Woke Oppressors

REI is having a dispute about whether to unionize. The leadership decided to hold a podcast to talk about it.

Wilma Wallace:

Hi REI. My name is Wilma Wallace and I serve as your Chief Diversity and Social Impact Officer. I use she/her pronouns and am speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people.

So I'm here chatting with Eric Artz who serves the co-op and all of us as CEO....

So just to recap for the audience on Friday January 21st we were notified by the National Labor Relations Board that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union filed a petition for an election at our SoHo store in New York. And since then I'm sure you've heard from lots of employees across the co-op. Maybe we can start by you sharing some of what you've heard.

Eric Artz:

Well thank you Wilma. Thanks for hosting and hello to everyone that is listening. For those of you who I have not had the chance to meet, I use he/him pronouns and I'm speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples.

Spoiler: they are not in favor of allowing their workers to unionize. 

The atmosphere did it

It was the atmosphere that prompted the shooting!--I didn't say the people who created the atmosphere "caused" the shooting, so I didn't commit libel. From John Sexton, one of the better contributors at HotAir:

If accusing Palin (or her PAC) of clear incitement to mass murder when in fact there is no such connection at all doesn’t constitute reckless disregard for the truth, what could possibly qualify? In a way, even Bennet’s own argument supports this. Saying he was too rushed to do a proper job of it is just a way of justifying his own reckless behavior, i.e. if he’d only had more time, he’d have looked into the truth of what he was writing. The jury may decide the law protects the Times even in this case but if so then it’s hard to see how why “reckless disregard” was included in the law at all.

Lowdown Freedom

Trucker convoy has "weaponized freedom" to "undermine democracy." The preservation of the freedom of ordinary common folk was the whole point of the latter as I had always understood it. Canada doesn't have our Declaration of Independence, with its philosophical justification for government; but what really is the point of democracy if it isn't to protect the rights of common people? 

Common people will have common faults, and their common sense will just mean embracing the kinds of things that make sense to common folk. It's only those kinds of things any government can do whose legitimacy is broad-based, for the common people are by far the most of them. Democracy was never meant to be for the great and the good; that's aristocracy, which has its own faults. They are worse faults: the Arabs say, "The mistake of the wise man is equal to the mistakes of a thousand fools."

So they'll drink too much, and some of them will cheat on their spouse; they'll have some prejudice, sometimes, against the people who are different. But they won't leave thousands of American citizens stranded in Afghanistan, or sell the place and all its ancient liberties to a totalitarian China. They won't murder millions like Mao did to try to make some titanic change. I'm not one of them, but I'll ride with them. My loyalty is always to them: as decent as they can be, as free as they can be. May God keep them -- He must love them, having made so many -- and may God defend the right. 

Enchiridion XXIX

XXIX

In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit, indeed, careless of the consequences, and when these are developed, you will shamefully desist. “I would conquer at the Olympic Games.” But consider what precedes and what follows, and then, if it be for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, and sometimes no wine—in a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow an abundance of dust, receive stripes [for negligence], and, after all, lose the victory. When you have reckoned up all this, if your inclination still holds, set about the combat. Otherwise, take notice, you will behave like children who sometimes play wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy, when they happen to have seen and admired these shows. Thus you too will be at one time a wrestler, and another a gladiator; now a philosopher, now an orator; but nothing in earnest. Like an ape you mimic all you see, and one thing after another is sure to please you, but is out of favor as soon as it becomes familiar. For you have never entered upon anything considerately; nor after having surveyed and tested the whole matter, but carelessly, and with a halfway zeal. Thus some, when they have seen a philosopher and heard a man speaking like Euphrates—though, indeed, who can speak like him?—have a mind to be philosophers, too. Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler, consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for different persons are made for different things. Do you think that you can act as you do and be a philosopher, that you can eat, drink, be angry, be discontented, as you are now? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintances, be despised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet; come off worse than others in everything—in offices, in honors, before tribunals. When you have fully considered all these things, approach, if you please—that is, if, by parting with them, you have a mind to purchase serenity, freedom, and tranquility. If not, do not come hither; do not, like children, be now a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own reason or else externals; apply yourself either to things within or without you—that is, be either a philosopher or one of the mob.

I didn't say anything about the last chapter because I think it's self-explanatory. That doesn't mean I don't think it's important.

This chapter, as the note at the original mentions, is almost the same as a parallel part of the Discourses, where  arguments and discussions are laid out in fuller form.  Since it is in its fuller form, I will also leave it be save to answer questions you may have.

