It's All Fun & Games Until Your Delusions Collide with Reality

Generally speaking, things are never okay. Nor are they not okay. What mainly changes is the collective perception -- the group fantasy -- that things are or aren't okay. At the moment, the group fantasy that President Biden is okay -- that he is in charge of anything, including his own mind -- is crumbling. 

They gave me a list here... The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O'Donnell, NBC.

Thanks for the tip, Creepthroat! If I'm Kelly O'Donnell -- or a journalist, rather -- I'm obliged to cut out the muddleman and find out who they are: Who gave you the list, Grandpa? An extra scoop of ice cream if you can remember their names! 

In any event, this crumbling of the protective group fantasy leads to an upsurge of primitive emotions, including anxiety, fear, rage, and even panic. But it can also provoke primitive defense mechanisms such as denial. Wait -- are there still people in denial about Biden's cognitive dysfunction? 

It depends on what we mean by "denial, i.e., whether we mean it clinically or colloquially. People in the former category are just crazy and/or stupid and obedient, while folks in the latter category are either the usual cynical and manipulative political sociopaths, or else terrified for another reason, one that can be conveyed in two dreadful words: President and Harris. 

As is the case with the individual, the breakthrough of primitive emotion reveals what the defense mechanism had been defending against: individuals and groups inhabit fantasies of various kinds in order to ward off the emotions they would feel in their absence. When it happens to an individual, it's called "decompensation." When it happens to a group, it's called... 

I don't know if there's a specific word for it, but one can certainly see the effects of the crumbling group fantasy. But only those who weren't plugged into the fantasy can perceive it. Readers of this blog -- trolls excepted -- never adopted the delusion that Biden is in full possession of his faculties. We've been full of dread since last November, with no comforting delusions to distance ourselves from the cold hard facts of life. 

For us it hasn't been a matter of "if" but when: when will reality and delusion collide? In one sense we've drawn comfort from the truism that what cannot go on will not go on. Still, it's always a shock when it suddenly ceases to go on. This doesn't happen to other animals, only humans. Rabbits don't convince themselves that coyotes are their friends so they can go about their lives in peace. 

But in the past week or two, millions of Americans have been shocked to learn that their president is a cognitively diminished husk of his former mediocrity, truly incapable of leading a Cub Scout troop, much less the military. When did this happen? And why so suddenly? Poor Jill Biden! Her husband was so strong and vibrant just seven months ago, when he was sworn in!

The power of denial. 

Let's leave politics per se aside and go to the deeper metaphysics of it all. Again, other animals don't have this problem. Why? How are human beings different?

Ultimately it has to do with the distinction between appearances and reality. (Ortho)paradoxically, a properly functioning human being lives in neither, but rather, in the tension between these poles. This hardly mean reality doesn't exist. Rather, it exists and we know it exists, but we can never know the thing itself in its totality. This latter is reserved for God -- or, if you prefer to leave him out of it, just the nonlocal sponsor, or Principle, of our intellection.

It is possible, however, to live in the -- or a, rather -- world of appearances. Every ideology, for example, is but appearance, some more ludicrous than others. Why do people choose to inhabit this or that ideology, e.g., feminism, or environmentalism, or progressive wokeism? There's no specific answer, since people are motivated by different unconscious agendas. But generally speaking, it's in order to make the bad feelings go away. Remember?

Yes, but so many of these ideologies are the cause of bad feelings. Look at all the kids who are depressed because they think the world is going to end because of global warming, or the blacks who think they're being persecuted by imaginary white supremacists, or feminists who fantasize that their happiness is thwarted by Big Daddy, et al.

As we mentioned in the previous post, this is where the personal and political intersect: if I've got a lot of personal issues, the culture provides a menu ideologies to help me articulate and contain them. For example, if I'm a typical depressed woman, I can project it out into the Patriarchy, thus distancing myself from my dysphoria while nurturing a false sense of control and even hope for a cure: I'd be so damn happy and fulfilled if it weren't for those toxic men! 

Look at the ridiculous buffoon General Milley. The world is a dangerous place. Enemies are everywhere, and we don't mean loitering grannies, Ashli Babbitt, or the QAnon Shaman -- rather, people who will happily commit suicide if they can just bring a few Christians with them. No wonder he seeks refuge in the safety of his own delusions:

I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it.

Wait, you want to understand yourself? Why not just go into therapy? Why involve the whole military in your Daddy issues?

Me? I know why I'm angry. And I'm always angry; or rather, given the human condition, there are always reasons to be angry.  #1, this isn't heaven and never will be. #2, people aren't perfect and never will be. #3, come to think of it, people are inclined to evil and always will be. 

Memo to this thoroughly postmodern Milley: if you really want to externalize your anger, might I suggest Islamist rage? That should be enough to keep you busy for the next millennium or so.

It's All Fun & Games Until Your Delusions Collide with Reality

Generally speaking, things are never okay. Nor are they not okay. What mainly changes is the collective perception -- the group fantasy -- that things are or aren't okay. At the moment, the group fantasy that President Biden is okay -- that he is in charge of anything, including his own mind -- is crumbling. 

They gave me a list here... The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O'Donnell, NBC.

Thanks for the tip, Creepthroat! If I'm Kelly O'Donnell -- or a journalist, rather -- I'm obliged to cut out the muddleman and find out who they are: Who gave you the list, Grandpa? An extra scoop of ice cream if you can remember their names! 

In any event, this crumbling of the protective group fantasy leads to an upsurge of primitive emotions, including anxiety, fear, rage, and even panic. But it can also provoke primitive defense mechanisms such as denial. Wait -- are there still people in denial about Biden's cognitive dysfunction? 

It depends on what we mean by "denial, i.e., whether we mean it clinically or colloquially. People in the former category are just crazy and/or stupid and obedient, while folks in the latter category are either the usual cynical and manipulative political sociopaths, or else terrified for another reason, one that can be conveyed in two dreadful words: President and Harris. 

As is the case with the individual, the breakthrough of primitive emotion reveals what the defense mechanism had been defending against: individuals and groups inhabit fantasies of various kinds in order to ward off the emotions they would feel in their absence. When it happens to an individual, it's called "decompensation." When it happens to a group, it's called... 

I don't know if there's a specific word for it, but one can certainly see the effects of the crumbling group fantasy. But only those who weren't plugged into the fantasy can perceive it. Readers of this blog -- trolls excepted -- never adopted the delusion that Biden is in full possession of his faculties. We've been full of dread since last November, with no comforting delusions to distance ourselves from the cold hard facts of life. 

For us it hasn't been a matter of "if" but when: when will reality and delusion collide? In one sense we've drawn comfort from the truism that what cannot go on will not go on. Still, it's always a shock when it suddenly ceases to go on. This doesn't happen to other animals, only humans. Rabbits don't convince themselves that coyotes are their friends so they can go about their lives in peace. 

But in the past week or two, millions of Americans have been shocked to learn that their president is a cognitively diminished husk of his former mediocrity, truly incapable of leading a Cub Scout troop, much less the military. When did this happen? And why so suddenly? Poor Jill Biden! Her husband was so strong and vibrant just seven months ago, when he was sworn in!

The power of denial. 

Let's leave politics per se aside and go to the deeper metaphysics of it all. Again, other animals don't have this problem. Why? How are human beings different?

Ultimately it has to do with the distinction between appearances and reality. (Ortho)paradoxically, a properly functioning human being lives in neither, but rather, in the tension between these poles. This hardly mean reality doesn't exist. Rather, it exists and we know it exists, but we can never know the thing itself in its totality. This latter is reserved for God -- or, if you prefer to leave him out of it, just the nonlocal sponsor, or Principle, of our intellection.

