An apt metaphor

For the charade of globalist “leadership”:

Once again the mainstream media peddled the spoon-fed propaganda that world leaders “led the march” to honor the victims of the Paris shootings last week. Glorious photo-ops of Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, David Cameron (oh, and not Barack Obama) were smeared across front pages hailing the “unity in outrage.” However, as appears to be the case in so many ‘events’ in the new normal managed thinking in which we live, The Independent reports, French TV has exposed the reality of the ‘photo-op’ seen-around-the-world: the ‘dignitaries’ were not in fact “at” the Paris rallies but had the photo taken on an empty guarded side street.

 

We are living in a Potemkin world. Take nothing reported by the media at face value.

Post-intentional problems

Edward Feser addresses R. Scott Bakker’s proselytization for post-intentionality:

Bakker tells us that, though he once found the objections to eliminativism compelling, he now takes the post-intentional “worst case scenario” to be a “live possibility” worthy of exploration.  It seems to me, though, that he doesn’t really say anything new by way of making eliminativism plausible, at least not in the present article.  Here I want to comment on three issues raised in his essay.  The first is the reason he gives for thinking that the incoherence problem facing eliminativism isn’t serious.  The second is the question of why, as Bakker puts it, we are “so convinced that we are the sole exception, the one domain that can be theoretically cognized absent the prostheses of science.”  The third is the question of why more people haven’t considered “what… a post-intentional future [would] look like,” a fact that “amazes” Bakker.

Still incoherent after all these years

Let’s take these in order.  In footnote 3 of his article, Bakker writes:

Using intentional concepts does not entail commitment to intentionalism, any more than using capital entails a commitment to capitalism.  Tu quoque arguments simply beg the question, assume the truth of the very intentional assumptions under question to argue the incoherence of questioning them.  If you define your explanation into the phenomena we’re attempting to explain, then alternative explanations will appear to beg your explanation to the extent the phenomena play some functional role in the process of explanation more generally.  Despite the obvious circularity of this tactic, it remains the weapon of choice for great number of intentional philosophers.

There are a couple of urban legends about the incoherence objection that eliminativists like to peddle, and Bakker essentially repeats them here.  The first urban legend is the claim that to raise the incoherence objection is to accuse the eliminativist of an obvious self-contradiction, like saying “I believe that there are no beliefs.”  The eliminativist then responds that the objection is as puerile as accusing a heliocentrist of self-contradiction when he says “The sun rose today at 6:59 AM.”  Obviously the heliocentrist is just speaking loosely.  He isn’t really saying that the sun moves relative to the earth.  Similarly, when an eliminativist says at lunchtime “I believe I’ll have a ham sandwich,” he isn’t really committing himself to the existence of beliefs or the like.

But the eliminativist is attacking a straw man.  Proponents of the incoherence objection are well aware that eliminativists can easily avoid saying obviously self-contradictory things like “I believe that there are no beliefs,” and can also go a long way in avoiding certain specific intentional terms like “believe,” “think,” etc.  That is simply not what is at issue.  What is at issue is whether an across-the-board eliminativism is coherent, whether the eliminativist can in principle avoid all intentional notions.  The proponent of the incoherence objection says that this is not possible, and that analogies with heliocentrism and the like therefore fail.

After all, the heliocentrist can easily state his position without making any explicit or implicit reference to the sun moving relative to the earth.  If he needs to, he can say what he wants to say with sentences like “The sun rose today at 6:59 AM” in a more cumbersome way that makes no reference to the sun rising.  Similarly (and to take Bakker’s own example) an anti-capitalist can easily describe a society in which capital does not exist (e.g. a hunter-gatherer society).  But it is, to say the least, by no means clear how the eliminativist can state his position in a way that does not entail that at least some intentional notions track reality.  For the eliminativist claims that commonsense intentional psychology is false and illusory; he claims that eliminativism is evidentially supported by or even entailed by science; he proposes alternative theories and models of human nature; and so forth.  Even if the eliminativist can drop reference to “beliefs” and “thoughts,” he still typically makes use of “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “model,” “implication,” “entailment,” “cognitive,” “assertion,” “evidence,” “observation,” etc.  Every one of these notions is also intentional.  Every one of them therefore has to be abandoned by a consistent eliminativist.  (As Hilary Putnam pointed out decades ago, a consistent eliminativist has to give up “folk logic” as well as “folk psychology.”)

To compare the eliminativist to the heliocentrist who talks about the sunrise or the anti-capitalist who uses capital is, if left at that, mere hand waving.  For whether these analogies are good ones is precisely what is at issue.

