumptions, all bets are
off!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Computer simulations are in current use in weather forecasting,
economic forecasting, commercial makeup testing, automobile aerodynamics, new
drug development, as well as many other places.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But is this scientific reasoning or scientistic? I
suggest it is often the latter. Why? Because it regularly fails the most
fundamental criterion of scientific methodology, namely predictive
success.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Just as we appraise an empirical hypothesis by its ability to
make true predictions, so we must appraise a methodology by its ability to make
true predictions.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Computer modeling has notoriously been a failure. It’s
predictions, for example, with regard to the directions of hurricanes could
have been better made with tea leaves. With respect to the economy, one would
be advised not to bet the farm on its advice. And, particularly visible, have
been its failures on climate change predictions.</p>
<p class="JPS2">[Hat tip to friend A.W.: <a href="https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/29748-failed-predictions-of-climate-alarmists-make-future-predictions-suspect%5D">https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/29748-failed-predictions-of-climate-alarmists-make-future-predictions-suspect%5D</a></p>
<p class="JPS2">The methodology stinks. It stinks because the variables in real
world applications far outnumber any possible computer database capacity and
because the “laws” have not been adequately identified and/or refined in
detail.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In short, the simulations are not and cannot be adequate
representations of reality. As long as that is the case, the method must remain
too suspect to employ scientifically.</p>
<p class="JPS2">IV.</p>
<p class="JPS2">It is one thing to recognize the existence of fake science, it’s
another thing to account for its presence. Why and when do we wind up with fake
science?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The answer, I think, lies in the existence of a gap in the reach
of real science, a kind of “science vacuum” which draws the spurious imitation
science in.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There is a natural need in human beings for explanations of
natural events. But what must be understood is that this need
is visceral rather than cognitive. Human beings are not
intellectually critical with respect to their needs, not with respect to their
appetites, and not with respect to their psychological needs. When we’re hungry
or in the mood, we eat, and we mostly eat whatever is at hand, whether it’s
“good for us” or not. The same applies to our need for explanations. We’re
really pretty easy to satisfy. Before scientific explanations were
available, people made do with fantastic ones provided by priests. These stories
were utterly useless as predictors, but they had social/political usefulness
for the priesthood and they filled the explanation needs of the credulous
population at large more or less.</p>
<p class="JPS2">As empirical science progressed, it filled human explanation needs
more and more, but regions continued to exist where science simply could not
explain to the point of accurate prediction. It is into those regions that fake
science penetrates. Climate change at this point in time lies beyond the
abilities of predictive science simply because of the enormous size of the
phenomena involved. And, as always, such a situation gives rise to a priestly
class which thrives on cultivating an “explanation” narrative with all the old
hallmarks of religion. It does so in this case because the new religion has the
potential of enriching its practitioners beyond all imagination. To paraphrase
Rahm Emanuel: Changes in climate are a natural phenomenon simply too good
to waste!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yes, Virginia, this is a religion. There is a deity to worship
(Gaia, the Earth); there is human guilt (population, fossil fuels, flatulence);
there are hated non-believers (Global Warming Deniers); there are the priests
(the Global Warming “scientists”); there are oracles (the computer models); and
there are scared texts (the reports of the UN climate change grifters). But it
would still be naïve to expect a modern religion to come in the
familiar trappings of the old ones.</p>
<p class="JPS2">When we think of religions, we expect a supernatural invisible
god, we expect rituals of a certain antiquated kind, we expect special
buildings of worship, and so forth.</p>
<p class="JPS2">When we look at this modern religion, we cannot look for those in
their familiar form, we must look for their analogues. But what remains the
same is 1) the absence of genuine predictive science, and 2) the full panoply
of emotions which have always attended the blind want for explanation.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-17035128414745307102021-09-17T15:22:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:22:50.801-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/143-bias-weltanschauung/" title="Permanent Link to #143: Bias & Weltanschauung">#143: Bias
& Weltanschauung</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">August 2, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">There’s a new meme in town!</p>
<p class="JPS2">I.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Everyone’s talking about BIAS now. The word started grabbing our
attention with the Peter Strzok story, but, as is always the case, the
scribbling Lefties immediately saw an opportunity and took possession of it.
So, how exactly are they using the BIAS meme now? For those on the Left
who are getting nervous that they’re losing the narrative war, they’re using
the BIAS story to draw down the difference between Leftie & Conservative
from the level of world-view to a merely social-psychological one: we’re
not really disagreeing on anything substantive, we’re just in the grip of a
social-psychological mass phenomenon. When they think they’re losing, they
don’t mind psychologizing the difference between the viewpoints.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is of a piece with the Nussbaum move of trying to
delegitimize nationalism by social-psychologizing it into a “fear of the
(gasp) other.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">A couple of asides here. First, the Left always takes any
traditional distaste and turn it into a “fear” to delegitimize it. Thus, a
historically based distaste for homosexuality becomes “homophobia,” a distaste
for Islam becomes “Islamophobia.” By this logic, a distaste for <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Chihuahuas</st1:state></st1:place> has to become
Chihuahuaphobia. </p>
<p class="JPS2">It would seem, prima facie, that for the Left, there really
can never be such a thing as a distaste, it’s always just a
camouflaged fear. But, interestingly, anti-Semitism isn’t converted
by the Lefties into a phobia. It doesn’t become Hebraphobia. Maybe that’s
because Lefties think that hating Jews is n exception, it isn’t a psychological
illness, and that’s because they just hate Jews themselves.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And second, their psychologizing is intended to distract us from
remembering that sometimes “the other” is indeed someone
to be feared. Don’t hate the XYZ, he’s “just the same as
you are.” Well, very often he’s not, and hate might be just the
ticket. The Nazi was someone to be feared and hated, the Japanese citizen of
WWII was someone to be feared and hated (ask about the Bataan Death March or
the Chinese peasants of <st1:place w:st="on">Manchuria</st1:place>). And
fearing the other was not a bad thing until we were taught this rubbish by the
post-war Leftie academics at work to undermine the nation-state. During WWII we
had no problem speaking disparagingly of the enemy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And what is this psychological “problem” diagnosed by the Nussbaum
called? Get ready for this (drum roll): XENO-phobia! Yes, shockingly, another
“phobia” discovered. </p>
<p class="JPS2">But I digress.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, here’s something on which both sides agree: BIAS is a BAD
thing.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What makes it bad? They seem to think of it as non-rational and
non-conscious and thus an illegitimate driver of belief and action.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, I think there’s some truth in this, but, at the same time,
that they’re wrong in thinking of it as a BAD thing.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What everyone is calling a “bias” is nothing other than a strongly
held global world-view, what the Germans (who have words for almost everything)
call eine Weltanschauung.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Is a Weltanschauung non-rational? Yes, but then all of
our values are non-rational despite what the Enlightenment types would have you
believe. Preferring a Western style democracy over a middle-eastern style
dictatorship is indeed no less a preference than liking strawberry ice cream
over chocolate. Values are just preferences, get over it!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Is a Weltanschauung non-conscious? In most cases,
probably. But so what? It’s not easily noticed simply because it colors
everything we think and do. After all, it is our world-view.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The important thing to remember is this: the fact that our
world-view is non-rational and (possibly) non-conscious does not delegitimize
it. And yes, <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Virginia</st1:place></st1:state>,
it is a legitimate driver of belief and action. It is simply not
the kind of thing to which so-called “rational justification” applies, anymore
than our taste in ice cream calls for “rational justification.” This does not mean
that we “have no right” to defend it with all our might; talk of a “right” here
is a Leftie Enlightenment legacy piece of nonsense. We fight for our way of
life simply because we prefer it very strongly over the alternatives. That’s
all there is.</p>
<p class="JPS2">So, do Conservatives have a “bias”? Goddamn right they do, and
proud of it.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-23055052722026863082021-09-17T15:21:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:21:54.646-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/142-why-one-kavanaugh-may-be-worth-three-with-the-pie/" title="Permanent Link to #142: Why One Kavanaugh May be Worth Three with the PIE">#142:
Why One Kavanaugh May be Worth Three with the PIE</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">July 24, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">I know a number of N.Y. Republicans who simply don’t vote because
they believe, with some good grounds, that their votes are worthless. They
believe this because N.Y.C. is overwhelmingly Democrat and so a person voting
Republican is just spitting in the wind. I call this the “Political Impotence
Effect,” or the PIE. The PIE is evident in many places across the country, in
both red and blue states.</p>
<p class="JPS2">That’s unfortunate, but there’s silver lining to the PIE for the
SCOTUS.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The make-up of the court is currently (C=Conservative,
P=Progressive):</p>
<p class="JPS2">John Roberts (Chief) (63) C</p>
<p class="JPS2">Clarence Thomas (70) C</p>
<p class="JPS2">Samuel Alito (68) C</p>
<p class="JPS2">Neil Gorsuch (50) C</p>
<p class="JPS2">Kennedy/Brett Kavanaugh (K: 53) C</p>
<p class="JPS2">Elena Kagan (58) P</p>
<p class="JPS2">Ruth Bader Ginsberg (85) P</p>
<p class="JPS2">Stephen Breyer (79) P</p>
<p class="JPS2">Sonya Sotomayor (64) P</p>
<p class="JPS2">Of course, adding Kavanaugh creates a five to four majority for
the Conservatives, that’s obvious and that’s very good, but there’s another
factor to consider.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The two oldest members, Ginsberg and Breyer (85 and 79
respectively) become in effect lame ducks with Kavanaugh’s addition (because of
the Conservative majority). They become impotent on the court, they’re in
exactly the same position as Republicans in N.Y.. And what do those Republicans
do? They leave the fray: they do not vote. That’s the PIE.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There have been rumors for some time that Breyer would like to
retire. Perhaps realizing that he is no longer able to affect SCOTUS
decisions, he will make that move sooner rather than later. Because he’s
having some of the PIE and there’s another two years in Trump’s current term,
and it seems very likely that 1) the Republicans will hold the senate, and 2)
that Trump will get a second term. With all that, Breyer would have to wait
till he’s 85 before he might have a Democrat president to replace
him. That’s a lot of years of impotence for the mere chance of being
replaced by another impotent progressive.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And while Ginsberg seems to want to stay forever, perhaps the
departure of Breyer (with the addition of yet another Trump originalist to the
court) would demoralize her enough to hasten her own (vastly overdue)
departure. And that’s the rest of the PIE. Yum!</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-17145118023175095892021-09-17T15:20:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:20:47.461-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/141-the-infantilized-electorate-and-the-nanny-mind/" title="Permanent Link to #141: The Infantilized Electorate and the Nanny Mind">#141:
The Infantilized Electorate and the Nanny Mind</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">July 17, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">We’re all familiar with the current phenomenon of so-called
“snowflakes” who run and hide in “safe spaces” when they hear opinions not
their own. They get really “upset” and need to have a good cry. We’re told,
rightly, that this is at least partly an effect of university “social justice
warrior” indoctrination. But this way of putting it fails to make clear why the
indoctrination works so well. I suggest that it does because these students
suffer from an emotional arrested development coming from both their parents
and the culture at large, an arrested development which makes them natural soil
for “social warrior” indoctrination.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But why is this happening? I suspect that it is an
inevitable by-product of the recognition on the part of businesses and
marketing agencies that women are the majority spenders in the
society. And, like it or not, a huge number of women see the world through the
eyes of children; and a huge number of women want someone, a father or a
husband or a government or even a pimp to protect and provide for them and
their offspring. And the marketers have recognized that a huge number of women
are vulnerable to the narrative of the fragility of children both physically
and psychologically. There is a lot of money in the issues of “the child.” Books
written about them sell in the millions, talk shows endlessly deal with them,
and manufacturers make money selling every conceivable child protective gadget.
