Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Illogical negativism in, logical positivism out

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I have a post up at Quadrant Online: Weaponising Illogical Negativism. This is how it starts, discussing the base philosophical creed across the media and the left.

The core principle of logical positivism which underpins verification as the basis for scientific investigation of the truth of any statement:

A statement that cannot be conclusively verified cannot be verified at all. It is simply devoid of any meaning.

This then is the principle of illogical negativism, now applied near universally across the media and throughout the Left. It is the principle that denies any need whatsoever to verify any statement that suits the political outcome sought by the person making the statement or hearing it.

A statement that cannot be conclusively denied cannot be denied at all. It is simply true because someone has said it and conforms to what those who hear the statement prefer to believe.

Let us look a little more deeply at this principle, seen everywhere among the empty heads of the Republican Party as much as among Democrats. No evidence or factual underpinnings are required, only that someone says it and it suits others that it has been said.

Or to put it more plainly, they are liars who count on the complicity and ignorance of others. Now go to the link to see what has brought all this to mind.

Illogical negativism

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The core principle of logical positivism which underpins verification as the basis for scientific investigation of the truth content of any statement made:

“A statement that cannot be conclusively verified cannot be verified at all. It is simply devoid of any meaning.”

This then is the principle of illogical negativism, now applied near universally across the media and throughout the left. It is the principle that denies any need whatever to verify any statement that suits the political outcome sought by the person making the statement or hearing it.

A statement that cannot be conclusively denied cannot be denied at all. It is simply true because someone has said it and conforms to what those who hear the statement prefer to believe.”

Let us look a little more deeply at this principle which is seen everywhere among the empty heads of the Republican Party as much as among Democrats. No evidence or factual underpinnings are required, only that someone says it and it suits others that it has been said. Begin here with Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1993:

Hill alleged lurid details about her time with Thomas at the Department of Education: “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes… On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.” Hill also said that the following incident occurred later after they had both moved to new jobs at the EEOC: “Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?'”

Ridiculously mild by today’s standards and not a word of it ever verified or confirmed by anything outside of the statements made by Anita Hill herself and then repeated ad nauseum as part of this “high tech lynching” by everyone opposed to his confirmation. But now we have this: Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32 – 38 years ago but not mentioned until now – and moreover from The Washington Post, as untrustworthy a source as could be imagined. Here’s the only part I will quote with the bit in bold quite to the point:

In a written statement, Moore denied the allegations.

“These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore, now 70, said.

The campaign said in a subsequent statement that if the allegations were true they would have surfaced during his previous campaigns, adding “this garbage is the very definition of fake news.”

No wonder the left laughs at the right, so politically stupid it is almost beyond idiocy. A similar story about a Democrat would not even make it into the press.

Let us go further with a few links picked up at Ace of Spades.

And from the last of the stories:

The White House says President Donald Trump believes Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore “will do the right thing and step aside” if sexual misconduct allegations against him are true.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters traveling with Trump in Asia that the president believes a “mere allegation” — especially one from many years ago — shouldn’t be allowed to destroy a person’s life.

But Sanders says: “The president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”

And from J.E Sefton at Ace of Spades who thinks as I do:

The weekend is here and with it the cold slap in the face of yesterday’s accusations against Roy Moore. I probably reflect the sentiments of most if not all of you in the Horde in that my initial reaction was to call this an abject, unmitigated smear to derail Moore’s candidacy and throw a gimme seat to the Democrats. I still feel this way, and in fact, considering the absolutely disgraceful reaction from the GOP, I would not be at all surprised if it is they who were behind this. I’m looking at the be-goitered, flabby face of Mitch McConnell. The GOP pumped millions into that race to install Establishment lackey Luther Strange and he was rejected. . . .

Unlike the GOP, the MFM, Dems and others, who it’s safe to say couldn’t give two shits about the alleged victims but are more interested in derailing Moore for political gain, guilty or innocent, I will stand by Roy Moore until it is absolutely proven beyond any doubt that he is guilty of a crime or of behavior that would have obviated my support at the outset of his candidacy. Sadly, as the shabby Dick Gephardt would say, it’s not about guilt or innocence, it’s all about the seriousness of the charge. So guilty or innocent, odds are Moore may be sunk. That stinks to high heaven and I hope he can overcome what is now a cheap, desperate smear.

For myself, any evidence of any kind would be a help: a note he wrote, a photo someone took, an earlier application to the courts. Anything at all because without at least that, no one outside those utterly on the inside can enter public life without the certainty that some allegation of this kind will be made. Instead we have this:

Moore accuser worked for Hillary!!!

Witness comes forward, says WaPo tried to bribe women to accused Roy Moore

The Alabama GOP’s Awful Responses to the Roy Moore Sexual Assault Allegations Are Dead-End Partisanship At Its Worst

If the conservative side of politics keeps folding under this kind of pressure we will never win. Hit ’em back twice as hard, the slimy rotten lying scum that they are.