I am intrinsically dubious about Bakker’s ability to construct anything coherent on much simpler grounds. The fact that he could not, by his own admission, understand the metaphor when I pointed out how the rejection of traditional morality by modern SF/F writers significantly reduced their conceptual color palette and left them painting in shades of grey did not testify well concerning his intelligence.

John C. Wright had the likes of Bakker pegged when he wrote: “They think they are smarter than us. These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read ORIGIN OF SPECIES or DAS KAPITAL or THE REPUBLIC and who do not even know the intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.”

Now, Bakker is far from the worst of the sort; he is at least somewhat conversant with some of the books written on the subject. However, as Feser points out, he’s obviously not sufficiently conversant with the relevant material to understand that he is treading ground that has been trod before.


This exchange in the comments was particularly amusing:


Bakker: “How does asserting that I’m presupposing one of the thousands of
intentionalist interpretations out there do anything more than beg this
question?”

Brandon: “This doesn’t seem to be a correct use of ‘begging the question’; it’s
not presupposing a conclusion to point out that you yourself are
presupposing the conclusion and don’t seem to have any rational way of
not presupposing it.”

Scott: “Are you really entitled, on an eliminativist view, to talk about
“begging the question”? How might you give an account of that logical
fallacy with no reference to intentionality? I don’t think it’s
possible, but the point is that even eliminativists acknowledge that it
hasn’t been done.”

Feser: “I don’t know why you keep saying that the incoherence objection begs the
question. It does not beg the question. Here’s one way to summarize
the objection:

1. Eliminativists state their position using expressions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “illusion,” etc.

2.
They can do so coherently only if either (a) they accept that
intentionality is real, or (b) they provide some alternative, thoroughly
non-intentional way of construing such expressions.

3. But eliminativists reject the claim that intentionality is real, so option (a) is out.

4.
And they have not provided any alternative, thoroughly non-intentional
way of construing such expressions, so they have not (successfully)
taken option (b).

5. So eliminativists have not shown how their position is coherent.”

If you find the whole thing difficult to follow, Anonymous provides a helpful summary:

What, precisely, do eliminative materialists think they’ve discovered in science that shows that intentionality doesn’t exist?

They
failed to discover something that’s been intentionally excluded
from science to begin with. This, they believe, is great evidence that
the thing they’ve excluded doesn’t exist.

And thus we see, yet again, that it is his lack of historical knowledge that bites the atheist in the ass. They are, as Wright observes, boobs who cannot follow, or find the error, in a syllogism of three steps.

  1. If evidence for X cannot be seen or otherwise observed, X does not exist.
  2. I looked in my closet and did not see or observe any evidence of zebras.
  3. Therefore, zebras do not exist. 

I find it both amazing and amusing how so many atheist philosophies, no matter their starting points or authors, wind up chasing their own tails in precisely the same manner. They always wind up concluding that neither the individual nor his actions matter in the slightest. Taken as a whole, they point to a particular conclusion: without God, there is no Man.

    Underlining their case

    We don’t appear to be dealing with strategic masterminds here:

    Foreign intelligence agencies have intercepted discussions by Islamist militants about possible attacks on weekly marches organised by Germany’s new anti-Islamic movement, a news weekly reported on Friday, without citing its sources.

    Der Spiegel magazine said that foreign intelligence services had picked up the content of communications by some “known international jihadists”, without giving specific details.

    The intelligence, which was passed to German authorities, indicated they had discussed possible attacks on the rallies organised by the so-called group, “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident” (Pegida), the magazine said in a pre-released story to appear in this weekend’s edition.

    I can’t think of a better way for Muslims to transform the anti-Islamic marchers into anti-Islamic soldiers. Then again, I wouldn’t put it past the European authorities to try to scare the growing pro-Pegida forces into staying home.

    And nothing fails like past success. Since intimidation has succeeded so brilliantly for so long in Europe, it may be that this is a case of jihadists with a hammer seeing a nail. Meanwhile the French authorities are already demonstrating that they, at least, are not Charlie:

    Justice Minister Christiane Taubira said yesterday the French government was going to tighten laws against racism and anti-Semitism.

    It astonishes me how abysmally stupid these people are. Do they really believe placing the cause of free speech in ideological alignment with the most virulent racists and Jew-haters is going to change the way anyone thinks or feels? Especially in light of assertions such as these:

    “To laugh at the Prophet… is something very different from “free speech”
    as usually understood. It is a violent act.”     – Abdal Hakim Murad, the Telegraph

    Lind > Mitchell + Douhet

    William S. Lind was right. Again.