The market likes a child centered society. All of this leads the world being
perceived as a schoolyard. </p>
<p class="JPS2">I’ve focused in the past on how the Infantilization of culture is
to be seen in the language used in television news media. I wrote in #103:</p>
<p class="JPS2">“…the sentimentalization of our language. Apparently, the world
no longer contains any “mothers” or “fathers,” they were, apparently, replaced
during some starless night by a whole new cadre of “mums” and “dads.” This is
as true for bad mothers and fathers as it is for good ones. Nancy Grace
recently made a point of referring to Casey Anthony, a woman charged with
killing her infant daughter, as the “tot mom.” The crazed woman who produced
eight children was known as the “octomom.” So, these days, even a possible
child murderess is a “mom.” A self-aggrandizing mental case who tries to make
an industry out of procreation is still a “mom.” Men, on the other hand, who
don’t pay child support payments are known as “deadbeat dads.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">And the chance of war is called “scary” rather than frightening,
while external enemies are referred to as “bullies.” This is the language of
the schoolyard.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is the Oprahfied mass consuming herd and it understands the
world from the perspective of the schoolyard. I call this the perspective of
the “nanny mind.” Mrs. Smith, Mrs, Smith, Jimmy said something mean and
then Sammy said something bad back to him! Mrs. Smith, make them stop,
please! (crying)</p>
<p class="JPS2">It’s bad and sad enough that this occurs in the popular media
which amplify and distribute this infantilization of discourse, but it is more
than that, it is downright dangerous.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Watching news coverage of Donald Trump since the 2016 election is
truly sobering. Of course, we already know the derangement to be found there,
but look more closely.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The really frightening part is that even apparently sober
commentators seem aware of what the listening public expects, and what that
public expects is certain things have to be said and that other
things are “just too horrible” to have said. It’s all
about talk. But the world does not move this way or that way because of talk. The
world does not, but the schoolyard does.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This phenomenon is nowhere more visible than in the recent
Trump/Putin news conference in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Helsinki</st1:place></st1:city>.
The screaming scribblers (and even some normally sober talking heads) are
enraged that Trump did not publicly brace Putin on his various crimes and
misdemeanours. The only adult I heard was Rand Paul, whose words I summarize
this way: Oh please, grow up!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Other than Paul, none of them asked the critical
question: Exactly what would the objective have been in bracing Putin in
that venue, given that the reason for the meeting was to de-escalate tensions
between the two largest nuclear powers in the world?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Would the world have been a safer place because Trump got as
tough on Putin as Obama who told him to “cut it out.” Yeah, boy, that would’ve
put the Kremlin strongman in his place! Yeah!</p>
<p class="JPS2">He should have said this and he should have said that and why did
he say this and … and … and …</p>
<p class="JPS2">The whole thing is so tooth-achingly stupid that were
it not so dangerous, it would be utterly laughable.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Karl Marx believed in underlying laws of historical development.
He was wrong about that. But this does not entail that we cannot see definite
forces at play and see their at least their short-term destinations.</p>
<p class="JPS2">As long as the nanny mind is the dominant target in marketing,
the society will lurch towards Socialism, and, inevitably, that Socialism will
go broke. But since capitalism, together with universal suffrage, leads
inescapably to the dominance of the nanny mind, we cannot help but conclude
that there can be no stable democratic economic system. They all
lurch towards Socialism, and beyond that to bankruptcy and starvation.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The West needs an adult electorate, but the forces at
play do not work in that direction.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-1019260531665337092021-09-17T15:19:00.001-07:002021-09-17T15:19:05.344-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/05/30/140-the-eu-nationalism-imperialism-and-multi-culturalism/" title="Permanent Link to #140: The EU, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Multi-Culturalism">#140:
The EU, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Multi-Culturalism</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">May 30, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">We cannot understand the politics of current <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>
without appreciating this critical fact, namely that Socialism in every one of
its forms is inherently imperialistic.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is camouflaged by the fact that post WW II Leftists have
identified two culprits in history’s most recent horrors:
nationalism and imperialism (aka now as “colonialism”). Modern political
convenience made them parse imperialism as exclusively governance by force of
non-contiguous (distant) culturally distinct regions and populations. This was
partly so that they could agitate third-world populations and their widely
distributed descendants, but also to distract attention from the bothersome
fact that they were themselves imperialistic. But clearly empires were not only
based on distant colonies.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Really, any European not ideologically blinded should find it
hard to miss from where he is standing that Socialism is itself intrinsically
imperialistic. And further, realizing that, failing some very harsh medicine,
it is fated inevitably to disintegrate. But why?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The problem that empires encounter is that culturally distinct
populations resent and resist governance from a distance. This is true
even when the culturally distinct populations are geographically contiguous.
This is called nationalism and it leads to revolution, sometimes afar
and sometimes quite close.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This means that the Left’s public position on nationalism and
imperialism is not quite as represented. The Left is so hostile to
nationalism not because it leads to horrors such as those found
in Nazism, but because nationalism is imperialism’s deadliest foe. And Socialism is an
imperialism!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Most Socialist (read: Communist) nations have actually recognized
this fact and have attempted to deal with the problem by forcibly
“re-educating” or culturally homogenizing their populations.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Karl Popper famously accused Plato of fascism in The Republic
because he argued that the perfect state could only be achieved if it were
begun with young children, the parents having been eliminated. The children
could then be properly “educated” into perfect citizens.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Jacobins of the French Revolution sought to erase
the ancien regime partly by elimination (the clergy and the
aristocracy) and partly by an enforced newly minted culture of their own
devising.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Bolshevik Russians followed the same recipe, as did the
Chinese in their own “cultural revolution.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">This strategy has been successful to varying degrees. Czarism
remains beneath the surface in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region>
in various mutated forms. Catholicism and Confucianism remains beneath the
surface in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region>
in various mutated forms, not to mention its problems with the various
resisting minorities on its peripheries.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But, as we know, <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> has
opted for its famous “third way” governance, “Social Democracy,” which abjures
the use of force in governance. Yet, failing forcible cultural cleansing,
Socialism faces exactly the same disintegrative forces faced by the
conventional distant empires of the past, and this applies precisely to the EU.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Brexit was no accident. <st1:country-region w:st="on">Norway</st1:country-region>
and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Switzerland</st1:place></st1:country-region>
never joined. <st1:country-region w:st="on">Italy</st1:country-region> is
threatening to leave, and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Hungary</st1:country-region>
and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Poland</st1:country-region> are telling <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Brussels</st1:place></st1:city> to get lost.
There should be no surprise about this. It is happening precisely where <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>’s most dramatic imperial death took place, that of
the Austro-Hungarian empire. The EU is nothing but a Social-Democrat attempt at
empire along the Hapsburg line, namely the governance of culturally distinct
but geographically contiguous populations without cultural cleansing.
The Hapsburgs did not attempt to make all their contiguous “colonies” become
Austrian, they allowed them to retain their local cultures. For this reason, we
can say that both the Hapsburg empire and the EU are today’s multi-culturalism
writ large upon a continent.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We’ve seen how the Hapsburgs fared. We’ve seen how all the
conventional empires fared.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The leaders of the EU knew quite well the problem that they faced
and they knew quite well that the measures implemented by Communist nations
were not available to them. And so they embarked on another, new, strategy to
combat nationalism, the threat to their imperialism. It’s very clever.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Their strategy applied exactly the same force that was
threatening their empire-in-the-making against their nation-state
constituents. Here’s how.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Multi-culturalism in the form of different nation-states was
threatening EU disintegration. So the EU leaders decided to force
multi-culturalism upon the nation-states themselves to
dissolve their unity, hence neutralizing them.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is the entire point of the EU government’s insisting that
member states take in massive doses of third world migrants.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What we’re seeing are culturally cohesive nation-states who are
members of an empire insisting on their cultural distinctiveness to govern
themselves, while the empire attempts to erase their cultural distinctiveness
so as to gain hegemony over them.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A hell of a fight.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-47438967947120553332021-09-17T15:17:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:17:43.906-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/139-gettier-counter-example-lessons-warning-boring-philosophy/" title="Permanent Link to #139: Gettier Counter-Example Lessons [Warning: Boring Philosophy]">#139:
Gettier Counter-Example Lessons [Warning: Boring Philosophy]</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6pt; line-height: 150%;">April 30, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">[These are reflections really only relevant to people of the
Epistemology persuasion — my apologies to all others.]</p>
<p class="JPS2">I: Providing Context</p>
<p class="JPS2">From about 1900 on philosophical conceptual analysis increasingly
took on a very specific form. Instead of leaving it to our intuitions to
determine the “meaning” of a concept, philosophers left any reference to
“meaning” behind and became interested instead in what had to be true in order
for a particular concept to be properly applied.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A classic instance of such an analysis is that of the
justified-true-belief account of the concept of knowledge.</p>
<p class="JPS2">According to the JTB:</p>
<p class="JPS2">S knows that p if and only if</p>
<p class="JPS2">p is true,</p>
<p class="JPS2">S believes that p, and</p>
<p class="JPS2">S is justified in believing that p.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The new method had the distinct advantage of avoiding all sorts
of vexatious questions associated with talking about “meanings.” It also had
the advantage of specifying exactly how a criticism of an account is to take
place, viz. by way of a “counter-example.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">A counter-example, as the expression indicates, is a case, real
or fictitious, in which an account fails either by being too demanding (it has
too many conditions or too constraining conditions), on the one hand, or by
being not demanding enough (requiring an additional condition(s)).</p>
<p class="JPS2">The JTB was considered a rock-solid analysis, a model of the
method, until a very short paper was published by Edmund Gettier in 1963.