‘It’s what they get taught at school’

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I’ll give you an excerpt from an article in the latest Campus Review, which is sent out to all of us teaching in higher education. This is the least worst part of the story but read it all, and then you can tell me how true this is or isn’t: When did human rights become racist? A reflection on relativism in Australian education.

I had always assumed that most humanities teachers in this country, regardless of political leanings, were on the same boat.

The first signs that this was not the case, and that something was seriously amiss, came some years ago, when I began lecturing in Australian history. My 17 and 18-year-old students, most of whom were studying to become teachers, were arguing in their essays that Hitler should not be judged, and that we should always uphold a balanced view about history. Judging Hitler (yes, Hitler) was unbalanced. Paper after paper argued that there was no truth, just perspectives, all of which were equally valid or equally questionable. The sheer amount of teenagers upholding this hollow and extreme cultural and moral relativist credo alarmed me. I made it a point to clarify the distinction between historical ‘balance’ and ‘genocidal leaders’, but the same argument kept coming up, essay after essay. I mentioned this to a senior colleague, who shrugged her shoulders and exclaimed ‘it’s what they get taught at school’.

From there on it gets only worse. But that, of course, is only my view. That these people are moral monsters is also my view as well.

A commentary on the political consequences of lives that have been emptied of God

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An article filled with insight in an area of the deepest confusion. This is only part of the actual title, but gets to what is the issue at hand: Many Americans Are Suffering From a Mental Disorder. A long article but addresses the question why so many Americans, and it applies pretty well in every Western community, why so many vote in ways that harm themselves as a means of harming others. I will take excerpts that provide the central thread of the argument but it is worth reading through in full. There is more to it than this.

Socialism is a political philosophy that stands opposed to the principles of freedom America once valued. These have changed over time due to the influence of Marxism and materialistic, nihilistic German philosophies, which have subverted our education system for decades. It’s also due to the rejection of Judeo-Christian ethics and the Enlightenment philosophies of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu that work together to ensure liberty. . . .

Mises says we make a grave mistake if we try to reason with people who embrace anti-liberty views. This is because opposition to one’s own freedom doesn’t stem from reason. It’s actually a “pathological mental attitude,” born of resentment, “envious malevolence,” and “a neurasthenic condition” Mises called this the “Fourier complex”. . . .

The Fourier complex is rooted in psychological disruption. No amount of reason or life lessons will bring light to the darkened mind. “What is involved in this case is a serious disease of the nervous system, a neurosis, which is more properly the concern of the psychologist than of the legislator,” Mises writes. . . .

But we still have to ask — how is it that this deranged mental condition, this “Fourierism,” this love of socialism, is now so prevalent? Why are people prone to fantasy instead of reality? Do not doubt the fact that socialism and Marxism (despite its highfaluting rhetoric) are based in fantasy.

Neither of these ideologies can construct the utopia they promise. Even to formulate the hope, they have to suspend reason by making two assumptions: First, they assume that all the material of production in the world is there for our disposal and in such abundance that it doesn’t need to be economized. . . .

Second, they assume that suddenly and magically, work will change from “a burden into a pleasure,” and people will be overjoyed with working at meaningless tasks for others and not their own private use. They’ll be perfectly content, just like Winston Smith and his comrades in 1984. In this world of ever-flowing goods and a love for work and equal shares despite unequal abilities and contributions, they will find utopia.

This is the “saving lie” of socialism; the one neurotics believe to be true. And because of this, those who are frustrated by their own disappointments in life and who want to tear down everyone else in the name of egalitarian fantasies can console themselves of their despair in this world. . . .

“Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men,” Mises writes. “The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters.” . . .

The real necessities of life that create inequalities are rejected for a fantasy of happiness, social justice, and uniformity of wealth and existence. The material realities of life are ignored. Laws, consequences, value of property, reasonable outcomes, one’s own needs, even science — these are rejected for a dream: the socialist dream that is never realized.

This is the hell into which many of our fellow Americans are plunging. The only way to save them is with the “saving truth.” They need to live as God created them to live, in balance as taught by true religion, not by the false religion of Marx. Only when they understand that they live in the here and now but can also hope for eternity; that they are to work responsibly according to the necessities of life and dream of a better life one day; and that they derive value, not only from material goods, but also from spiritual realities — that there’s more to life than the accumulation of things, and yet accumulation of things is still part of life — will they be happy. And most of all they will be free.

And if that is the problem and also the only solution, then there is a problem indeed but no practical answer. The void and despair in the millions of devastated lives will never be filled, with political consequences of the darkest kind always an immediate possibility.

Can morality exist without God?

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Does it even have a meaning beyond self=interest? From Instapundit

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Karl Marx, not Adolf Hitler, was the most destructive German ever born, and Western intellectuals will go to extreme lengths to deny it.

