We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Vanderleun rates Van Morrison one of the great souls of our time. So do I. I have heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" more than enough times, but not "These are the Days." If you don't know that tune, find it. Read Vanderleun's piece, and listen, if you wish, to this YouTube long version of T.B. Sheets he posted:
I am periodically reminded that relative newcomers to the blogosphere - of which there happily seem to be many at Maggie's Farm - need to be advised to right-click links that you wish to see, without losing your page.
It's the best use of that right clicker on your mouse: it's certainly why God created mice with two ears.
A teleology is a basic component of most religions. As I understand it, Darwinian evolution contains no teleology and is based on random variation which "leads" nowhere.
However, even our non-scientific use of the word "evolution" connotes a sense of "progress." Philosophical naturalism cannot speak of progress, or "success" or "need" or "purpose" - only of temporary adaptations and maladaptations to conditions based on accidental genetic events.
As the very lame Wikipedia entry says correctly:
Teleology would argue that a person has eyes because he has the need of eyesight, form follows function, while naturalism is the reverse of this position: it would say that a person has sight simply because he has eyes, or that function follows form (eyesight follows from having eyes).
Auster discusses this in a short piece on the subject (The Intellectual Fraud which is Darwinism). Fact is, people have a tendency to fallaciously (via the pathetic, or anthropomorphic fallacy -or more specifically, personification) apply human notions like intent or direction to a Darwinian world-view which entirely lacks intent or purpose - but which does contain design (as humans comprehend it - eg snowflakes). Thus they impose a religious-like teleology upon a theoretically meaningless, purposeless and indifferent nature. This has no source in Darwin or in modern evolutionary theory, which reject any meaning or purpose in nature.
In fact, the source of the teleology in science is the human desire to impose human notions of purpose on nature.
Now one might argue that the use of animating figures of speech is nothing more that a way of making something dead feel more vivid and compelling - and that may be the case - but I believe that the figures of speech we use reflect how we really think about things.
Tropes, with repetition, aquire a sort of pseudo-substance - a mental substantiality in the absense of reality. This is termed "reification." Reified tropes may be the origins of religious ideas.
In that way, our animation of an indifferent nature with delusions of purpose and direction permits us to extend the notion of evolution to history, society, human activity, and even to the notion of human perfectability - as if "things" were "leading" anywhere: that is closer to religion than to Darwinism.
But is it even possible to talk or think effectively without using figures of speech, without tropes (outside of math and formal logic, which may also be tropes of a different sort)? And is it possible for a human being to not reify some of their tropes, resulting in a religious-like belief or faith in them? ("My raspberries like full sun," "The earth has a fever," "Mankind and society are stumblingly evolving towards better, kinder realities," "Species seek adaptation," and so forth. Doesn't such language form a teleological foundation for a primitive religion? I say "primitive" because based on a "Ghost in the Machine" category error.)
This is long enough, but these sophomoric musings could go on and on. (Mind you, this is written mainly from the standpoint of philosophical naturalism/materialism, as if that were the ground I stand on. It's not. When I hear the Messiah - or even listen to Alicia Keys, I cannot stand on that ground. And that's my point - no-one really can for very long unless they deaden their brain.)
Many thanks to Ed Driscoll for finding this highly enjoyable talk by Tom Wolfe at Duke last year, titled "What is Southern Today?" (It's about an hour, but well worth it.) Also, thanks to Ed Driscoll for introducing us to FORA.tv.
Best quote: Young writers are told "Write what you know." OK, but what do you know?
Imagine a country where city officials could take it upon themselves to ban art exhibitions, pieces of music and other performances that might, in their view, provoke violence. Where a pub, club or gallery could be threatened with having its licence revoked, and effectively be forced to close down, if it played music or displayed art that has been blacklisted by officialdom. Imagine a country where a young woman could be put under house arrest for, amongst other things, writing poetry judged to be ‘dangerous’. Imagine a country where the strictures on what you can and cannot say are so stifling that arts institutions censor themselves, sometimes withdrawing potentially inflammatory plays or exhibitions in order to keep sweet with the powers-that-be.
Surely no one would put up with such a regime? Even in Eastern Europe in the dark days of Stalinism, individuals protested against dictators who sought to control art and curtail artistic freedom. Yet all of the things listed above are happening right now, here in Britain, and people are putting up with it.
Read the whole thing. Yes, it's more about the Fascist Left.
Our blog friend Theo is taking a sabbatical after having run into problems with Google's Blogger. As a reliable purveyor of wit, art, and military aircraft, we will miss him and hope he comes back soon. For a sample of his famous photographic art collection, we offer this Odalisque below:
We first posted this piece by Dr. Bliss on July 14, 2005. Since that time, many have written on the same topic. Sometimes it's interesting for us to see what we were thinking a couple of years ago.
We who try to be reasonable are befuddled by why the American and European Left have a reflex to defend the Jihadists, and to oppose combating them. The fact that they do so is amply demonstrated, endlessly, by the Great Horowitz, among others.