Gettier argued that the JTB is deficient in that the three conditions while
necessary were not sufficient. He argued this by providing a counter-example to
the classic account, an example in which the three
conditions were satisfied, but putatively S did not know.</p>
<p class="JPS2">His argument is instructive for our discussion of the method of
philosophical analysis. He provides, in fact, two counter-examples,
though I’ll only cite his “case 2” as both are based on the same strategy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Here’s case 2:</p>
<p class="JPS2">“Let us suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following
proposition:</p>
<p class="JPS2">Jones owns a Ford.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Smith’s evidence might be that Jones has at all times in the past
within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford, and that Jones has just
offered Smith a ride while driving a Ford. Let us imagine, now, that Smith has
another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith
selects three place names quite at random and constructs the following three
propositions:</p>
<p class="JPS2">Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:city>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Barcelona</st1:place></st1:city>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Each of these propositions is entailed by (f). Imagine that Smith
realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by
(f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has
correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which be has strong
evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these
three propositions, Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones
does not own a Ford, but is at present driving a rented car. And
secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith, the place
mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If
these two conditions hold, then Smith does not know that (h) is true,
even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and
(iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">The strategy is this:</p>
<p class="JPS2">It is to construct examples in which a proposition (h in the
above, the one supposedly known) is validly derived from a false, though
justified, proposition f, but because h can be true under more than one
condition, it is in fact true, though accidentally so.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I chose Case 2 because the “known” proposition (h) is a
disjunction (an “or” proposition) and it is obvious with disjunctions that they
can be true under more than one circumstance.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Gettier examples rely on the following:</p>
<p class="JPS2">That a proposition can be well justified even though false;</p>
<p class="JPS2">That justification is transferred through entailment.</p>
<p class="JPS2">That there are propositions which can be true under various
different circumstances.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II: What Should We Conclude from these Cases?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, the two Gettier cases have been taken to mean that the JTB
account of knowledge is defective because it fails to exclude the cases. I want
to suggest that that is not the significance of the cases; rather, I think it
points to a problem with this method of analysis.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In both of his cases, Gettier simply assumes that the
conclusion must be that his protagonist does not know the
proposition in question and that we will automatically agree with that. And it
is critically important that we do agree, for without that, the
counter-example fails. However, I don’t want to suggest that
he does know the proposition; rather I want us to ask ourselves what
our own intuitions are about the case he presents. Note that it is a highly
artificial case based on a logical trick. Given that, my own intuition is that
I want to respond that I have no idea what this example implies with respect to
knowledge.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The clear uses of words allow for confident responses, but things
get murky as we move away from the center. And this is not a case of a
vagueness built into a word, like it is with the word “heap.” In “heap,” we
have a vague band between “yes” and “no,” but “no” is ultimately reached. In
the Gettier case of knowledge, we are not moving towards uncertainty by tiny
increments, not knowing exactly where “knowledge” definitely ends; no, we are
given a bizarre, contrived example for which we are not prepared by natural
language or intuition, so we really cannot say “no.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">With the Gettier case, we like an ornithologist confronted by a
winged, flying pig. Ok, we say to our ornithologist, is it a
bird? He would, should, say I have no idea.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Does my belief that a square has four sides count as knowledge?
Yes. Does my belief that the sun is 93 million miles from the earth? Yes. But
does Smith’s belief that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Barcelona</st1:place></st1:city>? I have no idea. The word
“knowledge” as I learned to use it was never applied to such a case.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Thus, the only way in which the Gettier cases can be made to
count as counter-examples to the JTB is if we make the assumption that analyses
of the JTB kind must be proof against examples outside the core of normal
natural language uses. But why would we make such an assumption?</p>
<p class="JPS2">I think it is because a number of very influential philosophers
had a mostly unspoken model of language in which our ordinary usage was no more
than a clue to an underlying, concealed perfect language which did indeed
consist of universally applicable concepts. The ancient version of this fairy
tale was Plato’s theory of Ideas, while the modern one is that of “logically
perfect language.” According to this notion, a conceptual analysis must be
proof against any counter-example, no matter how foreign to our
natural language mastery. I suggest that this is a bar too high, set perhaps
with one eye on the physical sciences where observed phenomena are used as
signs of underlying natural laws.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A more plausible model, perhaps, would be that of the law, where
the prosecution’s claim must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Not
beyond any doubt, no matter how contrived. So, the prosecutors in the
O.J. Simpson murder trial did not have to prove to the jury that aliens from
another planet did not kill Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman in order to make their
case; this was a doubt too far, they only had to
dismiss reasonable doubts (i.e. doubts for which there was at least
some evidence).</p>
<p class="JPS2">In a similar way, if conceptual analysis is to be continued, an
analysis can fairly be only expected to be proof against any intuitively
recognizable counter-example, but not more than that.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-45426646721738160522021-09-17T15:16:00.001-07:002021-09-17T15:16:05.231-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/138-what-can-we-learn-from-the-german-revolution/" title="Permanent Link to #138: What Can We Learn from the German Revolution?">#138:
What Can We Learn from the German Revolution?</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">April 26, 2018</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">I</p>
<p class="JPS2">Most everyone in the Western world knows that there was an
American Revolution (1775-1783) and a French Revolution (1789-1799). The
continental nineteenth century had a number of lesser known, smaller,
unsuccessful revolutions in 1848.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Virtually unknown in the West, there was the Chinese revolution
in 1911.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And then there was the important Russian Revolution of 1917,
which was, in fact, two revolutions, one in February and one in October, which
led to the murderous reign of the Bolsheviks.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The most recent revolution, however, was the German Revolution
which began in October of 1918, just one year after the Bolsheviks took power
in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region>;
which rejected monarchical rule and replaced it with a presidential
parliamentary democracy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">On a side note, outrageously, the neurotic imbecile Kaiser
Wilhelm II was allowed to go into exile on November 10, to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Holland</st1:place></st1:city>, where he lived in comfort until
June, 1941, and where he died in his bed at the age of 82. Nicholas II, on
the other hand, his cousin and one of the other co-conspirators in the
catastrophic debacle that was WW I, was murdered along with his entire family
in July 1918. As in Wilhelm’s case, his sin seems to have been entirely
culpable stupidity. King George V, another cousin and co-conspirator, also lived
past the end of the war, and remained King till the age of 70. Maybe this was
just a bit less outrageous than Wilhelm’s case since Britain was a
constitutional monarchy during WW I and the king really had very little
influence. The fourth conspirator was the semi-senile dotard Franz Josef of
Austria, who had the good manners to die in the middle of the war, 1916, at the
indecent old age of 86. Millions of others were consigned to much harsher
destinies than any of these.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Back to <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region>,
the new democracy was based in the German Enlightenment city of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city>, home to Goethe,
among others. It’s first chancellor was Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social
Democrat Party.</p>
<p class="JPS2">While there was nothing here quite like the excesses of the
French Revolution, the German one was scarcely “bloodless” and there is much to
learn today from this most recent Revolution. While the events of the
revolution and the details of the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Weimar</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype w:st="on">Republic</st1:placetype></st1:place>’s efforts to
govern during the following decade are daunting in complexity, this much is
evident.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The forces at play were:</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Social Democrat Party (SDP)</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Spartacist Party, supported by the Bolsheviks (meddling in
German politics)</p>
<p class="JPS2">The army and a reactionary population which, while enraged at the
monarchy for the outcome of the war, were still committed to authoritarian
rule.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And here are some thoughts on how that revolution is interesting
today.</p>
<p class="JPS2">First, and most obvious, the Russians have clearly had the habit
of meddling in other countries’ elections and politics since their own revolution.
No surprises here.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Second, the Socialists were split then along lines similar to
ours today. The SDP was the centrist Democrat party of the 1950s and 60s; the
Spartacists were today’s followers of Bernie Sanders. Just like today’s ANTIFAs
and BLMs, the Spartacists were happy to use violence to try to achieve their
ends. Since the SDP followers were unwilling to brawl in the streets, the SDP
made the ill-considered and fateful decision to enlist the army and
non-government militias to maintain order. Well, we know how that turned out.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Third, while today’s Left would very much like to paint Trump’s
conservative middle-class supporters as today’s version of the 1918 German
reactionary population, this is where the historical analogy fails.
