Tag: philosophy

Fantaisie, utopie, égalité

As I have repeatedly observed, there is no such thing as equality, the grand rhetorical flights of Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding. The artificial distinctions that conservatives attempt to make between equality of opportunity and equality of result, and between equality before the law and  equality of condition, simply do not exist. Literally every day we see material evidence to the contrary.

A rookie cop whose dad is an NYPD chief avoided getting fired after an off-duty arrest for groping a woman at an Atlantic City casino, police sources told the Daily News. The department’s handling of Officer Joseph Essig’s case raises questions among police sources who suspect high-ranking officers and those close to them are treated with kid gloves in discipline cases.

Just 15 months into his brand-new NYPD career — on Oct. 8, 2015 — Essig was arrested at Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City on a felony charge of criminal sexual misconduct. New Jersey authorities downgraded the charge to a health code violation. Essig pleaded guilty, was ordered to stay away from the victim, and paid a $1,000 fine.

Officers facing similar charges with less than two years on the force are typically fired, say sources. But Essig remains on the job. A police source said that’s “shocking.” “Other probationary cops have been fired for way less,” said the source.

This is not at all surprising, of course. Just as one does not expect off-duty police to receive speeding tickets or DUI citations, one does not expect the influential or their family members to be treated just like anyone else in the courts of law. But as petty as it is, this episode serves to effectively demonstrate that the conservative concept of equality is just as fantastic, just as utopian, just as nonexistent, and just as ludicrous a basis for societal policy, as the leftist concept of equality.

God does not believe in equality. Nature does not believe in equality. Neither should Man believe in it, must less attempt to order his societies around it, because it does not exist.

The reason that Jefferson found it necessary to claim it was self-evident that all men are created equal is because he could not find a single observable example of that imaginary equality to cite, not in religion, philosophy, history, nature, or law. The assertion is not a self-evident truth, it is nothing more than a logical and empirical falsehood, and easily proven to be so by every possible standard.

For a deeper dive into the mythical nature of equality, one cannot do better than to read Equality: the Impossible Quest by historian Martin van Creveld.

Why we crack down hard

Takimag’s elimination of its comment section underlines why the moderators and I act so swiftly, and ruthlessly, to eliminate commenters who even appear to be inclined to attempt disrupting the discourse, hijacking the mic, changing the subject, or disqualifying and discrediting me.

While we would prefer to have a free and open forum for our readers, a few bad eggs seem incapable of communicating as though they were in good company and have in so doing, ruined it for the the rest of you. So in a way, yes, you can blame (((them))), or at least those who blame (((them))), for this gag.

However, many of you do have something to add, and we would like to hear from you. Please email the mailroom so that we may post a selection of letters from our readers on a weekly basis, and in so doing, perhaps raise the bar above the pale from where it fell off.

As many of you will appreciate, Takimag is run like a dictatorship, rather than a nanny state, and therefore a moderated site is not an option we are considering at this time. Up until now moderation has been ineffective and seems to only encourage the bastards who ruin the exchanges many of you enjoy and will likely miss.

At this point, we would be ever so grateful if you would kindly give the steady stream of childish threats to abandon Takimag forever a rest and be grateful we provide this platform for you and our writers, and that they have something intelligent to say week after week.

For more than a decade, we kept the comments open and anonymous while primarily focusing our moderation efforts on the trolls, of the psychologically unstable, ideological, and professional varieties, as they popped up. This approach was fairly effective, but time-consuming. However, as our understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy has developed and deepened, we’ve come to understand that there are certain classes of commenters who will reliably, over time, become disruptive even if it is not their intention to do so. We also found the task of moderation to be increasingly Sisyphean, as the more stubborn trolls simply changed their names again and again and again. Hence my decision to lock down the comments and limit them to registered commenters.

Now, one of the strengths of this blog is the pattern recognition possessed by both me and the long-term commenters. If we haven’t seen it all before, we’ve seen an awful lot of it. So, if you’re a monomaniac, an attention seeker, or someone who is “just having fun”, the chances are that you’re not going to last long before going into the spam trap. To summarize, if you insist on creating work for me and the moderators, for any reason, then we don’t want you here. Don’t ignore or blow off a warning, because the chances are there will not be a second one. The blog was here before you started commenting and it will be here long after you stop.

