A St. Patrick's Day Feast, I

Rio Grande

Now today is the right day to watch The Quiet Man, if you can. It is one of the greatest good movies ever made. But the Warner Bro's didn't think it could make any money, a movie about Irish Americans and Irishmen. 

So they told John Ford and John Wayne that they had to make another movie, a cavalry movie, to fund their Irish movie. It turned out to make more by far than the very successful Rio Grande.

There's a small matter of fitness: can you ride like the ancient Romans?

It breaks my heart to think how far we have fallen from this display of respect of man to woman; this loss of chivalry. We aren't half our grandfather's generation. God help us.

Extended Waylon

I'm mostly going to do St. Patrick's Day stuff today, though I'm not at all Irish except through the distant way in which the Scots are "Scotti" from Ireland once upon a time. However, this piece is an extended cut of a 1970s piece in which Waylon and his crew were at the very top of their game.

 

The songs are fun, but the real meat of it is when they are done singing and start playing.

Sovereign Crime

Perhaps the most important question of the moment in terms of self-governance, and whether it still exists.

Your government, at the state and federal level, the FBI, government agencies can be in on the scam.  That is the realization slowly being accepted by millions of Americans.

We have technologies that can identify dead voters the moment they cast a ballot.  We can identify people who are out-of-state, voted twice, are underage, live in a vacant lot or a UPS or FedEx postal box.  We can even show a photo of that vacant lot so you can see where your fake neighbor claims to live.

Literally, the second their ballot is counted, they can be flagged as a likely fraud.

Yes, we can deploy that technology today....

The question is, if the government is pretty much in on the election fraud, does it really matter?

It is important to note, however, that the government is not the sovereign. It may be that they have forgotten who the sovereign really is. 

“Seeing as How it’s Near the 17th of March...”

A hand extended in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

       

Not to spoil the fun, but the opening joke in that clip is immediately relevant to the Parmenides post below.

Plato's Parmenides IV: The Setup

After the great difficulties are raised, Socrates admits that his idea of Forms seems hard to defend. Parmenides agrees that it is very hard to defend, but in terms that strongly suggest that he nevertheless believes it must be right:

These, Socrates, said Parmenides, are a few, and only a few of the

difficulties in which we are involved if ideas really are and we determine

each one of them to be an absolute unity. He who hears what may be

said against them will deny the very existence of them-and even if

they do exist, he will say that they must of necessity be unknown

to man; and he will seem to have reason on his side, and as we were

remarking just now, will be very difficult to convince; a man must

be gifted with very considerable ability before he can learn that

everything has a class and an absolute essence; and still more remarkable

will he be who discovers all these things for himself, and having

thoroughly investigated them is able to teach them to others.

I agree with you, Parmenides, said Socrates; and what you say is very

much to my mind. 

And yet, Socrates, said Parmenides, if a man, fixing his attention

on these and the like difficulties, does away with ideas of things

and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate

idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which

his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning,

as you seem to me to have particularly noted. 

Parmenides is suggesting that, without the Forms as at least objects of thought, we cannot reason at all. He's also telling us something about the character of a Form: it is characterized by an essence, which is absolute and unitary. Not just some things of especially high and noble character must have Forms, but anything at all. 

Now we still have the difficulty of understanding whether these Forms are metaphysical or psychological. Parmenides' defense of them is that we need them to think; and if that is true, it is possible that the world doesn't have Forms in it, but rather that they are the way that our minds work. A thing then doesn't have an essence, but is assigned one by us. In this way, everything becomes an artifact, in a way: the thing in the world is not, but the thing as it exists in our mind is an artifact that we have made and assigned a purpose, our thought an artifact just as surely as if we had built a fork out of wood. We made the thing out of raw materials we found in the world, and assigned it a purpose to serve us. 

In that case, then, telos is real enough; but all the telos is human-made, and not inherent in the world. (This is roughly the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras' position: "Man is the measure of all things," as it is often given.)

Aristotle will not believe this; his assigning Form as not-separate from the things means that the form really is in the thing. We learn the form by examining the things; our minds grasp it from grappling with the things we encounter. Aristotle's Form is metaphysical, and also physical (but not material). Plato's, as presented in the Republic, is metaphysical but not physical. Parmenides isn't being clear about what he takes the nature of the Forms to be.

Socrates confesses that he has no idea how to proceed under the circumstances. Parmenides tells him this is because he is young, and as yet untrained in rhetoric and debate. If he developed skills in this kind of discourse, it would help him work out his philosophical ideas in a way that he is not ready to do yet.

Socrates asks him how to do this, and Parmenides gives a response he surely meant to be helpful.

I mean, for example, that in the case of this very hypothesis of Zeno's

about the many, you should inquire not only what will be the consequences

to the many in relation to themselves and to the one, and to the one

in relation to itself and the many, on the hypothesis of the being

of the many, but also what will be the consequences to the one and

the many in their relation to themselves and to each other, on the

opposite hypothesis. Or, again, if likeness is or is not, what will

be the consequences in either of these cases to the subjects of the

hypothesis, and to other things, in relation both to themselves and

to one another, and so of unlikeness; and the same holds good of motion

and rest, of generation and destruction, and even of being and not-being.