Nonetheless, even while failing, there is a very important insight to be had
here.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II</p>
<p class="JPS2">While political power can be taken by force, the real objective
of a revolution, whether totalitarian or democratic, is for it to become
permanent. The most common strategy for this has been to erase the preceding
culture in an attempt to normalize the new order; the French tried this, the
Russians tried this, and the Chinese tried this. While these efforts have
definitely altered the cultures involved, they have not had the effect of safeguarding
regimes. As it turns out, the only two things which safeguard a regime are
giving the population what it wants (usually bread and circuses), on the one
hand, and severe repressive power, on the other.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The American revolution aside, we find that populations
accustomed to autocratic absolutist government often return to it. Populations
are fickle; the political history of post-revolution <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> proves this if nothing else.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The French had their popular revolution in 1789 with its exercise
of democratic mob murder, but soon enjoyed having autocracy back in the person
of the Emperor Napoleon. They gave up Louis XVI and the Bourbon line only to
embrace Napoleon and the Bonaparte line. Then they tried democracy for a while,
only to follow it with a second emperor Napoleon. Through the following
decades, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>
lumbered back and forth between autocracy and democracy. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> is now
enjoying its fifth republic (fifth constitution). Who knows how long it will
last?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Russians gave up Nicholas II and the Romanov line in the Feb
revolution, only to embrace Lenin and Stalin and their successors in the
October revolution. The <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">USSR</st1:place></st1:country-region>
has since disappeared, but little has changed for the average Russian: Russian
aristocrats have just been exchanged for Russian oligarchs and oppression is
arguably worse than it was under the czars.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In the German revolution, circumstances allowed for a democratic
republic, only to see the population embrace absolutism again in the decade
following 1933, when General von Hindenburg, long past his best-before date,
allowed himself to be persuaded to make Adolf Hitler chancellor of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">George W. Bush, a good son of the American founding vision, could
not imagine a population that would not be ecstatic to be self-governing. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> raises questions
on this thesis. I think that a closer look at history might have suggested to
him that people are far more open to autocratic rule than he thought was
possible.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What do we learn from this?</p>
<p class="JPS2">That populations really do not care so much how they
are governed so long as their needs, their wants, and their
prejudices are satisfied.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Where any of these three are significantly absent, and where
autocratic power does not prevent it, the people will revolt.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-5416977123042419112021-09-17T15:13:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:13:51.670-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/137-the-enlightenment-revolution-and-its-grandchildren/" title="Permanent Link to #137: The Enlightenment Revolution and its Grandchildren">#137:
The Enlightenment Revolution and its Grandchildren</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">November 4, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">I</p>
<p class="JPS2">I’ve mentioned in a number of earlier posts that it is the
inescapable destiny of popular, democratic revolutions to be successfully
hijacked by tyrannical internal forces. The usual suspects come to mind, of
course: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution,
the German Revolution. I don’t mention the American Revolution since, as I have
previously argued, it was not, strictly speaking, a “revolution” at all, rather
a case of colonial irredentism.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I’m returning to this theme because of I’ve been reading Peter
Gay’s The Enlightenment. The reading chair in my tiny home office is
right next to a couple of book cases holding the rather sad remainder of what
was once a pleasantly large library. But still, being retired allows me the
luxury to read whatever strikes my fancy. Settling down in my reading chair to
wallow in a trashy mystery, my eye settled on the Gay book, which I didn’t
remember reading, but which looked like an enticing read. Which it has turn out
to be, complete with old notes, which I don’t remember making.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Gay is a superbly well-read enthusiast of the Enlightenment, and
he attempts to be fair to the many criticisms that have been leveled against it
during both the 19th and 20th centuries. Nonetheless, he fails to
appreciate that the Enlightenment was, in fact,
a single revolution taking place over the space of 200 years
that culminated in the murderous paroxysm that began in 1789. This is the more
odd since he paints the philosophes as perceiving themselves as (drum
roll) revolutionaries. More specifically, they saw themselves as
being at war with religion (which they branded “superstition”) and the various
cultures from which they themselves had emerged. So, how is it that we have
someone like Gay showing himself such a fan of the philosophes when
they are the precursors of the Terror?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, if the principle with which I began is true (and I have seen
no counter-examples), then Gay should have been on the lookout for signs of the
totalitarianism which seems the inevitable legacy of revolution. To be honest,
I haven’t finished the book yet, so he might still get to that.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II</p>
<p class="JPS2">But there’s no mystery here. The 17th and 18th century
Enlightenment was the incubator of modern totalitarian Socialism (aka
“communism”). And what lies at the heart of all these totalitarian
take-overs is a forced detachment from cultural/historical antecedents, the
erasure of the ancien regime, a forced move from a despised culture
to no culture at all.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Edmund Wilson, in his history of Socialism (“To the Finland
Station”), traces Socialism back to the French Revolution, where the principle
I’m proposing had already made itself felt in the Jacobins. But the theoretical
underpinnings of that revolution did not emerge suddenly as from the head of
Zeus, nor had they been churning unperceived beneath the European surface. The
French Revolution’s theoretical underpinnings had been proposed, debated,
evolved, and refined during the two preceding centuries. The Jacobins stood on
the shoulders of the philosophes, who were the early generals and
strategists of the Enlightenment Revolution.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The scientists and intellectual dilettantes of the French
18th century whom Gay so admires can easily be enjoyed for their wit,
their creativity, even their eccentricities. We forgive them much, at least
partly because we’ve been taught to do so. We smile at Voltaire’s excesses just
as so many smile at Bill Clinton’s. They’re charming, glib bad boys, and just
oh so clever. But we wouldn’t be so happy to give them a pass if we reviewed
their antics within the shadow of the guillotine. Reading Gay helps make it
clear why we don’t notice Robespierre’s face peering out from the background of
Gay’s cheerful group photo of the philosophes. It is because
the philosophes had not yet taken that fatal revolutionary step right
out of history. Yes, they sought to detach themselves from their Christian
heritage, but like so many moving into divorce, they had another lover waiting
in the wings. The philosophes divorced Christianity, but they were
able to do so because they had the writers of classical antiquity ready to take
its place. The Jacobins, on the other hand, divorced all of their
history and culture, and it is this that finally made the Terror
possible. It is this which distinguishes the philosophes from the vicious
and murderous ideologues of 1789 and which obscures the direct line of
descendancy leading to them.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And yes, it can seem a small price to pay, that of having a bad
boy, to have someone very clever at the helm of government. But we must ask
ourselves what the consequences will be of increasingly staffing our
universities, our courts, and our government institutions with such charming,
glib bad boys. Bad boys who hate the culture which nurtured them, on which they
feed, and from which they emerge.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The EU is one grandchild of the Enlightenment Revolution. How’s
that been working?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The American Democratic Party is another grandchild of the
Enlightenment Revolution. How’s that been working?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Enlightenment Revolution was an irresponsible parent (what
else would we expect?), so there are yet other grandchildren mucking about, all
illegitimate and all still waiting for parental support which will never come.
Revolutions lead to tyrannies, which lead to slavery, poverty, and starvation
for their citizens.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III</p>
<p class="JPS2">But while bashing the Enlightenment may be a necessary antidote
to its excesses, one can hardly argue against its one utterly overwhelming
benefit: Science. And by “science,” I mean the “natural” sciences, not the
jumped-up pseudo disciplines with the borrowed authority of statistics, i.e.
the “social sciences.” Lest someone doubt me here, let me indicate that a
recent study by a social scientist claimed to demonstrate that around 75% of
“published studies” in social psychology and cognitive psychology are not
replicable. I wonder if his own study was replicable and whether he sensed some
irony here. I tend to think the situation is likely worse for sociology and
whatever other invented disciplines are littering the university scene.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yes, science and math have made astonishing progress and are
accelerating at an apparently exponential rate. This is fabulous and must be
acknowledged and admired (which I do).</p>
<p class="JPS2">The problem arises only when, as is inevitable, the methods which
have proven powerful and successful in one arena are aggressively applied in
others where they simply do not work.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There is an enormous amount of money now involved in natural
science, and natural science has carried tremendous prestige for a long time.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A situation such as this is like the smell of fresh meat to a
scavenger.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The natural sciences have attracted wanna-be disciplines looking
to cash in on the natural sciences’ successes. They want to create departments,
to increase their staffing and their budgets. Hence they tart up their names by
adding “science.” We now have political “science.” Really? Maybe we’ll
eventually have philosophical “science,” as well. And we wind up with idiocies
like departments of “theory.” Shouldn’t that have been “theoretical science”?</p>
<p class="JPS2">But, worse, the prestige of the natural sciences
attracts political and social scavengers who actually
burrow into the periphery of real natural science from which position they
attempt to affect public policy. Their “scientific” camouflage is the use of
computer models and simulations. That’s pretty “scientific,” right? How well
has this “scientific” method worked in, say, economics? But we should accept
its hysterical results in the Global Warming scam. Right. The social
“sciences” per se could be thought of as harmless enough wastes of
public money, and if they were satisfied to remain that, I suppose we could
tolerate them on campuses. But sadly they have become the instruments of
governments and other enormous interests to manipulate public opinion into
supporting policies completely incompatible with common sense. We should be
very wary of these pseudo-sciences.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This all means that once science became rich and successful, it
became a target for parasites. Should come as no surprise. See what happens if
you win $50 million.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, these are the dishonest attendants on wealth and success,
but there is one other that seems to be built right into human nature.</p>
<p class="JPS2">It is that people are naturally inclined to extend a new method
that has proven successful beyond its place of discovery and to think of it as
the final solution for all human problems. Descartes, for example, invented
analytic geometry, an extraordinary achievement. Since he was, among other
things, one of the earliest physicists, he immediately thought he could use it
to represent motion. Unfortunately, he was wrong in this; the representation of
motion had to await the invention of calculus by both <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city> and Leibniz (separately). This impulse
to extend the method is also behind the attempt to approach non-quantitative
empirical problems and questions with “science.” It was certainly present among
the 18th century philosophes.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Those whose imaginations are totally in the grip of scientific
method often feel compelled to despise the organically grown culture within
which they live. This was largely true of the philosophes and it is
largely true of many modern intellectuals, e.g. Richard Dawkins or Christopher
Hitchens.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The really difficult thing to do is to accept the amazing
progress and discoveries of natural science while accepting the universe of
inherited myths and values within which we live.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A prudent first step in this is to reject all attempts at
persuasion on moral matters based on “social science studies.”</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-55917563930546184792021-09-17T15:12:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:12:40.866-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/136-feeling-the-old-age-paradox/" title="Permanent Link to #136: Feeling the Old Age Paradox">#136: Feeling
the Old Age Paradox</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">October 27, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">If one is at, say, one’s 40th birthday, then one is
not old.</p>
<p class="JPS2">No one would say that one is. Nor would one be old the next day.