    ISIS has almost doubled the land it controls in Syria since the US-led coalition began airstrikes against the extremist group in the summer, a new map has revealed. The extremist group has continued to expand its ‘caliphate’, despite more than 800 airstrikes hitting targets in ISIS-controlled areas since last summer.

    The map, created by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), shows just how much land has fallen to ISIS – which now has a third of the country under its control. Before the summer, the militants controlled just half that.

    Airpower is nothing more than a supporting arm. Sans nukes, it has never succeeded in accomplishing anything on its own. It’s interesting to see that even in combination with non-US ground forces in Iraq, all it has been able to do is prevent ISIS from expanding further.

    Even those with zero interest in things military should keep this in mind, because what it means is that any politician threatening air strikes is essentially promising to do nothing. Note that immigrants, who are a form of boots on the ground, are far more dangerous than air strikes.

    Christian revival in the heart of secularism

    A Christian in France suggests one might be in the works:

    On a recent Sunday, my family and I only showed up 10 minutes early for Mass. That meant we had to sit in fold-out chairs in the spillover room, where the Mass is relayed on a large TV screen. During the service, my toddler had to go to the bathroom. To get there, we had to step over a dozen people sitting in hallways and corners. This is business as usual for my church in Paris, France.

    I point this out because one of the most familiar tropes in social commentary today is the loss of Christian faith in Europe in general, and France in particular. The Wall Street Journal recently fretted about the sale of “Europe’s empty churches.”

    Could it be, instead, that France is in the early stages of a Christian revival?

    Yes, churches in the French countryside are desperately empty. There are no young people there. But then, there are no young people in the French countryside, period. France is a modern country with an advanced economy, and that means its countryside has emptied, and that means that churches built in an era when the country’s sociological makeup was quite different go empty. In the cities — which is where people are, and where cultural trends gain escape velocity — the story is quite different.

    But back to our parish. Is our pastor some outlier with megawatt
    charisma? In terms of flair, he would win no public speaking contests.
    But there is something that sets him apart from many of the Catholic
    priests my parents’ generation grew up listening to: he is
    unapologetically orthodox.

    It may seem strange to suggest this at a time when liberalism in the mainstream churches and secularism without appear dominant. The Anglicans have made women bishops, the Pope is a demi-socialist, and everyone expects the Supreme Court to declare, ex nihilo, that the abominable parody known as “gay marriage” was magically written into the U.S. Constitution in hitherto undetected invisible ink.

    But consider the logic of the situation. First, as with a market at its peak, there is no one left to buy into the mainstream denominations’ liberal quasi-Christianity. The pews, as they say, are already empty. The 60’s-era notion that being more tolerant, more accepting, more accommodating of the world would strengthen the Christian Church and bring in more believers had precisely the opposite effect. After all, if the Church is not only in the world, but of it, what purpose does it have?

    At the same time that its intellectual bankruptcy has resulted in the undeniable material failure of inclusive, liberal, and tolerant Churchianity, the material and spiritual failures of secularism are being more apparent as well. People are beginning to realize that asserting a belief in nothing is not going to save them from either the fires of Hell or the bullets of a resurgent Islam.

    Add to that the fact that the apparent wealth of the longest credit boom in world history has turned out to be mostly illusionary, and what we are seeing is the potential for a perfect storm of a return to the faith of an intensity that may be unprecedented. For decades, only prophets saw the danger. For years, only extremists were willing to speak out. But now, one has to have one’s head lodged firmly in the sand, or in one’s posterior, to fail to recognize four things:

    1. The failure of liberal Christian heresy
    2. The spiritual and material failures of secularism
    3. The danger of the third great wave of Islamic aggression
    4. The peril of the Christian West

    Now, none of this means a revival is inevitable. It is not. But God works in mysterious ways and in His own time. He appears to enjoy waiting until the moment is dire, and then, using the most unlikely of sources. We cannot make it happen, but we can raise our voices and pray that He will make it happen, and that He use us as His weapons against those who have proclaimed themselves His enemies.

    We are all sinful, corrupt, and fallen. I do not exempt myself from that, being worse than many, if not most, in those regards. But even I can see that something is stirring, something appears to be rumbling under the ground to which the flimsy secular chains that cover the inert corpse of Christendom are attached.