In a word, when you suppose anything to be or not to be, or to be

in any way affected, you must look at the consequences in relation

to the thing itself, and to any other things which you choose-to each

of them singly, to more than one, and to all; and so of other things,

you must look at them in relation to themselves and to anything else

which you suppose either to be or not to be, if you would train yourself

perfectly and see the real truth. 

Socrates finds this answer as mystifying as most readers do when they first encounter it. He asks for a practical example to help him understand how this process is supposed to work.

That, Parmenides, is a tremendous business of which you speak, and

I do not quite understand you; will you take some hypothesis and go

through the steps?-then I shall apprehend you better. 

That, Socrates, is a serious task to impose on a man of my years.

Nevertheless, that will be the business of the next part. Zeno and others present join in the request to hear Parmenides walk through an example at length, so that they can better understand how to perform this sort of inquiry. 

UPDATE: If your response to reading Parmenides' answer was similar to this, don't feel bad. It's perfectly normal. 

Politicizing the Military

I don't know how much attention this stuff gets, but it really is both stupid and illegal. It's not just the praetorian guard stuff they're pulling with the National Guard deployment to DC, either. This weekend there were several stunts in which military personnel and leadership deployed as political weapons against American citizens who disagree with the current government. 

Stupid:

Illegal:

Here's the military publication cited in that last. The conduct is not illegal because the publication says so; the publication says so because it's illegal. The general officer who signed that document is none other than our current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, currently overseeing what increasingly looks like an opportunity to purge right-wing views from the military. 

The leadership, at least, has internalized that it is their job to parrot political support for the administration and mock its enemies. The fact that this is illegal will only matter if laws are still being enforced -- well, I mean, obviously they would be against you. It does seem like the lesson of the last few years, though, is that the FBI and the DOJ work for the political establishment: they exist to excuse their crimes, but punish their enemies. Has the military legal sphere fallen as well? Signs point to "yes." 

"Get right before you get left, boomer." From an official USMC account. A lot of those Boomers were Marines too, and they fought a harder war in Vietnam than we ever faced. 

Bullets

 

What About Confession? What Do You Think Confession's For?

"The Archbishop Who Fears for Joe Biden’s Soul"

When Catholics receive Communion, they must strive to do so “worthily,” meaning they have repented of their sins and desire to live in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the Bible, the apostle Paul warns of grave consequences for those who take Communion unworthily. But Naumann is also worried about the message Biden communicates to other Catholics when he takes Communion while continuing to support abortion rights: “Whether he intends it or not, he’s basically saying to people, ‘You can be a good Catholic and do similar things,’” [Archbishop] Naumann told me.

I don't know. Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red has a good point. What's a mortal sin or two as long as you've got Confession? 

 

The problem isn't so much the sinning as the lack of confession. If you could just admit the cannibalism was wrong, it'd be more tolerable all the way around. 

Boo

It’s been a minute since a singer could get away with calling himself “Stonewall Jackson,” but I remember hearing this on the radio. 

Ancient Greek Computation

On the Antikythera mechanism. A familiar name appears: Parmenides may be the source for the measurements of two planets in this analog computer that models the Cosmos. 

The Present Regime, circa 2016

Worth reconsidering in light of the present moment, and the last several years -- or even the last six months. I am posting it here because I haven't time to read it this morning, and want to get back to it when I do have time.

UPDATE: Also interesting is the Codevilla essay it begins with -- again, this is 2016 -- that declares that Trump will be the end of America as a republic. 

Mind-Blindness

Some people can’t visualize mental images. Those people also aren’t scared by ghost stories. 

A Curfew on Men

This idea seems to get proposed just from time to time, and the time has come around again in the UK. The problem, as Wretchard points out, is: who enforces this curfew on men? In this case, the man accused of the horrible crime was (in addition to being a man) a 'gun cop,' one of the few UK police entrusted to carry firearms. 

Why don't we have a 6 PM curfew on police, or at least 'gun cops'? Well, again: who enforces it? The unarmed police? The helpless victims? 

Ultimately there is no alternative beyond these: (a) let ordinary people protect themselves, which includes giving them the right to keep and bear the tools they need to do it; (b) accept those people being victimized by those you did entrust with power and/or weapons. All versions of (b) prove immoral over time.

Faust

The Dead South

I had a YouTube Tom Lehrer set on all afternoon, but whoever put it together started interspersing other music he likes, including this band:

That's no reason why they cain't be friends

Taking a break from all the unity and healing to escape into Gilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein. "I don't say I'm better than anybody else--but I'll be danged if I ain't just as good." I didn't remember how terrific the Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance were.

Plato's Parmenides III: Greater Difficulties

Parmenides now moves on to raise two stern objections to Socrates' theory of Forms. Edith Hamilton's translation has a very brief introduction to the dialogue in which she says that it is unclear why Plato wrote a dialogue that was so harshly critical of his own most cherished idea. It is "certainly a curious procedure since in the end he apparently neither demolishes them nor establishes them," she says, but "[t]o some people, however, it is only what is to be expected from Plato, never out to defend his own views, always with one object alone, to know the truth. It would be natrual for him to do his best to find out if what he had built up could be torn down."