It is possible, however, to live in the -- or a, rather -- world of appearances. Every ideology, for example, is but appearance, some more ludicrous than others. Why do people choose to inhabit this or that ideology, e.g., feminism, or environmentalism, or progressive wokeism? There's no specific answer, since people are motivated by different unconscious agendas. But generally speaking, it's in order to make the bad feelings go away. Remember?

Yes, but so many of these ideologies are the cause of bad feelings. Look at all the kids who are depressed because they think the world is going to end because of global warming, or the blacks who think they're being persecuted by imaginary white supremacists, or feminists who fantasize that their happiness is thwarted by Big Daddy, et al.

As we mentioned in the previous post, this is where the personal and political intersect: if I've got a lot of personal issues, the culture provides a menu ideologies to help me articulate and contain them. For example, if I'm a typical depressed woman, I can project it out into the Patriarchy, thus distancing myself from my dysphoria while nurturing a false sense of control and even hope for a cure: I'd be so damn happy and fulfilled if it weren't for those toxic men! 

Look at the ridiculous buffoon General Milley. The world is a dangerous place. Enemies are everywhere, and we don't mean loitering grannies, Ashli Babbitt, or the QAnon Shaman -- rather, people who will happily commit suicide if they can just bring a few Christians with them. No wonder he seeks refuge in the safety of his own delusions:

I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it.

Wait, you want to understand yourself? Why not just go into therapy? Why involve the whole military in your Daddy issues?

Me? I know why I'm angry. And I'm always angry; or rather, given the human condition, there are always reasons to be angry.  #1, this isn't heaven and never will be. #2, people aren't perfect and never will be. #3, come to think of it, people are inclined to evil and always will be. 

Memo to this thoroughly postmodern Milley: if you really want to externalize your anger, might I suggest Islamist rage? That should be enough to keep you busy for the next millennium or so.

The Lazy Raccoon

No, not the tavern in Bismarck, North Dakota, but just me, too lazy to post anything more than a disorganized jumble of otherwise fine insultainment

Multiculturalism just means multiple standards, which happily for the left redounds to no standards at all.

I can't think of a term for the promise of liberation from one's own nature. Only the source.

Psycho-political viruses, unlike their material analogues, evolve to kill the host. 

Transcendence can never be eliminated from the human state, which always exists in the space between it and immanence. Progressivism pretends to deny it while seeking it from below, in pre-rational instinct, feeling, and dissolution of ego into the hivemind. 

New word: Tyranniscendence. 

Leftism always involves delusions of transcendence in one form or another. What was Obama and his grandiose promises of fundamental change! but a ridiculous, almost slapstick, dream? For the left it doesn't get better than that, and yet, in the end it amounted to nothing. A reminder that there is no political cure for man, and that believing so only makes a man worse than he already is.

Younger readers may not know this, but liberals -- back when Bob was one of them -- used to question authority, embrace reason, and vigorously defend freedom of speech. Now they do the opposite, but retain the brandname. It reminds me of how they still call it Coca-Cola, even though they removed cocaine from the formula in 1929. 

Being a knowledge worker is fine, but today the real money is in ignorance work. It's why half the wealthiest counties in the U.S. surround the imperial capital, and indeed why we have a president who literally knows nothing.

Much of the appeal of progressivism comes down to the joy of contempt. It compensates for the bitterness of envy.   

If only the Resistance could resist indoctrination. Yes, and if only Antifa could resist fascism, or BLM racism.

The '60s was the first decade in which we had more college students than farmers. After that our fate was sealed.

That's also the decade when black elites joined hands with white statists to destroy the black family and ensure a permanent voting bloc. As with ignorance work, the big money is in poverty.

The personal is the political. Translation: the pathological is the political. Hence microaggressions, wokeness, trigger warnings, censorship, cancel culture, et al.

What is the root cause of seeking "root causes"? Denial of free will teleologically ordered to the Good.

What is the first principle of unprincipled postmodern relativism? Denial of the free intellect teleologically ordered to the True.

The Democrat party is an alliance of the top and bottom against the middle. The purpose of eliminating our southern border is to flood the bottom with enough low-IQ parasites to declare permanent victory. Things will get interesting when the unintended consequences inevitably swamp the intended.  

Identity politics is a 5,000 year regression to a time when man's identity, loyalty, meaning, and authority revolved around the tribe. Proving that the "progressive" universe is both closed and circular. 

In contrast, our cosmos is an open spiral, which is the foundation of any conceivable progress.

Must there always be a Sacrifice? Yes, but it can be either His way or his way. What we're seeing in Afghanistan is his way. Come to think of it, the road to Utopia is paved with human sacrifice, every time.

There is no surpassing the principle of Equality under the law. The current arrangement of equity under the lawless is but one small step for the left but a giant leap backward for mankind. 

Any academic department with the modifier "studies" is geared to students for whom no amount of study could result in mastery of a real subject. Whole academic departments had to be invented for certain genders, races, ethnic groups, and sexual deviants. It begs the question of why Asians are so good at white European studies.

25 years ago, Alan Sokal proved to the satisfaction of the left wing reviewers that gravity is a linguistic construct.  In such a universe it isn't difficult to understand how men can give birth, how we can power our economy with renewable energy, how the government can print trillions of dollars without causing inflation, and how defunding the police will reduce crime.

The Lazy Raccoon

No, not the tavern in Bismarck, North Dakota, but just me, too lazy to post anything more than a disorganized jumble of otherwise fine insultainment

Multiculturalism just means multiple standards, which happily for the left redounds to no standards at all.

I can't think of a term for the promise of liberation from one's own nature. Only the source.

Psycho-political viruses, unlike their material analogues, evolve to kill the host. 

Transcendence can never be eliminated from the human state, which always exists in the space between it and immanence. Progressivism pretends to deny it while seeking it from below, in pre-rational instinct, feeling, and dissolution of ego into the hivemind. 

New word: Tyranniscendence. 

Leftism always involves delusions of transcendence in one form or another. What was Obama and his grandiose promises of fundamental change! but a ridiculous, almost slapstick, dream? For the left it doesn't get better than that, and yet, in the end it amounted to nothing. A reminder that there is no political cure for man, and that believing so only makes a man worse than he already is.

Younger readers may not know this, but liberals -- back when Bob was one of them -- used to question authority, embrace reason, and vigorously defend freedom of speech. Now they do the opposite, but retain the brandname. It reminds me of how they still call it Coca-Cola, even though they removed cocaine from the formula in 1929. 

Being a knowledge worker is fine, but today the real money is in ignorance work. It's why half the wealthiest counties in the U.S. surround the imperial capital, and indeed why we have a president who literally knows nothing.

Much of the appeal of progressivism comes down to the joy of contempt. It compensates for the bitterness of envy.   

If only the Resistance could resist indoctrination. Yes, and if only Antifa could resist fascism, or BLM racism.

The '60s was the first decade in which we had more college students than farmers. After that our fate was sealed.

That's also the decade when black elites joined hands with white statists to destroy the black family and ensure a permanent voting bloc. As with ignorance work, the big money is in poverty.

The personal is the political. Translation: the pathological is the political. Hence microaggressions, wokeness, trigger warnings, censorship, cancel culture, et al.

What is the root cause of seeking "root causes"? Denial of free will teleologically ordered to the Good.

What is the first principle of unprincipled postmodern relativism? Denial of the free intellect teleologically ordered to the True.

The Democrat party is an alliance of the top and bottom against the middle. The purpose of eliminating our southern border is to flood the bottom with enough low-IQ parasites to declare permanent victory. Things will get interesting when the unintended consequences inevitably swamp the intended.  