Or the day after. The reason is that one’s age status doesn’t change on
the basis of one day more-or-less. However, if one adds, say, 12,320 days,
making one 75, then on is old. But 12,320 days are just that many
individual days no one of which is capable of changing one’s age status. The
big group of days can’t have a property not owned by any of its constituents.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This means that at age 75 one has a property that one didn’t have
when one was 40 and never acquired since then. How is this possible? It would
seem that either we were old at 40 or we are
not old at 75. We can’t have oldness at 75 without having
acquired it at some point.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is a paradox. Call it the “Old Age Paradox.” A paradox
occurs when two equally compelling beliefs are incompatible. Most commonly,
paradoxes involve an incompatibility between a belief of which one is
intuitively certain and a belief which is the conclusion of some apparently
sound argument. What makes it a paradox is that it seems that one must abandon
one of the beliefs, but one is still equally committed to both. Psychologists
call this state of mind “cognitive dissonance.” Students of philosophy will
recognize the Old Age Paradox as an instance of the “Heap” or “Sorites”
paradox.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I don’t think that this paradox is best for introducing paradoxes
to young people, there are others in which the dissonance is much more obvious
and immediate.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yet, there is a feature to the Old Age Paradox that I don’t
detect in others.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Logical paradoxes are mostly contrived, one doesn’t encounter
them in the course of ordinary life. But the Old Age Paradox puzzles almost
everyone who actually gets old whether philosophically inclined or not.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Of course, most everyone who gets old bemoans that fact. But it’s
not this that I’m after here; it’s that almost everyone is puzzled with respect
to when it happened.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I remember my mother telling me that when she looked in a mirror
(in her 70s), that she couldn’t understand when it happened. There was the
usual emotional component, but there was also a distinct,
identifiable cognitive component. “I was young,” she said, “and
now I’m old. When did it happen, how did it happen”? She really
couldn’t understand how it could have happened without her noticing that it
had. Yet, it had. Her puzzlement was exactly the one found in the Old Age
Paradox.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I couldn’t answer her question then, and now I find myself
puzzled in exactly the same way. And I still can’t answer the question.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Old Age Paradox may be unique in being a natural and
inevitable experiential moment built right into the human condition.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-74988972318951165212021-09-17T15:10:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:10:53.912-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/135-the-public-apology-app-pap/" title="Permanent Link to #135 The Public Apology App (PAP)">#135 The
Public Apology App (PAP)</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">October 20, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">As we all know, technological change often brings with
it unanticipated cultural change and attendant challenges. Generally, those
challenges are themselves met with novel technological advances. This is no
less true for our current struggles with the new social media technology. While
the social media revolution has presented new challenges, those challenges have
often been overcome by new software in the form of … apps.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Like many beauty pageant contestants and political science
majors, I want to make a difference. I also want to make the
world a better place. In keeping with those objectives, I offer the
following proposal for a clearly needed new app.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I call it the Public Apology Application (or “PAP”).</p>
<p class="JPS2">I have noticed that more and more people on Twitter particularly
have been asked to make public apologies and recantments for their obviously
heartfelt beliefs and sentiments. Almost universally, those people have
complied. In older days, the public apology was restricted to large powerful
institutions, such as governments. Social media such as Twitter have thankfully
democratized this much needed societal instrument. What was once only available
to large entities such as the Soviet Union under Stalin (and is still used by <st1:country-region w:st="on">North Korea</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region>), is now finally available
to the people. My app would go even further in making the task of
public self-abasement easier. This is what the app would offer.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Both boiler-plate and custom apologies.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A boiler-plate apology would be something like this:</p>
<p class="JPS2">If any of my statements, actions, or habitual behaviors have
unintentionally given pain or offense to anyone, I want to make it absolutely
clear how very, very sorry I am that they have had to feel this way. My
statements, actions, and habitual behaviors in no way represent my true beliefs
or attitudes and have all been either misinterpreted, taken out of context, or
were the result of the use of prescribed drugs. Or my struggles with deep
personal problems or addictions. Or other matters beyond my control. Anyways,
I’m really sorry. Really sorry. That they feel this way.</p>
<p class="JPS2">All apologies could, of course, be edited and the audience base
adjusted. Thus, an apology could be restricted to some predefined message
address database (email, messaging, twitter accounts, etc.) or it could be
addressed to the world at large.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The apologies could also be titrated for degree of personal
humiliation: I am sorry, I am so sorry, I am so very sorry, my sorriness
goeth beyond all belief, I am beneath contempt, OMG I am so awful, etc.</p>
<p class="JPS2">My plan includes having the app available in both a
free (with advertisements) version and a premium version (no advertisements).
The premium version would also allow for larger apology scripts up to five
typed pages in length along with an inventory of professionally done scripts
written by ex-presidential speech writers.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I sincerely believe that this app would be a genuine
contribution to the great goal of making the world a better place and
am confident that if it were implemented, I would indeed have made a difference.
And I apologize most sincerely if my efforts have unintentionally caused anyone
any pain, discomfort, anxiety, nervous tic, digestive disorder, or unhappy
thought. Sorry. Really.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-75702461803560050472021-09-17T15:09:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:09:49.853-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/134-kant-lieutenant-commander-data-and-the-what-if-argument/" title="Permanent Link to #134: Kant, Lieutenant Commander Data, and the “What if…” Argument">#134:
Kant, Lieutenant Commander Data, and the “What if…” Argument</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">September 12, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Back in 2009 I wrote a post (#14) on the “What If everyone Did
That” moral argument. I still stand by what I wrote then, but I want to add
something important, something I clearly missed then.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The “What If” argument actually conceals some ancient and very
false assumptions. These assumptions arguably go back to Plato, but achieved
their modern force in the late Enlightenment through the moral writings of
Immanuel Kant. Kant is a difficult read, but his foundational false belief is
not difficult.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This belief is that human beings as we encounter them are
actually composites of parts only one of which is the authentically “human”
part, the other parts being, in his term, heteronomous (“external” to
the “true self”). The part which is the “true” us is, of course, the
rational part. And the rational part, sadly, is frequently overridden by
the heteronomous forces within us, e.g. lust, greed, pride, etc..
Thus, when we sin, we are simply losing the battle against external forces.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Kant further argues that reason is independent of personal
identity in the sense that any two people faced with the same circumstances and
relying only on reason will reach identical conclusions. For Kant,
all authentic people (people shorn
of heteronomous influences) are in fact identical; their apparent
differences reflect nothing of their true selves, but only the
varying heteronomous forces at play in them.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Still further, Kant argues that moral action is nothing other
than rational action.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Consequently, in an imaginary world in
which heteronomous forces were not present, all men would
behave morally simply by “being themselves.” There would actually be no such
category as “moral” behavior in such a world, since there would be no such
thing as “immoral” behavior. There would just be “behavior” (which, of
course, we, from our vantage point in the real world, would judge
to be “moral.”)</p>
<p class="JPS2">In contemporary culture terms, a Kantian “moral agent” would look
like Lieutenant Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise. All other things
being equal, Data acts rationally, this is how he has been programmed. He has
no lust, no greed, no pride, no pleasure, no pain, no satisfaction, etc.. If
other androids of Data’s kind were manufactured, their behaviors would be
indistinguishable from his.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And, according to Kant, Data automatically acts morally.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, if we want to simulate ordinary human activity in
Data, imagine him infected by a computer virus which mimics human vices and
frailties. In such a case, Data is faced with the challenge of dominating the
virus’ effects in order to remain “himself” and, thereby, to act morally.
That’s ostensibly the human condition according to Kant.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But even if one buys this nonsense, one is still left with the
crucial question: What is it “to act rationally?” Kant answers that a rational
being acts always and only in accordance with a “rule,” a generalization with
regard to behavior. But which rule?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, one of the ways in which Kant expresses this “rule”
governing the behavior of a moral agent is this:</p>
<p class="JPS2">Act only in such a way as you would have the generalization
expressing your action be a law of nature.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is often expressed as the dictum that when one acts, one
acts “for all men,” and it is one version of the rule which guides the actions
of any rational being. Kant calls this rule the “categorical (unconditional)
imperative.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">A thought experiment capturing this notion is this: When you act,
imagine yourself a God whose every act becomes a natural law such that all
other men cannot help but act the way in which you did.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And there you have it! The “What If…?” argument with which
we began.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Kant’s view is that a rational being cannot act in any way that
is not generalizable, that is, in any way he would not have all men act. For
him, this is not really a moral imperative, it is
a logical imperative: acting according to the categorical imperative
follows necessarily from being a rational being. So, when we ask ourselves
“what if everyone acted this way,” we are asking ourselves whether a rational
being would act this way, and thus whether we should act this way.</p>
<p class="JPS2">To be fair to Kant, let me stress that this
is not intended to be a prudential argument, namely
that “enlightened self-interest” dictates that we act only on universally
generalizable rules. For him, we are not reasoning that we should not
do X because if everyone did X, we might ourselves eventually be harmed by
that. No, rather the universalizability test of the categorical imperative is
there to inform us as to how we would act if we were free. Being
subject to heteronomous forces is being un-free. So, assuming that
all men wish to be free, the universalizability test allows one to know how one
would act if one were not subject to external constraints and forces. On
the Kantian story, being moral is equivalent to being rational is equivalent to
being free. Should we buy into this? No? Why?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Because any close look at this Kantian story reveals it for what
it is: a pathetic Enlightenment fantasy featuring the 18th century’s
favorite celebrity: Reason!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Are authentically human beings only their “reasoning” parts?
Is “being moral” the same as “being rational.” When we act morally, do we act
in such a way as we would have all other men act?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Nonsense. Morality is a matter of individual preferences,
themselves no more than the result of formative experiences and natural inborn
inclinations. For some people who have been conditioned in the Enlightenment
mode, a Kantian style “What if …” argument might work; but not because it
is sound, merely because they were so conditioned.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Let’s do away with the “What if …” argument and turn our eyes from
Kant to Hume, who really knew what he was talking about!</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-67081079986072400492021-09-17T15:06:00.007-07:002021-09-17T15:07:01.393-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><u> #</u></span><a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/133-multiculturalism-is-the-publicly-acceptable-face-of-revolution/" title="Permanent Link to 133: Multiculturalism is the Publicly Acceptable Face of Revolution"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">133:</span> Multiculturalism is the Publicly Acceptable Face of Revolution</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6pt; line-height: 150%;">July 20, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Revolution is by strategy and by ideology essentially an enemy of
culture, any culture, attacking it without any of the constraints
taken for granted in the culture under attack. Revolution operates in a field
devoid of all values save one: the destruction of the existing order. This was
true of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese
Revolution under Mao. It was also true, arguably, of the “bloodless” German
revolution of 1918 from which the Left emerged in power and, through the 1930s,
proceeded to effect the “revaluation of all values,” in Nietzsche’s phrase. If <st1:city w:st="on">Weimar</st1:city> was nothing else, it was certainly an attack on the
culture of pre-war <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. The only
counter-example to this thesis is that of the American Revolution, which belongs
much more in the category of colonial irredentism than genuine revolution.