Enchiridion XXVIII

XXVIII

If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?

Enchiridion XXVII

XXVII

As a mark is not set up for the sake of missing the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the world.

This mysterious line is of immense importance. A single sentence, this lays out the conclusion to an argument whose premises are unstated. The argument is a proof, whose consequence is a view of the problem of evil similar to that adopted by St. Augustine.* 

As noted before, the Enchiridion records only the summary conclusions of the Stoic school that Epictetus founded, and not the underlying arguments. Lacking the unstated premises, the proof's force and its consequences may not be obvious. 

So here is a reconstruction of how the unstated premises might be stated:

1) All things come to be because they order themselves by their own nature, or because they are put into a particular order by someone or something else. (Aristotle Physics 1)
1a) An example of the first is living beings, which grow into what they are because of internal processes like digestion that let them turn other parts of the world into material for their own order. A child grows into an adult because it is realizing its own internal natural principles of order.
1b) Examples of the second include artifacts, which are made by someone else; and accidental features of nature like weathered riverbeds or seashores. They become what they are because of an external activity.

2) Things like human beings that are internally ordered have a nature; the reason a dog grows into a dog and a man into a man is that their natures differ.

3) Determining the good for a things requires looking at its nature, then; dogs can profit from eating different things than men, for example.

4) Human nature differs from dogs, other lower animals, and plants in that it has an additional capacity for reason that allows it to obtain fuller goods than irrational natural drives.

5) Human nature's highest good is eudaimonia, a flourishing that comes from ordering all your activities in accord with the reason that is the highest part of your nature. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1)

6) This ordering produces virtues (arete), which are excellences of capacity that allow you to pursue the highest good even more fully. 

7) Euidaimonia is reached when you exercise your arete in accord with your reason: thus, you can become happy by living the most virtuous life that is possible for yourself, which reason can tell you how to do.

8) Since this is the highest good for your nature (5), and your nature determines the good for the kind of being you are (3), attaining eudaimonia is the proper mark to aim at in your life.

9) Because the reason that is part of human nature (4) gives you the ability to hit this mark (7), nature can be said to contain a mark that is intended for you to hit and not miss.

Therefore, a mark exists in nature that is happiness and the highest good;

Marks do not exist to be missed, but to serve as targets to be hit. The mark does exist. Therefore nature is such that evil is not its intended end. Good is -- the highest good, and happiness, that comes from learning to hit the mark.

This leads to the solution of the problem of evil, which is that it is not the case that the gods have made an evil world, or a world in which evil is a necessary part. The gods have made a world in which good is the intended mark of nature: by pursuing your rational nature and developing your natural virtues, good and not evil is what you will obtain. Evil comes from people ignoring their reason, or their virtues.

What about random accidents, such as a rock falling upon your child? Those are events of type (1b), things that do not arise from one's own nature (what Kant will later call autonomy) but from outside forces that may be random chance (which Kant called heteronomy). They are not evil, no more than the carving of the river or seashore was evil. They are just the random workings of things that have no will of their own.

Therefore, the existence of the mark proves that the nature of evil is not part of the world. It is a failure by some of us to live up to the good -- to hit the mark that nature has provided. 

*(For St. Augustine, this is placed in the Christian context: God did not create a world with evil in it, nor that is evil by nature, nor in which evil is a necessary part. Gods will is perfectly good; but our free will allows us to fail to attain the goods that God made possible for us, or for others to harm us out of a failure of theirs to pursue the good that God would have wished them to pursue instead of what they chose. Evil is also then a human failing, or a collection of them, rather than a charge that can be laid at the feet of God -- as Job did not do, at least not at first.)

Just what it says on the tin

 The Virginia legislature's Black Caucus contains a lie right in its name.  It's the Black Leftist Caucus, and no black Republicans need apply.  Virginia's new black state representative aired the sad state of affairs on the floor of the House, saying:

Maybe I need to start my own caucus, the Virginia Non-Leftist Black Caucus. Right now it’ll be a caucus of one but that’s okay. As Thoreau said "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already."

Enchiridion XXVI

XXVI

The will of nature may be learned from things upon which we are all agreed. As when our neighbor’s boy has broken a cup, or the like, we are ready at once to say, “These are casualties that will happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is likewise broken, you ought to be affected just as when another’s cup was broken. Now apply this to greater things. Is the child or wife of another dead? There is no one who would not say, “This is an accident of mortality.” But if anyone’s own child happens to die, it is immediately, “Alas! how wretched am I!” It should be always remembered how we are affected on hearing the same thing concerning others.