Given the trouble that some commenters appear to be having with Blogger not playing nicely with their browser, I should also point out that I will always tell you that you are being spammed. If you have not been so informed, then you should assume that the issue is with your browser, not your commenting status, and that the only possible fix is on your end. So, if you are having problems commenting, please don’t ask me or inform me about it. There is literally nothing I can do for you in that regard, except tell you to try different browsers and browser settings.

It’s been two months or so since I locked down the comments and I have to say that despite a few dire predictions, the end result has been entirely satisfactory. Traffic remains strong, the number of trolls has been significantly reduced, and the amount of spam has fallen by more than 95 percent.

!Texas!

The more I contemplate the universe, the more I am convinced that the fundamental core of Man’s philosophy must revolve around a single question: to pretend or not to pretend. So much human evil stems from the fact that we deceive ourselves, we deceive each other, and we seek to deceive God. And one of the primary locuses of deception is the language we choose to employ.

Parents of a Texas high school student who was reported missing in late January had abused their daughter after she refused an arranged marriage, leading her to run away from home until she was found in mid-March, police said.

Maarib Al Hishmawi, 16, was reported missing on Jan. 30 after she was last seen leaving Taft High School in Bexar County. She was located in mid-March when she was taken in by an organization that cared for her after she ran away, KSAT reported.

Authorities on Friday said Al Hishmawi’s parents — Abdulah Fahmi Al Hishmawi, 34, and Hamdiyah Saha Al Hishmawi, 33 — had allegedly beaten their daughter with a broomstick and poured hot cooking oil on her when she refused to marry a man in another city.

“Texas teen.” Sure. What happened to Miss Al Hishmawi sounds like something that might have just as easily happened to any other true blue Texas family from the Lone Star State, does it not? What an unfortunate and unexpected fate for a Southern belle!

Words have meaning. We can pretend otherwise, but reality will shine through sooner or later.

So look what I found

I uncovered four old videotapes a few weeks ago. Originally there were six, and unfortunately the missing two were of my 1997 interview with Umberto Eco, but what I found contained about two hours of unique footage of interviews and public interactions with the great dottore. I arranged to get them digitized for use in a potential future Voxiversity, or perhaps even a documentary. Here is one screencap from the last tape, which shows Doctor Eco with Spacebunny and me at St. John’s University.

Corception

Last night at the Voxiversity Q&A event, the discussion about a prospective Voxiversity on rhetoric and dialect revealed the need for a word to express the concept of something that is technically false but rhetorically true that tends to guide one towards the truth.

If you think about it, we use the term deception to indicate the opposite, when one expresses that which is technically true, but leads others into a false understanding. And to the extent we express the concept at all, we would probably resort to the oxymoronic and awkward construction “deceived into the truth.”

My first thought was to describe the concept as inceit, but the problem is that “inception” already has a fairly well-understood and unrelated meaning due to the popular movie. So, I landed upon the construction corceit, as it fits rather nicely with the etymology of the term “correct”.

1300-50; (v.) Middle English correcten (< Anglo-French correcter) < Latin corrēctus past participle of corrigere to make straight, equivalent to cor- cor- + reg- (stem of regere to direct ) + -tus past participle suffix; (adj.) (< French correct) < Latin, as above

The reason the term is needed is because none of the similar terms accurately describe the concept.

A correct statement is one free from error, mistakes, or faults. An accurate statement is one that shows careful conformity to fact, truth, or spirit. A precise statement shows scrupulously strict and detailed conformity to fact.

None of that is true in the case of what can be described as a corceptive statement or story, such as the parables told by Jesus Christ. That pointed to another possible approach to the concept with a term such as parabole, (which, interestingly enough, is a little closer to the concept in French than “parable” is in English) but again, “parabolic” has already been utilized for “having the form or outline of a parabola.”