Genuine revolution only takes place within an existing
cultural/political entity.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The difference I’m appealing to here really demands a separate
blog post, but I’ll just say this much here: irredentism is
a defense of a culture, specifically a local culture,
against an alien outside occupier; revolution is an attack on a specific local
culture from within. This means that properly speaking colonial wars of
self-determination are not really revolutionary wars, they are irredentist
wars. The American revolution tends to fall between the cracks, since the
colony actually shared the culture of the “occupier,” thus not exactly falling
in the irredentist mold. Yet, arguably, the colony had gone far enough in
culture from the occupier to be classed as irredentist.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There are multiple, converging reasons why revolution is and has
to be an enemy of the culture within which it is hatched. For one thing, the
revolutionaries believe themselves and others like them to be excluded from the
culture under attack, and they hate it for that reason. Their usual
expression for this reason is that the existing culture is “unfair.” But, more
important perhaps, is that they perceive rightly that a culture is an
impediment to their program of taking power. A culture unifies and strengthens
a social/political whole, so it makes perfectly good sense to go about
undermining and eroding the culture under attack.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And the revolutionaries have a point: it is far easier to attack
a culture than to defend it, and, once the cultural norms and assumptions lie
in tatters and chaos reigns, it is much easier to take the government by force.
Witness the two revolutions in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region>
of 1917: the first, a democratic one unable to organize an utterly failing
state, and the second, taken by force by the Bolsheviks. Out of chaos, tyranny.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But how to undermine a culture? Well, there are some obvious
steps. One, infiltrate the universities and turn them into platforms of
indoctrination. Two, take over the news media and turn them into platforms of
indoctrination. Three, take over the entertainment industry and turn it into a
platform of indoctrination. Four, take over the courts and have them
legislate from the bench.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A culture is cemented by a social/historical mythology which
contains some truths and some outright lies. The fact that it is a mythology is
not a fact against it; its function is to provide a social cement. To attack it
“as history” is intentionally to miss the point for a political purpose, which,
of course, revolutionaries do.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But, lest they be accused of being “nihilists,” as some of them
in the 19th century were accused of being, they also bring forward proposals
for a “new” set of values, a “new” culture to replace the old. This is a clever
strategy, a Trojan horse which conceals a world without any values at all.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The values of this new world are “tolerance” and “acceptance” for
any peoples “not like ourselves,” no matter what the implications. But what are
the implications? </p>
<p class="JPS2">The new culture is one of “Multiculturalism.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">This is an interesting move. The <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> motto is “E pluribus unum”
(“Out of many, one.”). The revolutionaries’ new motto is: Out of one,
many.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Multiculturalism is an ideology with a strategic purpose: it
is dis-integrative of the existing social whole.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And there you have it: Multiculturalism is the public ideological
face of a revolutionary movement bent on the take-over of the state through the
gradual erosion of its historically rooted unifying identity.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Sadly, it’s an easy sell. The progressive fragmentation of the
social unity begins with the fragmentation of the whole into ethnic parts. But
it has to be seen that this is just the beginning. These parts are still too
large. Fragmentation must continue, so further cracks in the social cements
must be created. In addition to ethnic divisions, there must also be sexual
divisions. Thus, to start, there are the homosexuals as well as the
heterosexuals. But this is also not enough, there are also the transsexuals,
but there are more yet to come. Add to these the zoophiles, the cannibals, the
sadists, the masochists, the coprophiles, the necrophiles, and, of course, the
a-sexuals … Dare we add, the pedophiles? They all have identities which must be
respected because it’s it’s just so wrong to judge. Be tolerant! Have
no values at all!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yes, this is an easy sell. It’s message goes right to the heart
of lazy, drugged, depressed, angry, failed narcissism. Who is immune to
that siren call? Certainly not the deranged, screaming, eyes-bulging women of
the “Million Women March.” Certainly not the deranged, screaming, eyes-bulging
Millenials breaking windows and burning cars at “peaceful protests.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">For the revolutionaries, the beauty of this strategy lies in the
fact that a culture’s social and legal conventions and rules presuppose stable
and persisting identities and roles. </p>
<p class="JPS2">The revolutionary strategy has been this: to begin by fragmenting
the whole into ethnic parts, to progress to ever smaller parts, with the ultimate
goal of a population of shape-shifters whose part-identity is a matter of
momentary choice.</p>
<p class="JPS2">At this point, the social whole is no longer a nation, no longer
a socially cohesive unit, and it is ready to be merged with all the other
colorless, dying progressive polities into a single gigantic mass ruled by
bleak, faceless bureaucrats at the UN oligarchy.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Oh, brave new world that hath such people in it.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-12835145288790859822021-09-17T15:04:00.004-07:002021-09-17T15:04:57.365-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/132-mortal-loneliness/" title="Permanent Link to #132: Mortal Loneliness">#132: Mortal Loneliness</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">June 6, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">I</p>
<p class="JPS2">Many have noticed the religious nature of modern Leftist
movements. The acceptance of a priesthood, the proscribing of apostates, the
fervor, the hysteria are all hallmarks of the religious. Duly noted.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But more importantly the same Left which exhibits these
characteristics fails to be aware of them. If it were, it would also see the
inescapable inference: people desperately need and want religious
experience (even if they get it from atheism). Science and Leftist
indoctrination have stolen the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from the West,
but the need for a God, some God, remains. One such god was
Communism; we see this explicitly recognized by the Western ex-commies who
contributed to the 1949 book The God that Failed. I actually knew
communist devotees in the 1950s, both in high school and college, some adults
and some young men. All of them knew the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin like
catechism and would discuss them with each other by reciting relevant passages.
Not unlike the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages and the students of the
Torah in yeshivas for the past 5000 years.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Nowadays, the god is sometimes “mother earth” and sometimes
“humanity” and sometimes people have no idea what it is they are worshiping.
People just want to worship. They always have, and have all around the world.
The need and the impulse are hard wired in them.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But why?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Existentialists were on the track of this answer, I think,
but fell short of the mark. They identified the problem in the
“meaninglessness” of human life. We’re born, we live, and not long after we
die. Some got closer to the mark when they emphasized that we die alone. I
think that’s the heart of the matter.</p>
<p class="JPS2">I remember a deeply disturbing scene in a science-fiction movie
in which a man in a space-suit became untethered and slowly drifted out into
deep space, alive for only as long as his air held out.</p>
<p class="JPS2">God, religion, and worship are answers to the fear and horror of
loneliness in life and in death. Not the social loneliness that can be cured
through companionship, but the loneliness experienced simply by being an
inaccessible mind, a kind of solipsistic loneliness we suffer in the face of
death. I call it “Mortal” loneliness.</p>
<p class="JPS2">II</p>
<p class="JPS2">Nietzsche announced “the death of God” in 1882. I think he was
both premature and late to the party. The slide in God’s health could arguably
be said to have begun with Galileo’s work with the telescope (ca. 1650). Many
people date the beginning of God’s health problems with those beginnings of
modern science. His health certainly declined during the 18th century as more
and more intellectuals questioned His very existence. By the late 19th, publishing
His obituary was scarcely a big deal. But was God actually dead? Maybe
Nietzsche’s surrogate Zarathustra was releasing “fake news” to the media.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Fifty years earlier, Kierkegaard had far more perceptive
thoughts. He asked the question later brought to the movie public in the title
song of the movie “Alfie”:</p>
<p class="JPS2">“What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?“</p>
<p class="JPS2">Kierkegaard thought that it’s all about the personal bond of
love. Not a love between man and woman, but a love between the particular man
and a a particular, personal God. Hmm, perhaps God was still alive at that
point.</p>
<p class="JPS2">This meant really that religion was losing the battle with
science not so much, perhaps, because of science’s enormous explanatory power,
but because religion had taken on over the centuries the characteristics that
science exemplified much more effectively. Aristotelian Christian theology
became increasingly abstract and intellectual through the centuries, losing the
very element which had been the source of its original power: the loving
presence of a personal God in one’s heart and mind. Not
an abstract God, but a God who was actually a person, who knew you as
a person, and who was there with and for you right inside
yourself until the last fragment of your consciousness left this
earth. When you and God loved each other, you did not die alone. Had
religion stuck with that, it would have done much better; it should never
have gone into competition with science.</p>
<p class="JPS2">III</p>
<p class="JPS2">It’s not enough, though, to identify the direct benefits of God’s
love here. There are complementary benefits as well. Those who love a
personal God within the context of a religion have not only God’s love to
sustain them, but they have a further antidote to their mortal loneliness in
the community of God-lovers in which they live. There are thus two sources of
ease for the mortally lonely, God’s love and what I call “huddling”. There is
an important lesson in this. Huddling is a powerful loneliness analgesic, but
it comes admittedly at a price: those who huddle together, often work at
strengthening their huddle by rejecting others. </p>
<p class="JPS2">History has in various ways made the acceptance of a loving,
personal God more and more difficult. Some people are still able to “make the
leap,” thus Nietzsche was wrong and God is still “alive”; but huge masses of
people no longer have this solution available to them. Yet “huddling” is still
available to them, though one of its most important forms has been
systematically attacked by the internationalist Left. This is the huddling of
nationalism. And, admittedly, nationalist huddles are often aggressively
hostile to other nationalist huddles.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The Left is not ignorant of the political utility of loneliness,
it herds masses towards the useful huddles, while driving them away from ones
it sees as problematic. The Left drives the masses away from Western
God-religion huddles and from Western nationalist huddles, but it encourages
earth-worship and humanity worship huddles. And like all huddles, it encourages
rage and hatred towards other huddles. This is captured beautifully in Tom
Lehrer’s sardonic introduction to his song National Brotherhood
Week. He says:</p>
<p class="JPS2">“I’m sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I
know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings
and I hate people like that.“</p>
<p class="JPS2">IV</p>
<p class="JPS2">The mortal loneliness I’m speaking of was identified some years
ago in sociology by Emile Durkheim. He called it “anomie”. I think it can
fairly be described as the condition of feeling to be without an identity.
Another way is to call it “looking for a huddle” of one’s own. Huddles have
membership requirements, characteristics that all members have and expect
others to have as well. These characteristics constitute “identities” or
“roles.” Sartre is brilliant in his discussions of personal identity and the
way in which people adopt “roles.” In particular, he is very good at
identifying the discomfort people feel when they are suddenly bereft of a role.