Can anyone be so rational or detached about a beloved child? Ought one to be? Even Job tore his garments and shaved his head in mourning over his children, and was said to be blameless for 'he did not charge God with wrongdoing.' Epictetus wants us also not to charge the divine with wrongdoing, and simply to accept it as one of the random things that happens in this world. Which, of course, it is. 

Enchiridion XXV

XXV 

 

Is anyone preferred before you at an entertainment, or in courtesies, or in confidential intercourse? If these things are good, you ought to rejoice that he has them; and if they are evil, do not be grieved that you have them not. And remember that you cannot be permitted to rival others in externals without using the same means to obtain them. For how can he who will not haunt the door of any man, will not attend him, will not praise him, have an equal share with him who does these things? You are unjust, then, and unreasonable if you are unwilling to pay the price for which these things are sold, and would have them for nothing. For how much are lettuces sold? An obulus, for instance. If another, then, paying an obulus, takes the lettuces, and you, not paying it, go without them, do not imagine that he has gained any advantage over you. For as he has the lettuces, so you have the obulus which you did not give. So, in the present case, you have not been invited to such a person’s entertainment because you have not paid him the price for which a supper is sold. It is sold for praise; it is sold for attendance. Give him, then, the value if it be for your advantage. But if you would at the same time not pay the one, and yet receive the other, you are unreasonable and foolish. Have you nothing, then, in place of the supper? Yes, indeed, you have—not to praise him whom you do not like to praise; not to bear the insolence of his lackeys.

The analogue here is Diogenes, whom Plato reportedly called “Socrates gone mad.” 

“A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. “If you would only learn to compliment Dionysus, you wouldn’t have to live on lentils.” Diogenes replied, “But if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn’t have to flatter Dionysus.”

CDL Proximity Metric

A few years ago, reporters were incensed when they were asked whether they or someone they knew owned a pickup truck -- the Ford F-150 being the most popular line of vehicles in America for decades, and the next two most popular also being pickup trucks. None of the reporters knew anyone with a truck.

In the wake of the Convoy for Freedom, another metric has been proposed: "How far out in your immediate social circle do you need to go to find someone who can legally operate a dump truck?"

I myself own a Ford F-150, so I am zero steps removed in the first metric. I am not too much farther in the second one. I can myself drive a fire truck, which in North Carolina is legal for volunteers without a CDL provided they take an annual weekend certification course. Professional firefighters require a CDL. Since several of my friends are professional firefighters -- the county has a few slots for them, in addition to the volunteers -- the distance is one.

Back in Georgia my next-door neighbor was a big rig driver. He retired after being hijacked and shot, though he managed to wreck the truck to prevent it being stolen (and to allow the police to capture his hijacker). It's a hard job under the best of circumstances, and can be dangerous as well. 

Brilliant Analysis

Nobody believes China's pandemic numbers are remotely accurate: they are clearly lying. As part of its coverage of the Olympics -- which we should be refusing to participate in, both because of the ongoing genocide and slave labor in China and also because we cannot protect our citizens who travel there, as even Nancy Pelosi admits -- the NYT decided to entertain those numbers.

Headline: "Good morning. China’s zero-Covid policy has kept deaths very low. Can it continue?"

Has it, though? Refer to the graph at the first link.

The NYT admits that there is widespread disbelief: "Even if China’s official numbers are artificially low, its true Covid death toll is almost certainly much lower than that of the U.S., Europe or many other countries. Consider how enormous the official gap is."

That is an astonishing bit of reasoning. "Even if they're lying, look how BIG the lie would have to be. They can't be lying THAT much."

I mean, they could be. Their lies over the Great Leap Forward leave us guessing, even today, as to whether only 30 million people died or as many as 60 million people did. They control the state media and have threatened the foreign media on the ground very effectively, while purchasing influence with their parent companies. There's no reason to believe their numbers are remotely accurate, especially since they are also implausible. They're claiming to be doing fifty times as well as Japan, for example, a nation of similar population density and social cohesion but higher technology and far better sanitation. 

UPDATE: The PRC apparently chose to open the games with a synchronized display of smiling and waving Uyghurs, whose families are under threat at home to ensure their cooperation. It is raw, totalitarian propaganda. 