    I know that there are those who believe that we are living in a permanently post-Christian era. But I suggest it is far too soon to count out a faith that began with nothing more than eleven frightened men. If Christians do not serve and worship a Living God, then Christianity should, by all reason and logic, continue to dwindle and fade. But if that does not happen, if there is, instead, a great revival, that will be meaningful evidence to the contrary.

    Burning down the house

    Brad Torgersen has some thoughts on the reaction to the announcement of the forthcoming SAD PUPPIES 3. To put it in perspective, keep in mind that he is one of the liberal moderates of the Evil Legion of Evil:

    It’s remarkable how fast word travels on the intarwebz these days. No sooner had I posted the (rather tame) announcement that SAD PUPPIES was coming back for a third go-around, than some people began carping about it. Which is to be expected. SAD PUPPIES breaks the rules. RULE #1: thou shalt not publicly campaign. Even though campaigning (in this award) has been done for many decades. RULE #2: thou shalt not publicly point out blind spots or biases in the voting body. Even though behind-closed-doors rage about these biases and blind spots has also been going on for decades — just not always about the same biases and blind spots. And lastly, RULE #3: thou shalt not publicly criticize Worldcon or “fandom” proper. Even though “fandom” (as an actual, coherent label for a specific body of people) hasn’t been applicable since the 1970s, nor has Worldcon actually represented the largest gathering of the largest body of consumer fans.

    So . . . some personal opinions. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.

    I could care less about Rule 1 and Rule 2, since these are endlessly violated anyway. Rules which are perpetually broken behind the curtain, are not actually rules. And if SAD PUPPIES is to be damned for breaking them, fine. At least we’re honest about what we’re doing. I don’t have much patience for people who aim an accusatory finger at us, then do precisely what we’re doing, just sneaky-like. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy, even when it dresses up in its Sunday best and has good table manners.

    Rule 3 deserves a larger thought bubble. Because (as I have stated many times in the last few years) “fandom” does not really represent FANDOM anymore.

    You can understand my difficult position as the Legion’s Supreme Dark Lord, trying to maintain even a modicum of evil order at our monthly staff meetings.

    VOX DAY, SUPREME DARK LORD: Welcome, my black knights, my devious and subtle dark ladies. The circle is joined. Tell me, what evil hath thou wrought?

    TOM KRATMAN: GRAND STRATEGIKON: Sir! Another 64 crossbeams, 97 posts, and 468 iron nails have been prepared and added to the warehouse, sir! Four more excruciators have been trained and are good to go, sir!

    LARRY CORREIA, INTERNATIONAL LORD OF HATE: Bloody hell, Tom! How many crosses do you think we need? We haven’t even crucified anyone yet!

    KRATMAN: I just like to be prepaaaaared, sir!

    DAY: So how many pinkshirts can we crucify? Give me a daily average.

    KRATMAN: All of them!

    SARAH HOYT, BEAUTIFUL BUT EVIL SPACE PRINCESS, All of them?

    KRATMAN: All of them! We’re cocked, locked and ready to rock!

    HOYT (whispers to Correia): Kate’s going to be pissed. She had her heart set on impaling McCreepy.

    DAY: Stand down, Tom. Good work. Anyone else?

    JOHN WRIGHT, LIVING BRAIN, KING IN YELLOW, AND SPEAKER TO MORLOCKS: I have erected, at great personal expense, a ninety-one foot tall idol
    of radioactive black marble to your likeness in the caves of Logan County,
    West Virginia, where I and a coterie of degenerate hillbillies,
    drug-maddened Saponi and Shawnee shaman, blood-drinking devil dogs,
    together with an inhuman living fungi from Pluto make hideous sacrifices
    and perform acts of unspeakable abomination to adore our idol of Vox
    Day, impiously dreaming of the return of the Elder Star-gods from Hyades
    in Taurus. For we adore Vox Day! Crowned with Five Divine Cobras of Might! His Buttocks Sit Atop the Thunder-Winged Garuda Bird!

    DAY: All I asked for was the latest draft of Somewither, John.

    WRIGHT: Oh, yes. Let me see. Ah, here it is.

    BRAD TORGERSEN, SOFT AND CUDDLY TOKEN LIBERAL: Hey, Larry, what’s this?

    CORREIA: Dammit, Brad, put down-

    TORGERSEN: AH HA HA HA HA HA!

    CORREIA: The flamethrower….

    Homeschool or be poor

    The cognitive elite are abandoning the public schools:

    For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

    The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

     Jartstar observes: This will accelerate home schooling and private schooling. In a generation or before most of the major city public schools in the US will be like most of the rest of the 3rd World, poor, dangerous, and offering little education. There will be pockets of good public schools in select communities and neighborhoods. The real collapse will be when enough people take their kids out to kill the funding by stopping bonds.