Anomie is the condition of being role-less.</p>
<p class="JPS2">A world of role-less masses presents political opportunists with
troubled waters. The Left loves to fish in troubled waters, such waters present
them with crises “too good to waste.” And Western waters are very troubled
these days with role-less masses.</p>
<p class="JPS2">We see this particularly in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region>,
though also in different ways in <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. The
two largest anomie populations in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> are women and blacks. In the
case of the former, traditional roles have been under systematic attack for
over a hundred years. Whether one likes or dislikes the roles that women had in
<st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
no one can claim that women have actually formed a new, modern identity. We see
this in the media’s coverage of the Women’s March on <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:state>. More and more of the women
interviewed were besides themselves with rage, but unable to articulate their
issues except in pre-packaged Leftist talking points and platitudes. And among
the young ones, we heard them say, over and over again, “I wanna make
a difference,” “I wanna make the world a better place,” and
other pap. We hear similar sentiments from beauty contest finalists: “I
wanna work to end world hunger.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">And we’ve seen American Blacks experiment with one posture after
another since the 1960s, the latest one being the “Black Lives Matter”
movement.</p>
<p class="JPS2">V</p>
<p class="JPS2">We live in a time of anomie, a time of failing solutions to the
problem of mortal loneliness. Some of the solutions are failing on their own,
other solutions are failing because of relentless attack. While the old
solutions soldier on in places, huge masses are living in frightening personal
isolation, looking either for an old personal god, a new personal god, or a
group within which to be loved.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And even “being in search of an identity” has now become a
prevalent identity!</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-21071924888383944232021-09-17T15:03:00.000-07:002021-09-17T15:03:02.481-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/131-dear-mrs-merkel-heres-a-modest-proposal/" title="Permanent Link to #131: Dear Mrs. Merkel, Here’s A Modest Proposal">#131:
Dear Mrs. Merkel, Here’s A Modest Proposal</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">May 30, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Mrs. Merkel, Mutti as the Germans fondly call her,
doesn’t like Mr. Trump. A surprise? I think not, she probably feels much more
comfortable with Putin; she is, after all, an East Berliner, an unreconstructed
commie finally showing her true colors under stress.</p>
<p class="JPS2">She doesn’t like Trump? Gee, pech, too bad. Europeans have
long felt superior to Americans, but only too happy to accept their money.
Maybe the time has come when they have to get along on their own.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Europe has not only become a welfare state, it has been <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s own
welfare dependent since 1945. It started with the Marshall Plan and it hasn’t
stopped for a moment since then, the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region>
tax payer paying for European defense, and by that token, money being fungible,
subsidizing <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>’s generous Socialist
benefits. Even when <st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region>
bungled the North African invasion of <st1:country-region w:st="on">Libya</st1:country-region>,
it had to beg armaments from the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Well, now they’ll
have to repurpose their cheese factories into the production of ammo, though,
on second thought, they’ll probably prefer Russian occupation to giving up
their cheese. Ha! They’ll have to get used to watery borscht with rotting
potatoes. No more cheese for Francois!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Mutti is bitter now, doesn’t relish having to pay her own
way. Sad, bitter Mutti.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Since Monarchism finally failed and left a governance vacuum in <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>, starting with the French Revolution, through the
Russian one, the bloodless German one of 1918, and the Chinese one, Socialisms
of one stripe or another have been battling for possession of the continent.
Into the <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city>
vacuum after WW I swept the Spartacists and the Nazis, both Socialists; they
fought in the streets, the Spartacists with Stalin’s backing, the Nazis feeding
off a fictional past. The Nazis won that fight, but lost the war they began
soon after, leaving the field open in 1945 to their erstwhile losers.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The post-war Socialists were no Stalinists, they chose what they
called the “third way”: “Social Democracy”. Make no mistake about it, it was
still Socialism (the “Sozis,” as they were called). This Socialism learned from
the commies’ mistakes as well as from their insights; on the one hand, they
eschewed their heavy handed dictatorships, but on the other, they saw the value
of Hitler’s partnerships with giant corporations. They implemented and
perfected Crony-Socialism. And it’s worth noting that the first revolution in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> in 1917
was in fact a democratic one and that it fell very quickly to Lenin and his
tactics. Lenin, however, and Stalin after him tried to be doctrinaire Marxists
and thoroughly destroyed <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s
productive capacity (along with millions and millions of lives). Fortunately,
there was no Lenin in 1945 <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> and Social
Democracy seemed able to take over governance. To some extent this was an
illusion, since European reconstruction was being paid for by the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
which has continued paying and paying ever since.</p>
<p class="JPS2">While it is true that Mutti’s bunch has been doing very
well, the rest of <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> has not, particularly
the Southern countries. <st1:country-region w:st="on">Greece</st1:country-region>,
<st1:country-region w:st="on">Italy</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Spain</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Portugal</st1:country-region>,
and to some extent <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
have been flirting with bankruptcy. The Norwegians have <st1:place w:st="on">North
Sea</st1:place> oil, so they’re doing ok, the Swedes’ immigrations policies
are bringing the country into deep trouble. I confess that I am not bullish on <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. If the continent has to start paying its own way,
expect tires burning in the streets — that’s how political discontent is
expressed in <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. Unsubsidized Socialism
does not do well, even when it has wealth under its feet: witness <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Venezuela</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">And while the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region>
was subsidizing <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>’s recovery, the
scribbler positions which had gone empty over the bad years were being rapidly
filled with the old commie intellectual hold-overs from the 1920s and 30s. As
well, the GI Bill and the reconstruction of <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>
created huge numbers of new openings for scribblers. From their various
platforms in the Universities and the mass media, they worked away at boring
from within, a Socialist/Communist fifth column within the Western world. Their
goal was nothing less than the one which had animated Lenin and Stalin and Mao,
namely world domination. They worked by directly eroding and undermining the
cultural distinctiveness of the Western nations: their values, conventions, and
religions, and indirectly by importing populations utterly unable and unwilling
to share and support the Western cultures hosting them. They hoped to produce a
population-wide anomie into which one-world-Socialism could easily
slide.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Hussein Obama thought he had a chance to turn the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region> into a domesticated Socialist cash cow for an
increasingly socialistically unified world: an analogue, in effect, of an
imperial colony for <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>. Just as the French
sucked North Africa dry without giving anything in return, Hussein thought
Europe as a whole could enjoy its sophisticated civilization on the revenue
from its wealthy, primitive colony, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. He overshot, as did
the Europeans, and now they’re just sad, bitter, and frustrated.
Poor Mutti. Hussein has indeed managed to increase
an anomie that was already present, which is why we’re seeing deranged
screaming and violence in the streets. But his grasp of arithmetic was perhaps
not up to the task of predicting an election outcome: there just weren’t enough
of the crazed available (yet) to turn the trick. Poor sad, bitter Democrats;
bitter, sad Europeans.</p>
<p class="JPS2">But really, now, they should be more understanding. They should
just reflect on how annoying they themselves find the Greeks’ unwillingness to
pay their own way. The Greeks expect the rest of <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>,
particularly Mutti and her people, to subsidize their leisurely
lives. The Germans are not enthused about this, why should the Americans be any
more so? But this would require a level of perspective perhaps too demanding of
a commie-manqué like Mutti.</p>
<p class="JPS2">So, Mrs. Merkel, here’s a modest proposal given in the spirit of
communal contribution with which you are so familiar: Jeder nach seinen
Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen. (“From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs.” — Karl Marx). The EU has become more
than a mere economic union, it has evolved into an entity which speaks as if it
is the unified voice of the continent on all matters social, moral, and
political. I suggest, therefore, that the EU speak also with a single, unified
purse on the continent’s financial obligations. Let the EU pay the 2% (or more)
annual dues to NATO, rather than having individual nations of differing means
struggle to meet their commitments, eh? How about them apples, Mutti?</p>
<p class="JPS2">Now, I know that this might hit <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> a bit hard since it is
currently a deadbeat, but give the plan a chance. A quick look at the stats
shows where <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> falls: <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
3.61%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Greece</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
2.38%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Britain</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
2.21%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Estonia</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
2.16%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Poland</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
2%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.78%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Turkey</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.56%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Norway</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.54%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Lithuania</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.49%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.48%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Latvia</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.45%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Portugal</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.38%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Bulgaria</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.35%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Croatia</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.23%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Albania</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.21%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.19%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Denmark</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.17%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Netherlands</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.17%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Slovakia</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.16%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Italy</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
1.11%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Czech</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Republic</st1:placetype></st1:place>, 1.04%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Hungary</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 1.01%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Canada</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 0.99%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Slovenia</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 0.94%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Spain</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 0.91%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Belgium</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 0.85%. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Luxembourg</st1:country-region></st1:place>, 0.44%.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Gee, Mutti, aren’t you just a little embarrassed
that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Greece</st1:place></st1:country-region> of
all nations should be paying its bills better than you? But for goodness
sake, Mutti, even <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Albania</st1:country-region></st1:place> is cleaning your
clock, making you look bad!</p>
<p class="JPS2">So consider my solution. Sure, you’re a deadbeat nation, but if
you follow my suggestion, that can be nicely obscured. You can bury your
non-compliance within the single payment made on the EU behalf. Not only that,
but you can probably bully some of your more pathetic members into upping their
contributions so that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>
can pay even less! Maybe you can intimidate languishing <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region> into
coughing up 2.5% or more. Remind them of the last two Wars, eh? Think it
over, Mutti, I’ve got your back.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-55086975994437485722021-09-17T15:02:00.001-07:002021-09-17T15:02:06.590-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/130-trump-the-media/" title="Permanent Link to #130: Trump & the Media">#130: Trump &
the Media</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">February 21, 2017</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Among the many fine things that President Trump has done in only
his first thirty days in office is smack down the press. His attacks on the
press have gotten the same entertaining results as his order on immigration
did: talking heads in psychiatric level shock over the sheer personal violation
they feel. Their eyes rolling in their heads, spittle flecking their lips, they
whine and screech: Does he not KNOW who we are??!!</p>
<p class="JPS2">Yes, they repeat over and over again, We are the Press,
guaranteed freedom by the US Constitution! </p>
<p class="JPS2">Jeez, they weren’t so interested in the Constitution while
Hussein was president. Maybe we should point out to them that in their
own view of the Constitution, it is a “living thing” responsive to
changing social and political norms in which it can mean whatever we want it
to. Maybe “free press” now means “a press told to mind its manners”.
Just a little joke, I’m an Originalist so “free press” still means “free
press.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">But what’s particularly intriguing about the nonsense issuing
from their over-heated spitty lips is the word “adversarial.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Again and again, they complain that the president has no business
objecting to their lying, biased, often unsourced, “reporting.” He just doesn’t
understand (the simple fool!) the special nature of the relationship in The
U.S. between the (free) press and the government: that it is by its very nature
“adversarial.”</p>
<p class="JPS2">Well, that’s o.k.. We know what adversarial relationships are
like. The relationship between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was adversarial.