Another Western Interlude

Enchiridion XXIV

XXIV

Let not such considerations as these distress you: “I shall live in discredit and be nobody anywhere.” For if discredit be an evil, you can no more be involved in evil through another than in baseness. Is it any business of yours, then, to get power or to be admitted to an entertainment? By no means. How then, after all, is this discredit? And how it is true that you will be nobody anywhere when you ought to be somebody in those things only which are within your own power, in which you may be of the greatest consequence? “But my friends will be unassisted.” What do you mean by “unassisted”? They will not have money from you, nor will you make them Roman citizens. Who told you, then, that these are among the things within our own power, and not rather the affairs of others? And who can give to another the things which he himself has not? “Well, but get them, then, that we too may have a share.” If I can get them with the preservation of my own honor and fidelity and self-respect, show me the way and I will get them; but if you require me to lose my own proper good, that you may gain what is no good, consider how unreasonable and foolish you are. Besides, which would you rather have, a sum of money or a faithful and honorable friend? Rather assist me, then, to gain this character than require me to do those things by which I may lose it. Well, but my country, say you, as far as depends upon me, will be unassisted. Here, again, what assistance is this you mean? It will not have porticos nor baths of your providing? And what signifies that? Why, neither does a smith provide it with shoes, nor a shoemaker with arms. It is enough if everyone fully performs his own proper business. And were you to supply it with another faithful and honorable citizen, would not he be of use to it? Yes. Therefore neither are you yourself useless to it. “What place, then,” say you, “shall I hold in the state?” Whatever you can hold with the preservation of your fidelity and honor. But if, by desiring to be useful to that, you lose these, how can you serve your country when you have become faithless and shameless?

"How can you serve your country when you have become faithless and shameless?" There is a rhetorical question, since we have endless evidence before our eyes of how such people 'serve.'

This is a larger statement of how to engage in public matters, which have also been called 'semblances' and 'externals.' It is not that you ought not to do it; it is that you ought not to privilege any of them above the maintenance of your own honor, fidelity, and self-respect. If you do no more than provide your country with one more faithful and honorable citizen, you will have done enough. If it is given to you to do more, fine; if it is not, you have fulfilled your real duty by preserving these internal qualities.

It occurs to me that Stoic philosophy is not taught in public schools, except for those who choose to major or take electives in philosophy or history and even then only if they happen to choose that area. Yet what better lesson could we convey to the young than this one right here in today's chapter? It does not matter if you are famous; it does not matter if you are powerful. It only matters to live with faith and honor, and to live so that you hold your head up because you know that you deserve to hold it up. 

Only in that way could you serve your people anyway, whether friend or fellow citizen. 

The clear analogy today is to Mark 8:36, which makes a similar but metaphysically sterner claim. What profits it you to gain a position of service to others if you have lost the faith and honor that would allow you to perform service? Well, it might profit you quite a bit -- again, there are many examples right in front of us of people who have profited from precisely that. Yet I think Epictetus means something very close here to what Jesus said.

Strictly Unconstitutional

The White House calls on all media platforms -- by name, Spotify -- to censor the speech of Americans with whose views they disagree. 

Private platforms might possibly do what they want; that's an argument, though there are significant counterarguments. Private platforms that are explicitly carrying out the will of the government are acting as agents of the state, and are bound by the restrictions on the state. 

Of course the government is already in violation. The courts might correct them, or not; the corporations might choose to do the right thing, or not. There is a point, coming closer, at which the corrective is us. 

If you stop arresting people, arrests will go down

 On the other hand, some of the kids may get killed by someone you didn't arrest.

Enchiridion XXIII

XXIII

If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be content, then, in everything, with being a philosopher; and if you wish to seem so likewise to anyone, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you.

This begins to be an answer to the question raised by the last chapter; we will see more over the next two days.

What would we do without critics?

Via Neo:  I can't say "Justin Castreau" didn't ask for it.

JP Sears is funny as usual, but he can't hold a candle to the genuine news article Neo linked:  "critics warn that conflating the absence of bloodshed with 'peaceful' protest downplays the dangers of the weekend demonstrations."  Was there violence that didn't quite draw blood?  Well, no, but one person interviewed (duly identified as non-binary, because we need to know) said she knew of at least one child who was afraid to go outside.

That's a DeSantis signature.

I leave you with these words of comfort:

I don't think you have to call the kids in until the "mostly peaceful" klaxons go off.