Now, I am aware that many, if not most of you will completely fail to appreciate the point of this sort of thought exercise, but that’s fine. I happen to find it very useful to be able to identify and articulate specific concepts like this, even if it is only for my internal use. It helps me clarify my thoughts when I am contemplating questions like the morality of corceptive rhetoric vs deceptive dialectic. If it happens to be useful to anyone else, so much the better, but rest assured, I don’t expect anyone else to utilize my idiosyncratic constructions.

Of Left and Right

At its core, the left-right divide all comes down to the most basic principles.

Left = Plato. Anti-Christian. Anti-family. Imperialist.
Right = Aristotle. Christian. Pro-family. Nationalist.

This heuristic will allow you to quickly and easily categorize any ideology correctly and cut your way through even the most determined fog of nebulous redefinitions attempting to ideologically mischaracterize a person, a party, or a movement.

Anyone who is against Christianity is necessarily against the West, also known as Christendom. Remember that the concept of ideology is, in itself, an intrinsically Western concept.

UPDATE: based on my personal observations, you could reasonably add a fifth element to the heuristic.

Left = Redefinitions, complications, explanations, interpretations, penumbras, emanations, and appeals to authority, credentials, and the sacred spirit of Science.
Right = Truth

Who is the best dark lord?

Now, I may be biased, but I have long contended that dark lords don’t get a fair shake in literature. I mean, they are often portrayed as failures, but if they were historical figures, they would be legends who compare favorably to the likes of Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon.

So, who is your favorite dark lord from literature and why? The Black Rider? Arawn Death Lord? Sauron or Morgoth? The Warlock King or Torak the Half-Burned? The Night King or the White Witch? Or some other, less well-known dark lord.

Present company excluded, of course.

Never trust the moderates

They will sell out you and their previously professed principles in favor of their new friends on the other side in a heartbeat, as the True Finns learned the hard way.

The Finns Party, formerly called “True Finns”, rose from obscurity during the euro zone debt crisis with an anti-EU platform, complicating the bloc’s bailout talks with troubled states. It expanded into the second-biggest parliamentary party in 2015 and joined the government, but then saw its support drop due to compromises in the three-party coalition.

This June, the party picked a new hard-line leadership and got kicked out of the government, while more than half of its lawmakers left the party and formed a new group to keep their government seats.

Huhtasaari, 38, who was picked as deputy party leader in June, said voters were still confused after the split-up but that the party would eventually bounce back.

“The game is really brutal. The biggest parties want us to disappear from the political map. No one is in politics looking for friends.”

The Finns party ranks fifth in polls with a support of 9 percent, down from 17.7 percent in 2015 parliamentary election, while the new “Blue Reform” group, which has five ministers, is backed by only 1-2 percent.

This is why moderates can only be permitted in support positions and should never be allowed in positions of leadership, policy-making, or personnel. They love to talk about principles for the reason that they don’t actually have any, and use these nonexistent principles as an excuse to break promises and commit betrayals whenever it suits them.

It’s not necessary, and it’s not possible, to spurn them entirely. There are enough of them that they have to be accepted. And this is fine, this is not a problem, so long as they are not allowed into any positions of power or influence despite their best efforts.

That being said, it won’t be surprising if the True Finns end up outperforming their 2015 results, while their short-sighted sell-outs vanish from the political scene.

Mailvox: God and morality: the connection

Groggy doesn’t understand why the question of morality and the question of the existence of God are intrinsically related:

I never really understood why the question of whether morality was objective was tightly coupled to the existence of God.

For example Sam Harris says morality is objective, and it can be discovered and solved through science alone in The Moral Landscape.

It seems that science deals with the objective, hence science would be a good tool for dealing with morality, if morality were purely objective.

If the 10 commandments just come down from God and are dictated to us, without us having any say, then isn’t that subjective morality, because then morality is just whatever God says it is?

I think J. Peterson would say that God speaking in the 10 commandments is not a literal truth but a deep psychological truth (evolved, even), built into the human mind which needs to come out through religious expression, and is more akin to ‘objective’ morality, I suppose.

For example if God had commanded in the 10 commandments – Thou Shalt Murder, would it be right or wrong? If morality is objective, then murder would always be wrong regardless of what the 10 commandments say.

I just never really understood why “morality is objective” was associated with Christianity and “there is no objective morality” was associated with Atheism. I don’t see the logical connection.