If you’re interested in the question of whether morality can exist without God, you might enjoy Arthur Allen Leff’s discussion in Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. Or, in shorter and more pungent form, his treatment in Memorandum From The Devil. Also, these — especially the latter — are two of the best-written law review articles ever.

My father would have been 100 years old today

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I am what is known in the trade as a red diaper baby. But that was only on my Father’s side. I have always wondered about William James’s observation that the children of parents of conflicting temperaments find those conflicts raging inside themselves. I followed my Father’s communist line right through to the end of university, then took my second degree and spent a year and a half as a gardener in London working things through. It was then that I read Solzhenitsyn who may have been the catalyst or perhaps only the vehicle to announce to myself how my philosophy of life had sorted itself out, more towards my Mother’s side of the family tree.

Yet I am like my Dad in my allegiance to Mill in the way he had his allegiance to Marx. I loved my Dad who loved me in turn, but I ended up in Australia as far from his influence as I could possibly go. So I will tell my favourite story of my Dad, about when he had been made a manager in a factory where he then set up a union which he could not become a member of. The management knew someone had organised the union but didn’t know who. So they brought in each of the workers, asked who it was who had set up the union, and when they refused to say, fired each of them on the spot [it was the 1950s]. They then hired them all back, no one ever found out who had been the organiser and the factory remained unionised from that day on.

He had himself always remarked on his having been born almost to the day of the Russian Revolution, which is why I was so aware of the timing of the October Revolution and the storming of the Winter Palace. He outlived the Communist era but never gave up the faith. May he rest in peace wherever he may be.

Adam Smith and “the man of system”

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From Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (paragraph VI.II.41-42):

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

They have all the answers to questions that are not being asked. Smith could see the gulag even before he had seen Robespierre.

The October Revolution reaches 100

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What have socialists ever done that would make anyone think they care about other people? For myself, I cannot think of a thing. Socialist ideas have never, not in a single instance, not at any time in the whole of its history, improved the lives of the communities they ruled. Other than for its leaders, socialism has only caused misery for anyone who has been trapped inside a socialist regime.

This post is a reminder of what cannot be denied other than by liars or those with not a shred of historical memory, written in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Russia’s still celebrated October Revolution which was once the centre of a worldwide faith in a glorious future, that is, a glorious future once the tens of millions of regime opponents had been eliminated, driven into the gulag, or terrorised into silence. And while it was the “October” Revolution, that was old calendar, but in the new calendar that is the date we have now reached.

October Revolution, also called Bolshevik Revolution, (Oct. 24–25 [Nov. 6–7, New Style], 1917), the second and last major phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia, inaugurating the Soviet regime.

Socialists seek political power by pretending they have answers to genuine problems but never do; they only make such problems infinitely worse. We will never be rid of problems, nor will we ever be rid of people who will tell you that if only they are put in charge, our problems would go away. Any community in which the majority of its population are unaware of this massive danger to their future lives is in perennially danger of falling into the abyss of a socialist governing clique taking power.

Here is the reality. The socialist left is filled with people whose lives are driven by envy and hatred for the productive, contented and self-reliant. Ruining their lives makes no one better off but does lay to waste the lives of everyone involved, other than those who take power. No one can any longer be unaware that every socialist so-called solution to our existential and economic problems has been disastrous for everyone but those who seize power. Every socialist leader is a Stasi agent lying in wait.

Publishing historical fact is now illegal in Germany

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You do know the picture within the picture above is of an actual historical meeting. Here is the story that comes with the picture:

A German court recently sentenced journalist Michael Stürzenberger (pictured) to six months in jail for posting on his Facebook page a historical photo of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, shaking the hand of a Nazi official in Berlin, in 1941. The prosecution accused Stürzenberger of “inciting hatred towards Islam” and “denigrating Islam” by publishing the photograph.

This was just by way of illustrating a much more disturbing change in the German legal system:

A new German law introducing state censorship on social media platforms came into effect on October 1, 2017. The new law requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the German state. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint — regardless of whether or the content is accurate or not. Social media companies receive seven days for more complicated cases. If they fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law.

This state censorship makes free speech subject to the arbitrary decisions of corporate entities that are likely to censor more than absolutely necessary, rather than risk a crushing fine. . . .

Germany has made no secret of its desire to see its new law copied by the rest of the EU, which already has a similar code of conduct for social media giants. The EU Justice Commissioner, Vera Jourova, recently said she might be willing to legislate in the future if the voluntary code of conduct does not produce the desired results. She said, however, that the voluntary code was working “relatively” well, with Facebook removing 66.5% of the material they had been notified was “hateful” between December and May this year. Twitter removed 37.4%, and YouTube took action on 66% of the notifications from users.

Where this will end is not good, but the certainty is that none of the social media giants will be in the fight for free speech.