A Rough Estimate on Ukraine

 Russia continues to redeploy significant assets in ways that look like it is preparing for war. It has chosen to redeploy dozens of deniable Wagner PMC assets from Africa to Europe, and is today moving its Pacific Fleet through the Suez Canal to take up position somewhere closer to Europe -- the final destination is unclear at this time, but even from the Mediterranean they could provide some support. Like the existing deployments of forces on the border, the Pacific Fleet maneuver is expensive and cannot be maintained for a very long time without sacrificing a strategic asset in a strategic region. 

My personal guess is that the Russians will use Belarus to provoke (or more likely fake) a Ukrainian 'provocation' the Belarussians will respond to, allowing Russia to invade under the pretense of defending its allies from Ukrainian aggression. They will use the overwhelming force they are accumulating behind special operations and aircraft fires to rapidly seize and hold the eastern half of the country only, I estimate, where most of the population speaks Russia and conceives of themselves as Russians. If they then consolidate that position, there will be a long front that can be dug in and defended. Western diplomatic pressure to make them concede it will be exactly as effective as it has been in South Ossetia and Crimea, i.e., not at all.

Russia is in a perfect position to steal a march on the West, take the portion of Ukraine that will be easiest to take and easiest to hold, and to do so at a low cost in lives and resources. It's the most sensible play, and in accord with Putin's past operations. They could do something more aggressive, but it would also be more expensive and be more likely to create a long-term problem for them like an insurgency behind their lines.

I'm guessing Belarus will do it this time because their President just publicly issued a more aggressive statement on Ukraine than Russia has done. They've already allowed Russian military assets onto their territory, and are openly inviting many more 'if attacked.' If they're staging up to take the lead, then Russia gets to come in not as aggressor -- the chief war crime -- but as a defender and savior of its (allegedly invaded) ally. This will also serve as a pretense that the Russians are not aggressively gobbling up territory again, though of course the collapse of the West and of American power under the Biden administration has made such realignments inevitable. 

Expecting a play of that sort is probably also why the Ukrainian government is trying to get the Biden administration and others to lower their tone, as they want to avoid any appearance of provoking or encouraging conflict. The last thing they could want at this time is to give any appearance of being an aggressor in this conflict. (CNN analysts are a good reverse barometer, so if you read this analysis you'll see both that lowering the tone is the wise play and also that the Biden administration is almost certain to go the other way, thinking they are being 'muscular' rather than walking into a trap.)

Anyway, that's my estimate of what military intelligence calls the 'Most Likely Enemy Course of Action' (MLECOA). This differs from the 'Most Dangerous Enemy Course of Action,' (MDECOA), which I'm not going to lay out in public. I doubt most Americans care enough about any of this to want to get involved, but the Biden administration has shown a stark disconnect from being able to care about, or even entertain concerns from, ordinary Americans.

Enchiridion XXII

XXII

If you have an earnest desire toward philosophy, prepare yourself from the very first to have the multitude laugh and sneer, and say, “He is returned to us a philosopher all at once”; and, “Whence this supercilious look?” Now, for your part, do not have a supercilious look indeed, but keep steadily to those things which appear best to you, as one appointed by God to this particular station. For remember that, if you are persistent, those very persons who at first ridiculed will afterwards admire you. But if you are conquered by them, you will incur a double ridicule.

Let us combine this advice with the last chapter’s: sometimes the admiration does not come until after you die. Socrates and Jesus both had a few admirers at their executions; numerous artists knew very little commercial success in their lives. Some committed suicide, even, only to have their works become beloved later — Robert E. Howard is often mentioned here, and Van Gogh was just mentioned at AVI’s place. 

In remembrance of death we remember that all of life’s troubles are passing; in remembering that honors often come after death to those who were true to their divine appointment, we might even face death boldly under difficult conditions and circumstances. 

Yet it is striking that Epictetus, who has heretofore cited honors like admiration as mere semblances to be discarded as ‘not our business,’ would cite them here. Is admiration from others a proper ethical concern, or is it not?

The interested might turn to Aristotle’s discussion of whether honor affects the happiness of the dead beginning in Nicomachean Ethics I.10 and followings. Aristotle asked if Solon was right that you couldn’t judge the happiness of a person before death, or if you could. This leads into a general discussion of happiness as an activity (which presumably only live people can execute), but that leads to a puzzle about whether the dead can be less happy if they are later scorned, or if their children suffer, and so forth. He isn’t quite wiling to say these things can be dismissed as considerations even for the dead, for whom they are no longer even semblances. 

Solidarity - A Blast from the Past