Identity politics is a 5,000 year regression to a time when man's identity, loyalty, meaning, and authority revolved around the tribe. Proving that the "progressive" universe is both closed and circular. 

In contrast, our cosmos is an open spiral, which is the foundation of any conceivable progress.

Must there always be a Sacrifice? Yes, but it can be either His way or his way. What we're seeing in Afghanistan is his way. Come to think of it, the road to Utopia is paved with human sacrifice, every time.

There is no surpassing the principle of Equality under the law. The current arrangement of equity under the lawless is but one small step for the left but a giant leap backward for mankind. 

Any academic department with the modifier "studies" is geared to students for whom no amount of study could result in mastery of a real subject. Whole academic departments had to be invented for certain genders, races, ethnic groups, and sexual deviants. It begs the question of why Asians are so good at white European studies.

25 years ago, Alan Sokal proved to the satisfaction of the left wing reviewers that gravity is a linguistic construct.  In such a universe it isn't difficult to understand how men can give birth, how we can power our economy with renewable energy, how the government can print trillions of dollars without causing inflation, and how defunding the police will reduce crime.

Fascism is the New Liberalism

I'm just sitting here waiting for Dementia Joe to give his Remarks on Our Ongoing Efforts in Afghanistan. As usual he's late, so I'm gonna pass the time by free associating on the passing scene.

I'm a big believer in intersectionality -- specifically, the intersection of stupidity and viciousness, AKA progressive wokeism.  

The left's dictatorship of relativism is one way to escape from the tyranny of reality -- of merit, standards, and intelligence.  

The massive rise in the educated class over the past half century in no way tracks with a rise in intelligence, since the latter is constrained by genetics. There are always cognitive elites, and it is the task of the progressive education establishment to make it more difficult to identify them. It's very much like inflation: flood the intellectual market with paper credentials, and they're no longer worth anything.

Our knowledge class has neither. 

Increased mass education correlates with the shocking increase in mass illiteracy. The left is making it official by insisting it is racist to require high school graduates to be literate and numerate. Equity in a nutshell: if we can't make everyone equally intelligent, at least we can make them equally ignorant.

For Siegel, "the 60s" wasn't a decade, but rather, more of an era that hasn't yet ended. To be sure, the old liberalism ended -- we can argue over when, but Siegel picks 1972, with the McGovern nomination. Although he lost the presidential election in a landslide, his side has increasingly dominated the Democrat party ever since. 

Biden has been around so long that he now believes the opposite of what he did 50 years ago (for example, he used to pretend to be against racial discrimination), but with no explanation. This amount of cognitive dissonance would kill a normal man. How does he do it? Yes, dementia surely helps, but something else is needed to explain how an entire party can become proudly illiberal while still calling itself liberal.

I suppose deconstruction helps, in that it severs the link between words and reality. Therefore, words mean whatever we want them to mean. Language becomes entirely expedient, in service to political power. The rest is commentary.

I don't want to get too far afield, but it's very much like end-stage nominalism, which entails the utter loss (or effacement, rather) of transcendent reality -- a reality upon which our nation is founded, including such perennial realities as natural law, natural rights, and just nature, period, as in the nature of things. 

Quite simply, postmodernism is the denial of essences. The rest is commentary. And it couldn't be easier: detach, say, "sexual identity" from biological reality, and anything is possible. 

But you will have noticed that they nevertheless draw necessarily arbitrary distinctions of various kinds, distinctions that their principles do not permit. On what principled basis can a man not marry his pet, or his toaster? Why can I not identify as black? In one one sense it comes down to majority rule -- that is, just get five justices to agree with you. 

But this can be further reduced to the rule of one person, i.e., the Almighty Fifth Vote. And people say the Pope has too much power, and that "papal infallibility" is absurd! But for the left, there is no principle preventing the Fifth Justice from infallibly ruling that men are women, such that biological reality -- AKA reality -- is against the law. 

It's just a matter of time before the Catholic Church -- the first and last bastion of natural law -- is declared illegal. Which would represent paganism coming full circle and making a frontal assault on the very foundation of western civilization.  

Indeed, that's how I would proceed if I were the devil: don't mess around with effects, go straight to the cause. The only surprise is that they haven't yet ruled the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it anchors our rights in the Creator. For that matter, the Constitution renders itself unconstitutional by virtue of its talk of the "blessings" of liberty. Those blessings com from God, so they negate what follows.

"Today's identity politics took hold of liberalism in 1972" (Siegel). He mentions, oh by the way, that there were in excess of 1,900 terror bombings in the U.S. that year, none by white supremacists or by QAnon, whatever that is. One of terrorists also helped launch Obama's political career. At least he's consistent, in that it too was a bomb.

Yesterday, one of Cuomo's last acts as governor was to pardon another liberal terrorist, David Gilbert. The progressive circle of death!

"It has been largely forgotten," writes Siegel, "but for the left of the 1960s it was liberals and not conservatives who were their primary enemy." Correction: still are their primary enemy, except now we're called fascists, white supremacists, and insurrectionists.

Fascism is the New Liberalism

I'm just sitting here waiting for Dementia Joe to give his Remarks on Our Ongoing Efforts in Afghanistan. As usual he's late, so I'm gonna pass the time by free associating on the passing scene.

I'm a big believer in intersectionality -- specifically, the intersection of stupidity and viciousness, AKA progressive wokeism.  

The left's dictatorship of relativism is one way to escape from the tyranny of reality -- of merit, standards, and intelligence.  

The massive rise in the educated class over the past half century in no way tracks with a rise in intelligence, since the latter is constrained by genetics. There are always cognitive elites, and it is the task of the progressive education establishment to make it more difficult to identify them. It's very much like inflation: flood the intellectual market with paper credentials, and they're no longer worth anything.

Our knowledge class has neither. 

Increased mass education correlates with the shocking increase in mass illiteracy. The left is making it official by insisting it is racist to require high school graduates to be literate and numerate. Equity in a nutshell: if we can't make everyone equally intelligent, at least we can make them equally ignorant.

For Siegel, "the 60s" wasn't a decade, but rather, more of an era that hasn't yet ended. To be sure, the old liberalism ended -- we can argue over when, but Siegel picks 1972, with the McGovern nomination. Although he lost the presidential election in a landslide, his side has increasingly dominated the Democrat party ever since. 

Biden has been around so long that he now believes the opposite of what he did 50 years ago (for example, he used to pretend to be against racial discrimination), but with no explanation. This amount of cognitive dissonance would kill a normal man. How does he do it? Yes, dementia surely helps, but something else is needed to explain how an entire party can become proudly illiberal while still calling itself liberal.

I suppose deconstruction helps, in that it severs the link between words and reality. Therefore, words mean whatever we want them to mean. Language becomes entirely expedient, in service to political power. The rest is commentary.

I don't want to get too far afield, but it's very much like end-stage nominalism, which entails the utter loss (or effacement, rather) of transcendent reality -- a reality upon which our nation is founded, including such perennial realities as natural law, natural rights, and just nature, period, as in the nature of things. 

Quite simply, postmodernism is the denial of essences. The rest is commentary. And it couldn't be easier: detach, say, "sexual identity" from biological reality, and anything is possible. 

But you will have noticed that they nevertheless draw necessarily arbitrary distinctions of various kinds, distinctions that their principles do not permit. On what principled basis can a man not marry his pet, or his toaster? Why can I not identify as black? In one one sense it comes down to majority rule -- that is, just get five justices to agree with you. 

But this can be further reduced to the rule of one person, i.e., the Almighty Fifth Vote. And people say the Pope has too much power, and that "papal infallibility" is absurd! But for the left, there is no principle preventing the Fifth Justice from infallibly ruling that men are women, such that biological reality -- AKA reality -- is against the law. 