My theory is that the Left is nihilistic at heart. For whatever reasons, they have passed criticism and have come to hate their own civilization, which is admittedly imperfect but which, at the same time, cannot be matched anywhere, anytime, in history in its freedom, opportunity, safety, stability, and idealism. (Yale's famous rejection of the Bass donation was a high-water mark of this self-hating trend.)
The consequence is an anti-Western bias, but they refuse to offer an alternative, either because they do not have one, or because any offered would be rejected by voters. My belief is that our civilization is a fragile sculpture, a rare and precious thing, and that our Western Civilization is one of the most amazing things that humans have created, with, at its core, the idea that every individual human matters, as a child of God. That’s the core of it all, and it is at the core of Western medical practice and medical ethics too, since Hippocrates. We care for their injured in our hospitals, and they behead their prisoners. That is a big difference, one which relegates them to the barbarian category. “All men are created equal…”
It was not my brief on Maggie’s to get into politics, but I cannot ignore this one. What is behind the Left’s apologizing for Jihadists? Why does England welcome them? Why does the US welcome them? Why France and Germany and Sweden? Why does Canada welcome them? Why welcome your destroyers into your home?
I wrote a piece on Evil several months ago, but it had no political content. Hatred and destructiveness can derive from hundreds of sources, but most of the time social norms and rules prevent us from acting on such impulses. They are very human evils, or sins, if you will. If you live in a culture, or subculture, which endorses them, many will be pleased to follow – see Nazi Germany, the Mafia, the Weathermen, or any number of murderous, sadistic civilizations and cultures and subcultures throughout history - and relieved to be given a sanctioned outlet for such emotions. Humans are natural-born killers, after all, just like chimps, and it takes a heck of a lot of civilization to keep us on the right side of the road.
It’s clear to me from all that I have read that the Jihadists have long identified Jews and Christians as the “other” – sub-humans occupying potentially Islamic space. We do not do the same to them – on the contrary, we in the West bend over backwards to make them welcome and to accommodate their ways. Their denial of our humanity is their evil, even if it is endorsed by their culture and their religion, and their using our generosity and tolerance for their own purposes is evil as well, though they see it as justified by Mohammed. Fooling an Infidel is not a sin, and we "nice" infidels are too eager to be fooled.
So we quickly arrive at the religious core of morals and ethics, from whence they derive. The Jihadist believes that war on the West is demanded of him by God. I refuse to get morally relativistic and multicultural about that about that - leave that to the anthropologists. To me that is evil. Why does the Western Left like to ally themselves with this? One might imagine that woman-hating, fascistic, anti-human rights, primitively-capitalistic, oil and opium-dependent, hyper-religious movements would be anathema to them.
But no. They are apologists. And I do not think it is as simple as the anti-Semitism of the Left, although that does exist, I believe.
My take on it all is that the Left longs for chaos, for trouble, for failure and failure of confidence, for cultural breakdown, to undermine the fabric of our culture. Thus the Left has a reflex to be contrary to all tradition, including moral, religious and patriotic traditions - and including the tradition of self-defense. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”I suspect that they imagine that with adequate turmoil, they will prevail and create our socialist heaven on earth with them, of course, in control. However, they would create a nightmare – whether their own statist vision, or the Jihadist theocracy, where their women would be the first to be stoned to death in the stadium, and the men would be next in line. Jihad does not tolerate free-thinkers.
Thus hatred of their own civilization, and contempt for its defenders, seems to have become the hallmark of the Left. I view it as a cultural death-wish. I can understand the Jihadists – their individual evil impulses are culturally- and religiously-endorsed, promoted and rewarded, from childhood, thanks to the Saudi-supported Wahabist schools.But whence the West's cultural-suicide wish from within?
There are only two possibilities: they either believe the illusion that they might prevail following social catastrophe, or they operate in a near-insane denial of the capacity for evil and destructiveness in mankind – the wishful, childish notion that everyone is “nice underneath,” which is psychological nonsense, as reality and honest introspection reveal to us daily. I suspect mostly the former, since the Left has no trouble attributing evil to the defenders of our civilization, and virtue to themselves.
(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and to my office, there to dispatch a business in order to the getting something out of the Tangier business, wherein I have an opportunity to get myself paid upon the score of freight. I hope a good sum. At noon home to dinner, and then in the afternoon to church. So home, and by and by comes Mr. Hill and Andrews, and sung together long and with great content. Then to supper and broke up. Pretty discourse, very pleasant and ingenious, and so to my office a little, and then home (after prayers) to bed. This day I hear the Duke of Yorke is come to towne, though expected last night, as I observed, but by what hindrance stopped I can’t tell.
We follow Samuel Pepy's Diary regularly. It is delicious. He would have been a star blogger, like Tom Paine.
I am periodically reminded that relative newcomers to the blogosphere - of which there happily seem to be many at Maggie's Farm - need to be advised to right-click links that you wish to see, without losing your page. 
A teleology is a basic component of most religions. As I understand it, Darwinian evolution contains no teleology and is based on random variation which "leads" nowhere.
Heat in a saucepan, almost to boiling, a few cloves, a stick of cinnamon, a whole orange peel, and real, fresh cider.
(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and to