The relationship in North American courts between prosecution and defense are
famously adversarial. But what does this really mean?</p>
<p class="JPS2">It means that, for example, that the prosecution gets to say
things, often perhaps outrageous things (under the watchful eye of the
court, of course), BUT then the defense gets to respond or rebut or simply
bloviate in turn. Neither of the two gets to use the other as his (or her)
punching bag without the other getting his (or her) turn. “Adversarial” means
that BOTH sides get to punch.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Historically, presidents have for the most part decided to simply
“take it.” This has generated a population of wussy news bullies who have taken
it for granted that they can say absolutely anything with impunity. In effect,
we are talking about a generation of snowflake reporters (I won’t use the
overblown honorific they constantly bestow on themselves: “journalist.”) The
combination of presidential forbearance and left wing control of the media has
allowed the newsy population to develop and market a fictional “brand” for
themselves: the honorable, courageous, deeply insightful, counter-balance to
“power.” I suspect that this began in the post-war years with personalities
like Murrow and Cronkite, the erstwhile priests of news, since canonized to
News Sainthood. Again and again we hear them repeat the hackneyed phrase “we
speak truth to power.” Jeez, get over yourselves! “Journalist,” today, is
treated (by themselves) like “superhero fighting the forces of darkness.” But
even in the comic books, the arch-enemies of the superheroes do fight back
without the superheroes going into a crying tantrum.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Our modern “journalists” (it’s ok to use the word as long as it’s
in quotes) resemble nothing so much as modern “Palestinians”: they throw
rockets again and again at Israel, then get outraged when Israel hits back:
“they hit back too hard, it’s disproportionate,” wah, wah, wah.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The lesson is simple: you don’t wanna get whacked, play nice. You
don’t wanna play nice, then don’t whine when you get whacked. You insist on
whining? Eventually, people are gonna point at you and laugh. It’s already
started, get used to it.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-54296016417610291172021-09-17T15:00:00.007-07:002021-09-17T15:00:55.432-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/129-the-clintons-and-the-fbi/" title="Permanent Link to #129 The Clintons and the FBI">#129 The </a><a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/129-the-clintons-and-the-fbi/" title="Permanent Link to #129 The Clintons and the FBI">Clintons
and the FBI</a></h1><p><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6pt;">July 5, 2016</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">FBI director James Comey this morning gave a press conference in
which he described in great detail precisely what it was that Hillary Clinton
did in the email scandal and the relevant legislation. At the very end, he
stated that the FBI was not going to recommend to AG Loretta Lynch that a
criminal indictment take place.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The general response among pundits was that this was a “great
victory” for HC. Perhaps. But was it a great victory for the Democratic Party?
Time will, of course, be the final arbiter, but there’s another possible take
here.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In effect, what Comey did may be more subtle than appears.</p>
<p class="JPS2">On the surface, the whole affair, including the meeting between
Lynch and Bill Clinton, smells to high heaven. It smells so much that it is
difficult to understand how it could have been allowed to go so far. And when
Comey did his strange routine, the whole thing became even more mysterious.</p>
<p class="JPS2">What Comey did was this: the laid out in the greatest detail the
strong criminal case against HC under “gross negligence” legislation
and then declined to recommend prosecution! This certainly increases
the impression that “the fix is in.” But, if the fix was indeed in, then why
would he lay out such a damning case against her? It makes him look bad and it
certainly energizes the conservative voting public against her. Well, maybe
that was precisely his intent, especially if there was indeed pressure being
applied on HC’s behalf.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Here’s a possible scenario. Obama or his minions lean on Comey.
Comey contacts Lynch who has also had pressure. They decide that Lynch would
shift the decision burden to Comey (which she did). Comey decides to satisfy
his bosses by meeting the letter of their demand: he agrees to not recommend
criminal indictment (which he did). But, he’s a pissed off Republican, so he
reasons that publishing a complete and damning case against her even as he
recommends no criminal indictment will have the following consequences.</p>
<p class="JPS2">First, it will avoid a bad and likely outcome. Had Comey
recommended indictment, it is very likely that the Party would have dumped HC
and brought in Biden. The voting population on both sides would likely have
heaved a sigh of relief and moved on masse behind him, assuring a Democratic
victory. Comey’s move, instead, has the effect of simultaneously wounding her
severely and yet keeping her as the Dem candidate.</p>
<p class="JPS2">At the same time, his move will further energize that vast part
of the voting population who already believe that the fix is in.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There are two things in this speculation which are not really
essential. There’s no need for Comey to have been pressured; he might have just
decided that far more was to be gained from having a wounded HC staggering
around on the campaign field than by finishing her off in a legal mercy
killing. Second, it isn’t necessary to involve Lynch here at all. Lynch was in
a terrible bind and her decision allowed her to escape her problem. In a sense,
Bill Clinton’s “accidental” meeting with her was a great favour since it
provided her with a convenient pretext for getting out of the fix she was in.</p>
<p class="JPS2">All in all, I think it likely that Comey’s performance will do
much more damage to the Hildabeast than to Trump.</p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4731406794490716817.post-78812398199896623482021-09-17T14:59:00.004-07:002021-09-17T14:59:43.385-07:00<h1 style="text-align: left;"> <a href="https://immigrant9.wordpress.com/2016/03/19/128-the-assimilation-of-illegal-aliens/" title="Permanent Link to #128 The Assimilation of Illegal Aliens">#128 The
Assimilation of Illegal Aliens</a></h1>
<p class="JPS2"><span style="color: #777777; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 6.0pt; line-height: 150%;">March 19, 2016</span></p>
<p class="JPS2">Apologists for the millions of illegal aliens in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place>
frequently make the argument that these people will quickly become upstanding
and contributing American citizens and should consequently be welcomed.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The larger issue of their illegality aside, along with that of
the security risks involved and the additional costs to the communities in
which they concentrate, there is the further problem that what the apologists
claim is most likely simply false.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The same population making this claim, that the illegals will
soon assimilate, mocked G.W. Bush for his democracy spreading rhetoric. They
said that it was absurd to think that one could take a middle Eastern
population accustomed for centuries to strong man rule and make it respect the rule
of law. It takes cultural evolution to change the political and social
inclinations of a population, they said.</p>
<p class="JPS2">They were quite right in that mockery and, at the time, I was
also against the invasion of <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region>
for that reason as well as for the reason that Saddam was a necessary
constraint on <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iran</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
Bush would have been well served by reading a bit about the history of WW I’s
military campaign in the <st1:place w:st="on">Middle East</st1:place>. The
effort to turn the Arab tribes into a viable army against the Turks failed
miserably. Why? For substantially the same reasons that democratizing <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> has
failed. But where the apologists are wrong is in not applying
this insight to the migrating illegals.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There is ample evidence that these migrants will not be a net
benefit to the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.A.</st1:country-region></st1:place>.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Since the Democrat Party declared war on poverty back in the 60s,
how has that gone? Billions, if not trillions, spent on this miserable fantasy
war and what do we have now? Ever larger ghettos, so large in fact as to
consume entire cities. Consider <st1:city w:st="on">Baltimore</st1:city>, consider
<st1:city w:st="on">Detroit</st1:city>, consider the barrios of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:city></st1:place>. We cannot
even make our indigenous sub-populations assimilate, what could possibly make
us think that importing millions of ethnically similar groups would do better?</p>
<p class="JPS2">The apologists point to the successes of the Irish, the Italians,
the Jews, the Poles, the Czechs and so on. They could also point to the
successes of the Asians, which are plentiful, but can they point to the
successes of the Hispanics? They can try, but on balance how has that gone for us?
What should be clear, political considerations aside for the moment, is that
some cultures assimilate to the Western mercantile society and others do not. <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>, both Western and Eastern, has done very well.
South America, Africa, and the <st1:place w:st="on">Middle East</st1:place>? Not
well at all.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Is this just an example of an ideologically driven mistake? Oops,
sorry, didn’t expect this? Not likely.</p>
<p class="JPS2">There’s a wise old saying: When people say “It’s not the money
that’s motivating me,” it’s the money. I would suggest the same is true when
they say “It’s not political advantage that’s motivating me.” It’s the
political advantage.</p>
<p class="JPS2">The comedian Jay Leno got it exactly right. He quipped, “We can’t
say ‘illegal alien’ anymore, that’s politically incorrect. The acceptable new
term,” he said, “is ‘undocumented Democrat’.” Sad, but right on the money. It’s
about importing new Democrat voters.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In a democracy, it’s all about the votes. If you haven’t got
them, import them, breed them, buy them, or turn to the dead (somehow, they
always vote Democrat).</p>
<p class="JPS2">Kennedy was first in importing them (the 1965 Immigration and
Nationality Act), Obama has doubled down on that. Johnson bred them with his
welfare policies. Obama simply bought them, and all Democrats appeal to the
dead.</p>
<p class="JPS2">These are eternal verities. Our newly empowered Canadian Liberal
Party is experimenting with a universal monthly stipend to buy votes (even
though this will significantly increase the national debt) and it is taking
advantage of the Syrian crisis to import Syrian refugees (i.e. Liberal voters).
In the words of Rahm Emmanuel, it was just too good a crisis to waste.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Open borders policy should be understood as a tool of the
conglomerate of the Democrat Party and its billionaire cronies. The Party gets
its lemming voters and cash from the billionaires; the billionaires get cheap
labor and favorable treatment in their multinational business
transactions. It has to be understood that neither the Democrat Party
nor their billionaire cronies find their interests best served by the existence
of national boundaries. Just as in the case of the EU, this
partnership of financial and political convenience sees a single undivided
world as best serving its own interests. The fact that the citizens of
individual countries violently prefer to have national unities is
an inconvenience best ignored. This attitude didn’t work in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, it hasn’t worked in the EU, and the ascendancy of
Donald Trump in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>
suggests it’s not working there.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Oddly, the Democrat/Crony partnership shares a common objective
with that much vilified old world notion: empire. Both have wanted a world
under a single government and for similar reasons, only their rhetoric has been
different. Go figger.</p>
<p class="JPS2">In the words of Tom Lehrer’s song “The Old Dope Peddler,” the
Democrat Party and its friends does well by “doing good.” The problem is that
while the Party members and their cronies do well, and the dependent class that
supports them does well, the tax paying middle class citizens gets squeezed
ever more tightly to support this gigantic boondoggle.</p>
<p class="JPS2">Open borders policy survives on other people’s money. As Margaret
Thatcher said, sooner or later, you run out of it.<strong><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 8.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></strong></p>The Immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03198915108963826227noreply@blogger.com0