It's just a matter of time before the Catholic Church -- the first and last bastion of natural law -- is declared illegal. Which would represent paganism coming full circle and making a frontal assault on the very foundation of western civilization.  

Indeed, that's how I would proceed if I were the devil: don't mess around with effects, go straight to the cause. The only surprise is that they haven't yet ruled the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it anchors our rights in the Creator. For that matter, the Constitution renders itself unconstitutional by virtue of its talk of the "blessings" of liberty. Those blessings com from God, so they negate what follows.

"Today's identity politics took hold of liberalism in 1972" (Siegel). He mentions, oh by the way, that there were in excess of 1,900 terror bombings in the U.S. that year, none by white supremacists or by QAnon, whatever that is. One of terrorists also helped launch Obama's political career. At least he's consistent, in that it too was a bomb.

Yesterday, one of Cuomo's last acts as governor was to pardon another liberal terrorist, David Gilbert. The progressive circle of death!

"It has been largely forgotten," writes Siegel, "but for the left of the 1960s it was liberals and not conservatives who were their primary enemy." Correction: still are their primary enemy, except now we're called fascists, white supremacists, and insurrectionists.

Nothing Human is Alien to Me, and It Doesn't Get Worse than That

What comes first, ideas or things? Let's consult an eminent and highly influential left wing philosopher:

For Foucault, a gay man who saw AIDS as a social construct rather than a physiological disease, reality did not exist. "Language is all there is" (Siegel, Sidebar).

I know what you're thinking: didn't this deviant lunatic die of AIDS? Indeed he did, but "death" is just a social construct -- just a word that points to another word. We are enclosed in a circle of language from which even death offers no escape: to paraphrase Orwell, imagine the liberal narrative stifling our curiosity forever:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always... always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

In an unintended sense Foucault is correct: language is all that is; for it is one of the names of God, AKA logos. We could say that God is both source and substance of the Word, without which language is strictly impossible, literally inconceivable. In other words, like everything else, language cannot be without a reason for being. 

For the fatuous Foucault, the sufficient reason of language is power. End of story. Of course, he is half-correct, in that this has always been true of the left (another case of bad philosophy reducing to unwitting autobiography): the common denominator of all left wing policies is the expansion of state power. It's what relieves them of the formalities of fact, logic, principle, and even plausibility. 

For example, what is the principle that unites such disparate items as, say, climate change, COVID hysteria, the redefinition of marriage, state-mandated racial discrimination, transgender rights, and the imaginary wage gap? Correct: each is a pretext for the concentration and extension of state power. For if the state can force us to pretend a man can marry a man, or that men can give birth, there is nothing it can't do.  

Back to the opening question: where do we begin our epistemological ascent, with ideas or things, concepts or objects? We won't re-belabor the point, because even if you have a hard time understanding how traditional realism can be true, we can eliminate the alternative because it leads straight to absurdity. Being that absurdity is ruled out, we are left with the traditional non-absurd principle that knowledge begins in the senses. 

Besides, the notion that words only point to other words is so preposterous that one would have to be mad or even irreversibly tenured to believe it. And we use the word "pre-post-erous" advisedly, because deconstruction reverses the order of pre and post: in reality, words are existentially posterior to things, even though, at the same time(lessness), the Word, AKA logos, is ontologically anterior to things. 

I hope this makes sense: if the world is intelligible to intelligence -- which it self-evidently is -- then there must be a reason. The sufficient reason of each is the logos that pervades and illuminates being. We could say that modernity is merely a rebellion against this principle, while postmodernity is an outright revolution against it.

When did this revolution get underway? Our usual answer is Genesis 3 (All Over Again), which is true as far as it goes. But revelation goes to ontological, vertical, and principial truths, not horizontal, historical, and contingent ones per se. 

Let's ask Fred Siegel, whose latest book, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, offers a likely story. Which, by the way goes to the definition of history, which is a plausible narrative linking event-objects: a likely story. 

And just because no story is perfectly adequate to the events, it hardly means that some stories aren't more likely than others. The same descent into relativism makes leftists believe that no culture is worse than any other (except for our uniquely bad White European Patriarchal Christian Slave culture).  

By the way, analogous to what was said above about the logos, we could say the same vis-a-vis profane history and salvation history: history is One Big Story, and Christ is -- or so we have heard from the wise -- the key that unlocks it. Notice, for example, how the Apostles used this very key to illuminate the Old Testament. Without the Inkeynation, it's somewhat impenetrable.

Apologies to our Jewish friends, who obviously see things differently. Not to veer off on a tangent, but we're not so different, you and I. This is from one of my favorite little books, Honey from the Rock by Lawrence Kushner:

For the word is very near to you....

It is to begin with, all inside us. But because we are all miniature versions of the universe, it is also found far beyond. And because we are all biologically and spiritually part of the first man, the place preceded us. And because we all carry within us the genotype and vision of the last man, the place is foretold in us.

Very Coonish! Touching on what was said above about Likely Stories, he writes that

The great stories did not happen to the masters of old alone. They happen to us. You and I. This moment. A tale unfolds.

It is only that we have lost the narrative element of our existence. 

True, he can at times be a bit new-agey, but the underlying principle is sound.

Back to Siegel. Like us, he is an old-fashioned liberal, not the malevolent illiberal progressive kind: for his liberalism 

is focused not on addressing postmodern concerns such as transgender rights, recasting American democracy as primarily an instrument of racist oppression, or the need for draconian steps to address climate change and the pandemic (Kotkin).

Rather, he "wants something more prosaic: the opportunity of ordinary, and extraordinary, people to get ahead in life." Same.  So what prevents this? 

Yes, you could say "the left," but in my opinion, this doesn't go far enough, for the real problem is human nature -- especially a metaphysically untutored human nature that is naive and even blind to the nature of human nature. Really, left and right can be distinguished by their antithetical visions of human nature. 

We, of course, believe Man Writ Large is a lousy sonofabitch, even while he is an Image of God. We are inveterate underachievers, to put it mildly, always living beneath ourselves. 

The left implicitly believes the same (even while denying the existence of human nature, much less its Creator), except they project the lousy SOB into America, Toxic Males, deplorable Christians, irredeemable Trumpians, etc. 

The point is, leftism is like human nature only worse, for reasons we'll get into. To cite one especially obvious example, human beings are uniquely susceptible to envy. Envy was socially adaptive in the small bands through which we evolved in prehistory, but nowadays it's as useful as is our appendix. 

Therefore, envy is something that needs to be transcended, not politically nurtured and indulged.  For to indulge it is merely to awaken a barbaric and precivilized primate, or maybe you haven't seen what the left has done to our inner cities. Antifa is just masked envy clad in black and living in mother's basement -- pure destruction of things others have built. 

I'll have to continue this tomorrow or Tuesday. I need to run some errands.

Nothing Human is Alien to Me, and It Doesn't Get Worse than That

What comes first, ideas or things? Let's consult an eminent and highly influential left wing philosopher:

For Foucault, a gay man who saw AIDS as a social construct rather than a physiological disease, reality did not exist. "Language is all there is" (Siegel, Sidebar).

I know what you're thinking: didn't this deviant lunatic die of AIDS? Indeed he did, but "death" is just a social construct -- just a word that points to another word. We are enclosed in a circle of language from which even death offers no escape: to paraphrase Orwell, imagine the liberal narrative stifling our curiosity forever:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always... always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

In an unintended sense Foucault is correct: language is all that is; for it is one of the names of God, AKA logos. We could say that God is both source and substance of the Word, without which language is strictly impossible, literally inconceivable. In other words, like everything else, language cannot be without a reason for being. 