If somebody could explain it I would be very grateful.

The intrinsic connection is because if there is, in fact, a Universal Moral Standard, (or to use the more common term, Universal Law), then logic dictates that there must be a Universal Lawgiver. This is why atheists are driven to deny objective and/or universal morality, due to the implication that if it exists, a Creator God exists too.

The fact that Sam Harris says morality can be discovered and solved through science alone is in itself evidence that it cannot be, because Sam Harris is an inept philosopher and his argument is both illogical and incorrect. I addressed this four years ago, both on this blog and in the appendix of the book On the Existence of Gods.

Unfortunately, Harris appears to have adopted Richard Dawkins’ favorite device of presenting a bait-and-switch definition in lieu of a logically substantive argument. He repeatedly utilizes the following technique:

1) Admittedly, X is not Y.
2) But can’t we say that X could be considered Z?
3) And Z is Y.
4) Therefore, X can be Y.

For example, in an attempt to get around Hume’s is/ought dichotomy, Harris readily admits that “good” in the sense of “morally correct” is not objectively definable and that what one individual perceives as good can differ substantially from that which another person declares to be “good.” So, he suggests the substitution of “well-being” for “good” because there are numerous measures of “well-being,” such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and daily caloric intake, that can be reduced to numbers and are therefore measurable. After all, everyone understands what it means to be in good health despite the fact that “health” is not perfectly defined in an objective and scientific manner. Right?

However, even if we set aside the obvious fact that the proposed measures of well-being are of dubious utility – life expectancy does not account for quality of life, GDP does not account for debt and more calories are not always desirable – the problem is that Harris simply ignores the way in which his case falls completely apart when it is answered in the negative. No, we cannot simply accept that “moral” can reasonably be considered “well-being” because it is not true to say that which is “of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong” is more than remotely synonymous with “that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings.”

A Creator God-defined morality can be described as arbitrary, but it cannot be described as subjective. If God had defined murder as good, then an act of murder would be good, in exactly the same way that if the NFL defines a pass that goes out of bounds incomplete, then the pass is incomplete even if the receiver clearly caught it. Groggy’s problem is that he is unconsciously assuming a deeper concept of good by which the objective standard itself is to be judged.

Morality is objective

Again and again, we see that the rationales and justifications offered by atheists for their disbelief simply don’t stand up to even cursory philosophical analysis. (This is not to say their disbelief is not genuine, merely that its cause is seldom rooted in the explanations provided.) While on the emotional side, atheism may be little more than social autism, on the intellectual side, it appears to be primarily a combination of historical and philosophical ignorance.

Consider the following exchange:

AB: some people, psychopaths especially have no capacity for moral reasoning and no moral agency.

VD: Of course they do, if you define morality correctly. The fact that psychopaths have no EMPATHY does not mean they have no moral agency, because morality does not depend upon empathy.

AB: I think understand what you are saying but I simply cannot grok the idea fully as I cannot see morality as objective.

This is little more than a failure to understand what morality is, because while the existence of God is nominally disputable, the objectivity of morality is not, and more importantly, cannot be disputed.

The definitions of morality refer us to the definition of moral, which is given a follows:

  1. of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;
  2. expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work.
  3. founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom.
  4. capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct: a moral being.
  5. conforming to the rules of right conduct

Now, if “the fundamental principles of right conduct” are not mere legalities, enactment, or custom, then they must be objective, for the obvious reason that if the standard for right conduct is subjective, then no such standard exists, not being a fundamental principle. Morality not only is not subjective, it cannot be subjective, because a subjective fundamental principle is both an oxymoron and an actual contradiction in terms.

A psychopath has both a capacity for moral reasoning and moral agency because he is capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct even if he does not feel any empathy for others. He can even conform to the Golden Rule; even a psychopath knows how he prefers to be treated himself.

AB’s fundamental mistake is that he confuses the concept of a personal ethos with morality. But a personal ethos is an ersatz morality and is no more a system of universally applicable rules than a preference for calling pass plays over running plays or playing man-to-man defense instead of zone are official NFL rules.