Especially the second of these two objections will remain relevant in theology even to this day: in the Middle Ages, Maimonides and others were gravely concerned with the proof that God could not know us. 

Parmenides sets up his first objection with a reprise of his Third Man argument. If these Forms exist like ideas in a mind, then they are unlike the things in the world. The things in the world that are supposed to be 'made in their image' have extension in three dimensions, weight, color, and so forth; the forms are unextended objects, which cannot have parts (as per the last discussion). Thus, no Form is anything like the things for which it is supposed to be the model. 

A further proof that the Forms cannot be 'like' the things in the world is that, if they were, then there is room for a third concept that unifies the Form and the thing it is 'like.' You have the Form of a Table, say, and a bunch of actual tables; what holds those things together as a category? If the Form of a Table is an idea about the essential nature of a table, then it is the thing that holds all the tables together in a category. Yet if the Form of a Table is like the tables in some way, then another idea must exist that holds the Form together with the several tables. (The real objection is not that there must be a 'third' thing, but that the process will repeat infinitely, so that knowing any Form requires knowing an infinite number of higher Forms as well).

Now he gets to what he calls his "worst" objection to the Theory of Forms. If the Forms are supposed to be ideas that capture the real essence of a thing, then knowledge of them should be knowledge of the real things. Yet knowing a Form gives you no knowledge about the facts of the world. His (unfortunate) example is slavery: knowing the Form of Master and the Form of Slave doesn't tell you who is a slave; and even if you recognize a slave, it doesn't tell you who his master is. "The significance of things in our world is not with reference to things in that other world [i.e. the world of the Forms]." 

If that is true, the real and best kind of knowledge will be knowledge of a world so separate from ours that knowing the truth would provide us with no benefits. Our branches of knowledge, insofar as they exist in this world, would seem to involve knowledge of the real things -- not knowledge of the ideal things. 

This leads to the second objection, which is the one that bothered theologians. It would seem that "a god," and certainly God, would have the best kind of knowledge. Indeed, the usual way of talking about the Forms since the advent of Christianity is to talk about them as "Ideas in the Mind of God." So God, at least, knows the forms even if none of us do.

But because God knows the Forms, what God knows is not knowledge of this world but of the world of Forms. Later monotheistic theologians will prove to their satisfaction that God himself must be simple and unextended -- this is Aquinas' position, and Avicenna's, and Maimonides' -- and thus the Forms are the only things God could know, because they are simple and lack parts too. 

Even in Parmenides' day, the perfection of divine knowledge implied knowledge of the Forms rather than knowledge of particulars. 

Then if the most perfect mastership and most perfect knowledge are in the god's world, the gods' mastership can never be exercised over us, nor their knowledge know us or anything in our world. Just as we do not rule over them by virtue of rule as it exists in our world, and we know nothing that is divine by our knowledge, so they, on the same principle, being gods, are not our masters nor do they know anything of human concerns.

This is an intolerable objection in the eyes of the Christian philosophers especially, for whom a personal relationship with God is the essence of the faith. Yet it's also a problem for Jewish philosophers, for whom their foundational books are all about God knowing particular prophets and others, and working with them directly. 

(The Muslim philosophers seem unbothered by it; this would explain, e.g., why Allah communicated to Muhammad through an angel rather than directly. The angels serve a metaphysical role as messengers and intermediaries between the divine and the human. Avicenna's proofs of divine simplicity are thus thoroughgoing and unbothered by the fact that the consequence is that humans cannot have a direct relationship with such a God as he describes.)

Aristotle accepts these objections, and generally rejects separate Forms (with the exception of Unmoved Movers, as mentioned, whose role for him doesn't require them to know us). He has a totally different idea about how knowledge of the forms works. If you're interested, and you have a little more than an hour, here is the best philosopher working today on this subject explaining how he believes Aristotle's model works.

Plato's model is that the Forms do exist separately, in spite of these problems that Parmenides raises. We still have a lot of ground to cover, but at least now you understand some of the problems that Plato expects to have to overcome in order to maintain his position.

The Ballad of Pancho and Lefty

A sad song, all around; perhaps especially in its embrace of betrayal of friendship to power and wealth.

They're right: Lefty needs your prayers, far more than Pancho Villa, who was not merely a bandit as according to the American understanding. He was a constitutionalist, even; for a while.

Federalism?

So, how is this different in principle from a Federal law stating that "all states that accept funds from the Federal government shall adopt California's constitution and state laws, making only the necessary exceptions to change the name of the state to their own"? 

Or the next Republican Congress with a Republican President changing the language to "Alabama"?

It seems to me that 'you can't cut taxes for five years' is meddling in the internal policies of the state to such a degree that you might by the same principle say 'you must adopt favored state laws in other matters,' and thus, 'in any matter,' and thus, 'in all matters.' 

I suppose it's possible that the courts might throw out this provision, but the courts aren't impressing me lately with their devotion to preserving our heritage or Constitutional order. All those Trump judges and Justices, and they still seem mostly inclined to go along with whatever the powers that be want to do.