For the fatuous Foucault, the sufficient reason of language is power. End of story. Of course, he is half-correct, in that this has always been true of the left (another case of bad philosophy reducing to unwitting autobiography): the common denominator of all left wing policies is the expansion of state power. It's what relieves them of the formalities of fact, logic, principle, and even plausibility. 

For example, what is the principle that unites such disparate items as, say, climate change, COVID hysteria, the redefinition of marriage, state-mandated racial discrimination, transgender rights, and the imaginary wage gap? Correct: each is a pretext for the concentration and extension of state power. For if the state can force us to pretend a man can marry a man, or that men can give birth, there is nothing it can't do.  

Back to the opening question: where do we begin our epistemological ascent, with ideas or things, concepts or objects? We won't re-belabor the point, because even if you have a hard time understanding how traditional realism can be true, we can eliminate the alternative because it leads straight to absurdity. Being that absurdity is ruled out, we are left with the traditional non-absurd principle that knowledge begins in the senses. 

Besides, the notion that words only point to other words is so preposterous that one would have to be mad or even irreversibly tenured to believe it. And we use the word "pre-post-erous" advisedly, because deconstruction reverses the order of pre and post: in reality, words are existentially posterior to things, even though, at the same time(lessness), the Word, AKA logos, is ontologically anterior to things. 

I hope this makes sense: if the world is intelligible to intelligence -- which it self-evidently is -- then there must be a reason. The sufficient reason of each is the logos that pervades and illuminates being. We could say that modernity is merely a rebellion against this principle, while postmodernity is an outright revolution against it.

When did this revolution get underway? Our usual answer is Genesis 3 (All Over Again), which is true as far as it goes. But revelation goes to ontological, vertical, and principial truths, not horizontal, historical, and contingent ones per se. 

Let's ask Fred Siegel, whose latest book, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, offers a likely story. Which, by the way goes to the definition of history, which is a plausible narrative linking event-objects: a likely story. 

And just because no story is perfectly adequate to the events, it hardly means that some stories aren't more likely than others. The same descent into relativism makes leftists believe that no culture is worse than any other (except for our uniquely bad White European Patriarchal Christian Slave culture).  

By the way, analogous to what was said above about the logos, we could say the same vis-a-vis profane history and salvation history: history is One Big Story, and Christ is -- or so we have heard from the wise -- the key that unlocks it. Notice, for example, how the Apostles used this very key to illuminate the Old Testament. Without the Inkeynation, it's somewhat impenetrable.

Apologies to our Jewish friends, who obviously see things differently. Not to veer off on a tangent, but we're not so different, you and I. This is from one of my favorite little books, Honey from the Rock by Lawrence Kushner:

For the word is very near to you....

It is to begin with, all inside us. But because we are all miniature versions of the universe, it is also found far beyond. And because we are all biologically and spiritually part of the first man, the place preceded us. And because we all carry within us the genotype and vision of the last man, the place is foretold in us.

Very Coonish! Touching on what was said above about Likely Stories, he writes that

The great stories did not happen to the masters of old alone. They happen to us. You and I. This moment. A tale unfolds.

It is only that we have lost the narrative element of our existence. 

True, he can at times be a bit new-agey, but the underlying principle is sound.

Back to Siegel. Like us, he is an old-fashioned liberal, not the malevolent illiberal progressive kind: for his liberalism 

is focused not on addressing postmodern concerns such as transgender rights, recasting American democracy as primarily an instrument of racist oppression, or the need for draconian steps to address climate change and the pandemic (Kotkin).

Rather, he "wants something more prosaic: the opportunity of ordinary, and extraordinary, people to get ahead in life." Same.  So what prevents this? 

Yes, you could say "the left," but in my opinion, this doesn't go far enough, for the real problem is human nature -- especially a metaphysically untutored human nature that is naive and even blind to the nature of human nature. Really, left and right can be distinguished by their antithetical visions of human nature. 

We, of course, believe Man Writ Large is a lousy sonofabitch, even while he is an Image of God. We are inveterate underachievers, to put it mildly, always living beneath ourselves. 

The left implicitly believes the same (even while denying the existence of human nature, much less its Creator), except they project the lousy SOB into America, Toxic Males, deplorable Christians, irredeemable Trumpians, etc. 

The point is, leftism is like human nature only worse, for reasons we'll get into. To cite one especially obvious example, human beings are uniquely susceptible to envy. Envy was socially adaptive in the small bands through which we evolved in prehistory, but nowadays it's as useful as is our appendix. 

Therefore, envy is something that needs to be transcended, not politically nurtured and indulged.  For to indulge it is merely to awaken a barbaric and precivilized primate, or maybe you haven't seen what the left has done to our inner cities. Antifa is just masked envy clad in black and living in mother's basement -- pure destruction of things others have built. 

I'll have to continue this tomorrow or Tuesday. I need to run some errands.

Is or Is Not, the Soul of Every Judgment

It's just common sense that common sense is a good thing. But exactly what is common sense? 

Not to immediately descend into pedantry, but is is not only an interesting little word, but probably the most important word in all of philosophy, since it is -- as Garrigou-Lagrange has written elsewhere -- the soul of every judgment.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore "really real."

For example, everyone is talking about President Biden's moral culpability for the Afghanistan fiasco, but they forget that he cannot be held responsible since his mind no longer exists. It is not.

Nor can it be the fault of the 81 million who voted for this decroded turnip, since they never existed. 

So, who is to blame? We can't yet know, since we do not know who is actually making the decisions. 

Philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, science -- all, in different ways, revolve around this business of isness.  Followed by why, how, for what end, etc. 

Back to common sense. Let's begin with the plain dictionary meaning before digging down to a more precise definition: "good sound ordinary sense." That's a bit circular: what's common sense? Good sound judgment. What's good sound judgment? Common sense.

Then there's this: "good judgment or prudence in estimating or managing affairs," which connotes being "free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety; not dependent on special or technical knowledge." 

These are better, but they raise as many questions as they answer: common sense is something that is "evident by the natural light of reason and hence common to all men"; it involves "ideas and conceptions natural to a man untrained in technical philosophy."

But if common sense is natural to all men, why is it so uncommon? For if it is common to all men, then the left does not exist. But the left obviously exists -- it is -- so where does this leave us? It leaves us with an ideology that is intrinsically "unnatural," i.e., not an accordance with man's real being. 

There is also the more technical definition of common sense, which is the native faculty that unites all the senses into a more general judgment. It's so fundamental that we don't notice it, but none of our senses knows about the others; the eye perceives light but knows nothing of sound; likewise ears and color or touch and taste. 

Raw perception is a material process, but the synthesis of perceptions into a unitary judgment is an irreducibly immaterial process: our common sense is not itself a sensation.  We know that the yellow bird sings -- it both is and is doing something -- even though the eyes know only yellow and the ears only birdsong.

Indeed, the senses don't even know anything about isness -- being -- since that is an abstraction from them. My dog doesn't know she exists. Nevertheless, she does. She is.

Did I just assume her gender? Speaking of the death -- or murder, rather -- of common sense, transgender activists teach us that the only way we can ascertain a person's gender is to ask them. Otherwise we're left without a clue. 

Do you see how this again comes down to the question of isness?  What is a man? We do not, and cannot know. Unless we ask. This person's opinion of what he is reveals what he really and truly is, notwithstanding superficial appearances such as a johnson. Therefore, what is is just your opinion, man. 

It is no exaggeration to say that this goes to the essential rift in our civil war, AKA Woke War I. To cite a most conspicuous example, our side insists that a natural right to free speech really and truly exists; it is not an opinion, a preference, an expedient, something for the sake of something more fundamental. Rather, it simply is. It is self-evident. It is common sense.