    I tend to suspect the influx of uneducated foreign children has encouraged more than a few parents to pull their children out of the public schools as well. Ironically, there is no state with an education system more segregated than Democrat-run New York.

    Rules of war, and the violations therein

    Bill Whittle writes a poignant explanation of the challenge facing a 2GW military that finds itself in a 4GW war:

    War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.

    And so from the beginning of war, there exists between soldiers a bond that cannot be described. There is the obvious connection of a soldier to his comrades, but there is too a strong sense of respect and kinship with the soldier on the other side of No Man’s Land, shivering in cold wet places just the same, under orders and doing his job, too — just wanting to get the thing over with and go home.

    Surrender is a mercy in such a place. The idea that certain death may be avoided, that one might be willing to simply give up fighting and still survive, is mercy of the deepest blue. Surrendering enemy soldiers are often greeted with a warmth and understanding that friendly civilians do not receive, for they have shared in the misery and hardship of war in ways that we comfortable and safe civilians can never know.

    Surrender, in war, is perhaps the ultimate of Sanctuaries. It is a way out when hope and rescue have fled the field. Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.

    And so, when groups of un-uniformed enemy soldiers waving white flags suddenly drop and open fire on unsuspecting, generous and honorable Americans, then the masters of these men have made a terrible bargain. They have destroyed the Sanctuary of Surrender, and eliminated for their own men a deep and abiding refuge in the nightmare of the battlefield.

    They have done this to their own men. Not us. We have known of the brutality of the Iraqi army regarding prisoners from at least as far back as those taken and beaten during the first Gulf War, and as far as improvements over the intervening years, we might perhaps call Jessica Lynch to tell us of any newfound magnanimity on the part of the Ba’athists.

    False surrender as a weapon of ambush is an abomination. When it is repeated, it is obvious that is not an aberration; it is policy. It is, like the abandonment of the uniform, a tactic to gain a short-term advantage that leads to long-term hardship and misery for their own troops. It is a Devil’s bargain, and they have had the Devil to pay for it — as have we.

    They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

    What Whittle fails to understand is that the Eastern enemy the Western militaries are engaging have NEVER respected the rules of Westphalian war. As William S. Lind notes, uniforms are an aspect of 1GW order.

    As long as Western armies insist on attempting to fight a 4GW war with 2GW tactics, they are going to be at a significant disadvantage, and one that likely outweights their various advantages. When the rules change, the players have to change with the rules.

    Note that few, if any, Western armies have ever succeeded in causing an Eastern foe to modify its non-Westphalian tactics in imitation of the Western army.

    However, Whittle needs to be corrected about this historically erroneous statement: “Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.”

    One incident of which I am aware is when the 45th Division of the US Army killed between 30 and 50 prisoners of war after the liberation of Dachau. It appears they mistook Hungarian Waffen-SS troops who had retreated to the camp with the SS-Totenkopf guards, not that killing the camp guards would have been acceptable under the principle of Sanctuary anyway.

    The incident was buried by Gen. George Patton.

    Maybe they’re just not very good

    In which we are supposed to be very concerned that there are insufficient numbers of people of color nominated for awards given in Hollywood:

    For only the second time in nearly two decades, the 20 Academy Awards acting nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses. Among the notable snubs was David Oyelowo, who received praise for his turn as the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

    In 2011, the 20 nominees also were entirely white. Before that, one has to go back to 1998 for an all-white acting group.

    The all-white nominees list comes at a time when Hollywood is fielding criticism for not doing enough to promote diversity in filmmaking. And just last month, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin were apologizing for leaked emails that appeared to be racially insensitive. Rudin was nominated this morning for producing best picture nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel.

    What I find amusing about this is that while we’re informed that if right-wing writers aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of their lack of talent, but if Africans or women aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of racism and sexism.

    Meanwhile, none of the science fiction SJWs celebrated the fact that a Hispanic man and a Indian were nominated for Hugo Awards last year. In fact, some of them are still openly decrying those nominations. The racists.

    Another thing that is modestly amusing is the way in which the SJWs don’t understand the way in which a relative nonentity being given an affirmative action award when very young, then winning nothing afterwards, will be used as evidence against their accomplishments in the future. See the Sports Guy’s dissection of Wes Unsfeld’s MVP award in his rookie year, followed by a subsequent lack of honors, in The Book of Basketball for details.