Let's turn to scripture for some additional illumination, page 25:

LEBOWSKI: What... What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

DUDE: Dude.

LEBOWSKI: ... Huh?

DUDE: I don't know, sir.

LEBOWSKI: Is it... is it, being prepared to do the right thing? Whatever the price? Isn't that what makes a man?

DUDE: Sure. That and a pair of testicles.

Lebowski turns away from the Dude with a haunted stare, lost in thought. 

LEBOWSKI: ... You're joking. But perhaps you're right... 

Of course the Dude is right: for it is common sense. It is not a matter of opinion. It simply is, and it devolves upon us to know what is. Any alternative ultimately reduces to nihilism -- or worse, to a nihilist who thinks nothing of cutting off your johnson.

Speaking of lunatic opinions in the Land of What Is Not and Cannot Be, I heard a good explanation of the whole transgender fad the other day. First of all, the real thing -- the thing that actually is -- is exceedingly rare, affecting fewer than one in 10,000, most of them male, and most of whom will become homosexuals or cross-dressers if left alone.

But according to Abigail Shrier, in the last decade or so we've seen an exponential increase in young girls and women claiming gender dysphoria. She cites one UK clinic where there has been an increase of over 4,400 percent! What's going on behind the hysteria?

Hmm. Sounds like plain old hysteria. But there's something else: it's in that little prefix, trans. It goes without saying that the person with "gender dysphoria" is unhappy; indeed, the person is dysphoric.

The question is, why? And will self-mutilation help the matter? Or perhaps even aggravate it?

I'm afraid that dysphoria is built into the human condition. Nevertheless, it can be transcended. However, transcendence is by definition from and to the above. I would say that self-mutilation is an attempt at transcendence "from below." Like other varieties of human sacrifice, it is not efficacious. 

Is or Is Not, the Soul of Every Judgment

It's just common sense that common sense is a good thing. But exactly what is common sense? 

Not to immediately descend into pedantry, but is is not only an interesting little word, but probably the most important word in all of philosophy, since it is -- as Garrigou-Lagrange has written elsewhere -- the soul of every judgment.

In other words, a thing either is or it is not; every argument, philosophical or otherwise, ultimately reduces to whether or not something really exists and is therefore "really real."

For example, everyone is talking about President Biden's moral culpability for the Afghanistan fiasco, but they forget that he cannot be held responsible since his mind no longer exists. It is not.

Nor can it be the fault of the 81 million who voted for this decroded turnip, since they never existed. 

So, who is to blame? We can't yet know, since we do not know who is actually making the decisions. 

Philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, science -- all, in different ways, revolve around this business of isness.  Followed by why, how, for what end, etc. 

Back to common sense. Let's begin with the plain dictionary meaning before digging down to a more precise definition: "good sound ordinary sense." That's a bit circular: what's common sense? Good sound judgment. What's good sound judgment? Common sense.

Then there's this: "good judgment or prudence in estimating or managing affairs," which connotes being "free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety; not dependent on special or technical knowledge." 

These are better, but they raise as many questions as they answer: common sense is something that is "evident by the natural light of reason and hence common to all men"; it involves "ideas and conceptions natural to a man untrained in technical philosophy."

But if common sense is natural to all men, why is it so uncommon? For if it is common to all men, then the left does not exist. But the left obviously exists -- it is -- so where does this leave us? It leaves us with an ideology that is intrinsically "unnatural," i.e., not an accordance with man's real being. 

There is also the more technical definition of common sense, which is the native faculty that unites all the senses into a more general judgment. It's so fundamental that we don't notice it, but none of our senses knows about the others; the eye perceives light but knows nothing of sound; likewise ears and color or touch and taste. 

Raw perception is a material process, but the synthesis of perceptions into a unitary judgment is an irreducibly immaterial process: our common sense is not itself a sensation.  We know that the yellow bird sings -- it both is and is doing something -- even though the eyes know only yellow and the ears only birdsong.

Indeed, the senses don't even know anything about isness -- being -- since that is an abstraction from them. My dog doesn't know she exists. Nevertheless, she does. She is.

Did I just assume her gender? Speaking of the death -- or murder, rather -- of common sense, transgender activists teach us that the only way we can ascertain a person's gender is to ask them. Otherwise we're left without a clue. 

Do you see how this again comes down to the question of isness?  What is a man? We do not, and cannot know. Unless we ask. This person's opinion of what he is reveals what he really and truly is, notwithstanding superficial appearances such as a johnson. Therefore, what is is just your opinion, man. 

It is no exaggeration to say that this goes to the essential rift in our civil war, AKA Woke War I. To cite a most conspicuous example, our side insists that a natural right to free speech really and truly exists; it is not an opinion, a preference, an expedient, something for the sake of something more fundamental. Rather, it simply is. It is self-evident. It is common sense.

Let's turn to scripture for some additional illumination, page 25:

LEBOWSKI: What... What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

DUDE: Dude.

LEBOWSKI: ... Huh?

DUDE: I don't know, sir.

LEBOWSKI: Is it... is it, being prepared to do the right thing? Whatever the price? Isn't that what makes a man?

DUDE: Sure. That and a pair of testicles.

Lebowski turns away from the Dude with a haunted stare, lost in thought. 

LEBOWSKI: ... You're joking. But perhaps you're right... 

Of course the Dude is right: for it is common sense. It is not a matter of opinion. It simply is, and it devolves upon us to know what is. Any alternative ultimately reduces to nihilism -- or worse, to a nihilist who thinks nothing of cutting off your johnson.

Speaking of lunatic opinions in the Land of What Is Not and Cannot Be, I heard a good explanation of the whole transgender fad the other day. First of all, the real thing -- the thing that actually is -- is exceedingly rare, affecting fewer than one in 10,000, most of them male, and most of whom will become homosexuals or cross-dressers if left alone.

But according to Abigail Shrier, in the last decade or so we've seen an exponential increase in young girls and women claiming gender dysphoria. She cites one UK clinic where there has been an increase of over 4,400 percent! What's going on behind the hysteria?

Hmm. Sounds like plain old hysteria. But there's something else: it's in that little prefix, trans. It goes without saying that the person with "gender dysphoria" is unhappy; indeed, the person is dysphoric.

The question is, why? And will self-mutilation help the matter? Or perhaps even aggravate it?

I'm afraid that dysphoria is built into the human condition. Nevertheless, it can be transcended. However, transcendence is by definition from and to the above. I would say that self-mutilation is an attempt at transcendence "from below." Like other varieties of human sacrifice, it is not efficacious. 

Thoughts on a Grey Day

If I were to add, "by Mrs. Scarrott," do I have a single reader who'd get the reference? Probably not. Or perhaps one. I'm lookin' at you, Ted. At any rate, one would have to be familiar with the 1972 album by a "Fleetwood Mac" that was quite distinct from both the early blues band led by the great Peter Green, and the later bland mega-pop outfit.  

The final track on Bare Trees is -- of course -- called Thoughts on a Grey Day. It isn't a song, but rather, "a recorded poem written and supposedly read by an elderly woman, Mrs. Scarrott, who lived near the band's communal home in southern England" (Prof. Wiki).  If I remember correctly, they stumbled upon an old tape Mrs. Scarrott must have left in the house, and appended it to the album as a kind of Pythonesque gag. 

Yes, they had good hash back then.

You can google the poem. Mrs. Scarrott seems to have been some kind of visionary mystic. Then again, they did have good hash back then:

Love; love. So great, so divine
Trees -- the grey day has changed everything
It's beautiful, just beautiful, so beautiful
This first grey day is ours

My loving child
By grace of God we live, my child,
And love...

God bless our perfect, perfect grey day
With trees so bare, so bare!
But O so beautiful, so beautiful!
The grey-blue sky
The world is here!
Ours, just, just ours
Our own

Hold us tight
I am yours, just a dream
And go on dreaming
May this joy of ours
Never, ever cease

But this isn't a grey day. Rather, slightly hazy and humid. Nor do I know why Mrs. Scarrott's poem popped into my head. Wait -- now I remember -- I had some random thoughts to offload on this... hazy and humid day:

A feminist is any woman who is emotionally fragile and ignorant of the facts of life. Any confrontation with these facts exposes and aggravates the fragility.

Today, transcendence is displaced to the political plane and called "liberation." Naturally, this cannot be attained via politics, which further fuels both the frustration and the hope for political amelioration. The vicious circle of liberalism -- and death cycle of the soul.

Ideology denies and drives out wrongthink, but the bad thoughts don't just vanish. Rather, a conservative is someone whose unwitting role is to harbor these bad progressive thoughts on behalf of the left. It's why we are seen by them as racists, fascists, misogynists, insurrectionists, greedy, etc.  

A relentless search for imaginary oppressors to explain one's real failings. A seductive program! 

When did the left become a revolt against math and literacy? Trick question!

Servitude to the progressive narrative is freedom. Liberation from it is slavery. In California, Larry Elder wants to put y'all back in chains! 

I don't object to teaching CRT to kids. So long as children are taught all the repulsive things about other races.

The free-floating boredom of the left is a consequence of hatred of reality. Unreality may not be true, but at least it's... interesting. 

Not to promulgate more oogily-boogily, but the relationship between conscious and unconscious, or ego and self, is not a duality but a complementarity.  I is to AM (being) as is particle to wave. We always live and have our being on no fewer than two planes.

Relativism, the sum of all heresies.

You can't buy IQ. Only its markers. The purpose of attending an elite university is to advertise intelligence without having to undergo the formality of possessing it. 

Hard work can compensate for a modest IQ, but the proper credential obviates the need for either. Cf. Obama, Biden, John Kerry, et al.

Of course they censor the controversy. The science won't just settle itself!

Eroding merit or undermining freedom is a false choice. The left is perfectly capable walking and chewing gum at the same time.

There's no IQ in equity. Oh, wait. 

Standardized testing was implemented to diversify the student body. Naturally, the left opposes it.

If you can't be happy here, you can't be happy.

Victimology is an inverse meritocracy; it fuels a race to the bottom. The last shall be first, good and hard.

Of course our privileged white elites are against standardized testing. It would both expose them and pose a barrier to the attainment and maintenance of their unearned privilege.

Low IQ imperialism: the conquest of the right side of the Bell Curve by the left. 

Universities are seminaries of evangelical stupidity. Our citizens are more educated but and therefore more stupid than ever.

Islam is one of two religious cults not content to be left alone. The other is progressivism.

Men are much greater and much worse than the left realizes. Our range runs from the diabolical to the saintly; the left's from who to whom, or from useless to useful idiots. "The poor" are simultaneously worthless and indispensable to the left's will to power.

Me? My talents are wasted on useful pursuits. 

Thoughts on a Grey Day

If I were to add, "by Mrs. Scarrott," do I have a single reader who'd get the reference? Probably not. Or perhaps one. I'm lookin' at you, Ted. At any rate, one would have to be familiar with the 1972 album by a "Fleetwood Mac" that was quite distinct from both the early blues band led by the great Peter Green, and the later bland mega-pop outfit.  

The final track on Bare Trees is -- of course -- called Thoughts on a Grey Day. It isn't a song, but rather, "a recorded poem written and supposedly read by an elderly woman, Mrs. Scarrott, who lived near the band's communal home in southern England" (Prof. Wiki).  If I remember correctly, they stumbled upon an old tape Mrs. Scarrott must have left in the house, and appended it to the album as a kind of Pythonesque gag. 

Yes, they had good hash back then.

You can google the poem. Mrs. Scarrott seems to have been some kind of visionary mystic. Then again, they did have good hash back then:

Love; love. So great, so divine
Trees -- the grey day has changed everything
It's beautiful, just beautiful, so beautiful
This first grey day is ours

My loving child
By grace of God we live, my child,
And love...

God bless our perfect, perfect grey day
With trees so bare, so bare!
But O so beautiful, so beautiful!
The grey-blue sky
The world is here!
Ours, just, just ours
Our own

Hold us tight
I am yours, just a dream
And go on dreaming
May this joy of ours
Never, ever cease

But this isn't a grey day. Rather, slightly hazy and humid. Nor do I know why Mrs. Scarrott's poem popped into my head. Wait -- now I remember -- I had some random thoughts to offload on this... hazy and humid day:

A feminist is any woman who is emotionally fragile and ignorant of the facts of life. Any confrontation with these facts exposes and aggravates the fragility.

Today, transcendence is displaced to the political plane and called "liberation." Naturally, this cannot be attained via politics, which further fuels both the frustration and the hope for political amelioration. The vicious circle of liberalism -- and death cycle of the soul.

Ideology denies and drives out wrongthink, but the bad thoughts don't just vanish. Rather, a conservative is someone whose unwitting role is to harbor these bad progressive thoughts on behalf of the left. It's why we are seen by them as racists, fascists, misogynists, insurrectionists, greedy, etc.  

A relentless search for imaginary oppressors to explain one's real failings. A seductive program! 

When did the left become a revolt against math and literacy? Trick question!

Servitude to the progressive narrative is freedom. Liberation from it is slavery. In California, Larry Elder wants to put y'all back in chains! 

I don't object to teaching CRT to kids. So long as children are taught all the repulsive things about other races.

The free-floating boredom of the left is a consequence of hatred of reality. Unreality may not be true, but at least it's... interesting. 

Not to promulgate more oogily-boogily, but the relationship between conscious and unconscious, or ego and self, is not a duality but a complementarity.  I is to AM (being) as is particle to wave. We always live and have our being on no fewer than two planes.

Relativism, the sum of all heresies.

You can't buy IQ. Only its markers. The purpose of attending an elite university is to advertise intelligence without having to undergo the formality of possessing it. 

Hard work can compensate for a modest IQ, but the proper credential obviates the need for either. Cf. Obama, Biden, John Kerry, et al.

Of course they censor the controversy. The science won't just settle itself!

Eroding merit or undermining freedom is a false choice. The left is perfectly capable walking and chewing gum at the same time.

There's no IQ in equity. Oh, wait. 

Standardized testing was implemented to diversify the student body. Naturally, the left opposes it.

If you can't be happy here, you can't be happy.

Victimology is an inverse meritocracy; it fuels a race to the bottom. The last shall be first, good and hard.

Of course our privileged white elites are against standardized testing. It would both expose them and pose a barrier to the attainment and maintenance of their unearned privilege.

Low IQ imperialism: the conquest of the right side of the Bell Curve by the left. 

Universities are seminaries of evangelical stupidity. Our citizens are more educated but and therefore more stupid than ever.

Islam is one of two religious cults not content to be left alone. The other is progressivism.

Men are much greater and much worse than the left realizes. Our range runs from the diabolical to the saintly; the left's from who to whom, or from useless to useful idiots. "The poor" are simultaneously worthless and indispensable to the left's will to power.

Me? My talents are wasted on useful pursuits. 

There's Only One Way to Skin a Catechism

Okay, let's circle back to Garrigou-Lagrange's The Philosophy of Being & The Development of Doctrine. We hadn't gotten very far, and left off with the claim that

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all...

I want to say that there is metaphysical truth and theological truth, and that these two should be susceptible to harmonization, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly. Not only do we reject any "two truths" approach to science and religion, even moreso do we reject it with regard to the deeper science of metaphysics. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the Truth of its Being. Otherwise it cannot exist.

Truth is at once at the center, origin, and end of things. It's why everything makes so much sense without ever making Total Sense, which is reserved for God allone (or someOne who might as well be). 

It is also why atheism makes no sense except within its own projected artificial world -- like a blind man whose first principle is that color does not exist. As always, bad philosophy is just unwitting autobiography.

Now, most people are either incapable of, or not interested in, metaphysics per se. Nevertheless, metaphysics is always interested in you! 

For Homo sapiens is the metaphysical animal: the divide between animal and man is a metaphysical one -- or, more precisely, on one side of the gap is animality, on the far side our homoerotic sapience, AKA love of wisdom. The latter is a kind of "space," or better, spacetime, since it is also developmental and teleological. It's why we live in history and not just a sterile duration. Unless you're watching CNN. 

Note that -- obviously -- only a being who has transcended evolution can know about evolution. Conversely, if our thoughts are merely a function of evolution (or genes), then we are pulled back to the animal side. To a materialist, the human side is just an illusion.  

But matter itself is but an idea; and, thanks to God, a very good and fruitful idea! If you don't think so, let's see you figure out how to create a unity of material body and immaterial soul without reducing one to the other or resorting to a crude metaphysical dualism. 

Matthew Levering, in the foreword, states that while G-L

knows that a dogmatic truth cannot be reduced to its specific formulation, he sees that the crux of the debate is whether the Church has been given a knowable, propositionally enunciable deposit of faith.

In other words, must we just take the deposit of faith on faith, or is it possible to situate it within a translogical network of axioms, principles, and propositions?  

Well, we already know that fideism is an epistemological nonstarter. However, this doesn't necessarily mean it it inefficacious. Farfromit. It just means you have different intellectual needs, and that an implicit metaphysic works just fine for you.

Schuon has something important to say about this. The question is, where among these 20 or 30 titles? 

Ah, here, in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: "Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation" -- as illustrated above in the example of the blind man enclosed in his limited vision -- "and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality" -- AKA, the understanding that Truth is One. 

Now, a purely fideistic approach to God generally has much in common with a bhaktic one that emphasizes devotion over intellection, or love over knowledge. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, but knowledge without love of Truth is a roadmap to hell. 

Nevertheless, good luck explaining this faith to a cynical, worldly, and credentialed yahoo whose social standing depends partly on being too sophisticated for Imaginary Sky Gods and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. There's a way of talking about religion that makes it easy for such midwits and mediocretins to ridicule and reject it. Our trolls never stop reminding us of this ironyclad principle.

Schuon compares a faith without intellect to a body without a skeleton, while a purely intellectual approach is like a skeleton with no flesh. In order to stand up on our own two wings, we need both:

Metaphysics is beyond charity, it is true, but a metaphysician without charity seriously risks compromising the doctrine because of the indirect repercussions of his vice on the workings of his intelligence.

Why is this? Again, because of Oneness: love + intellection are unified in God but separable down here. Consider: "it is not enough to be 'harmless as doves,' it is also necessary to be 'wise as serpents.'" Put conversely, do not be like the tenured, who are wise as pigeons and harmless as rattlesnakes.

Secular humanism. What could possibly go wrong (asked the serpent)? 

"humanitarianism" in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to believe that God is bad.... It is a satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is bad (Schuon).

Even Pope Francis (quoted in the foreword) agrees that "love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment.... Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond."

One last quote from the foreword: "dogmatic formulations rely upon 'the underlying realities of universal human experience' as cognitionally available to everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher."

Let's conclude by suggesting that metaphysics gives us the widest possible horizon of being, and that God himself is always just over that horizon. And revelation is the link between.

There's Only One Way to Skin a Catechism

Okay, let's circle back to Garrigou-Lagrange's The Philosophy of Being & The Development of Doctrine. We hadn't gotten very far, and left off with the claim that

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all...

I want to say that there is metaphysical truth and theological truth, and that these two should be susceptible to harmonization, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly. Not only do we reject any "two truths" approach to science and religion, even moreso do we reject it with regard to the deeper science of metaphysics. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the Truth of its Being. Otherwise it cannot exist.

Truth is at once at the center, origin, and end of things. It's why everything makes so much sense without ever making Total Sense, which is reserved for God allone (or someOne who might as well be). 

It is also why atheism makes no sense except within its own projected artificial world -- like a blind man whose first principle is that color does not exist. As always, bad philosophy is just unwitting autobiography.

Now, most people are either incapable of, or not interested in, metaphysics per se. Nevertheless, metaphysics is always interested in you! 

For Homo sapiens is the metaphysical animal: the divide between animal and man is a metaphysical one -- or, more precisely, on one side of the gap is animality, on the far side our homoerotic sapience, AKA love of wisdom. The latter is a kind of "space," or better, spacetime, since it is also developmental and teleological. It's why we live in history and not just a sterile duration. Unless you're watching CNN. 

Note that -- obviously -- only a being who has transcended evolution can know about evolution. Conversely, if our thoughts are merely a function of evolution (or genes), then we are pulled back to the animal side. To a materialist, the human side is just an illusion.  

But matter itself is but an idea; and, thanks to God, a very good and fruitful idea! If you don't think so, let's see you figure out how to create a unity of material body and immaterial soul without reducing one to the other or resorting to a crude metaphysical dualism. 

Matthew Levering, in the foreword, states that while G-L

knows that a dogmatic truth cannot be reduced to its specific formulation, he sees that the crux of the debate is whether the Church has been given a knowable, propositionally enunciable deposit of faith.

In other words, must we just take the deposit of faith on faith, or is it possible to situate it within a translogical network of axioms, principles, and propositions?  

Well, we already know that fideism is an epistemological nonstarter. However, this doesn't necessarily mean it it inefficacious. Farfromit. It just means you have different intellectual needs, and that an implicit metaphysic works just fine for you.

Schuon has something important to say about this. The question is, where among these 20 or 30 titles? 

Ah, here, in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: "Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation" -- as illustrated above in the example of the blind man enclosed in his limited vision -- "and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality" -- AKA, the understanding that Truth is One. 

Now, a purely fideistic approach to God generally has much in common with a bhaktic one that emphasizes devotion over intellection, or love over knowledge. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, but knowledge without love of Truth is a roadmap to hell. 

Nevertheless, good luck explaining this faith to a cynical, worldly, and credentialed yahoo whose social standing depends partly on being too sophisticated for Imaginary Sky Gods and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. There's a way of talking about religion that makes it easy for such midwits and mediocretins to ridicule and reject it. Our trolls never stop reminding us of this ironyclad principle.

Schuon compares a faith without intellect to a body without a skeleton, while a purely intellectual approach is like a skeleton with no flesh. In order to stand up on our own two wings, we need both:

Metaphysics is beyond charity, it is true, but a metaphysician without charity seriously risks compromising the doctrine because of the indirect repercussions of his vice on the workings of his intelligence.

Why is this? Again, because of Oneness: love + intellection are unified in God but separable down here. Consider: "it is not enough to be 'harmless as doves,' it is also necessary to be 'wise as serpents.'" Put conversely, do not be like the tenured, who are wise as pigeons and harmless as rattlesnakes.

Secular humanism. What could possibly go wrong (asked the serpent)? 

"humanitarianism" in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to believe that God is bad.... It is a satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is bad (Schuon).

Even Pope Francis (quoted in the foreword) agrees that "love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment.... Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond."

One last quote from the foreword: "dogmatic formulations rely upon 'the underlying realities of universal human experience' as cognitionally available to everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher."

Let's conclude by suggesting that metaphysics gives us the widest possible horizon of being, and that God himself is always just over that horizon. And revelation is the link between.