Sur la Scène Passante

Things I've seen. Maybe that you people wouldn't believe? I don't know.

• Apparently a Marine general, James Mattis, in Iraq, would say to the local leadership of whatever area his guys were deployed, "I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."
  
  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the single finest piece of discourse our species has ever produced. I didn't even excise the F-word: it's fundamental to the work, like the nudity in a Neoclassical painting. That is the summary of all rational defense policy, probably of all foreign policy period.


• I occasionally refer to my attitude toward the fallacy-spewers who pass for our thinkers nowadays as contempt, but that's probably not the word. I found a more appropriate word in a Belloc book: disdain. I hold such idiots in disdain, not contempt, for their ideas a six-year-old could see through and the fact they know no more of basic facts than do the beasts that perish.


• Tycho Brahe has occasionally inveighed against the mentioning of violent video games in connection with various crimes, and it's hard not to agree with him. Personally, though, I want the culture at large to see video games as a normal facet of behavior, so if a crime really does have a connection to games, we can talk about it.
  
  In my ideal world, you'd turn on the news and the murderer's former roommate would be saying, "Yeah, I knew that guy was messed up, 'cause he preferred harvesting the Little Sisters, in Bioshock, and he liked the Brutes better than the Elites."


• How come people think it's a rational position to believe that war is inherently evil? 'Cause, see, eventually, everyone has to acknowledge that war is sometimes unavoidable. People who believe war is inherently evil—like, just off the top of my head, Marxists, Neo-Confucians, and various kinds of Anglophone Jingo—do far worse things when they're at war, because they believe the war itself is already evil.
  
  Not only does such a belief open one to rationalizations like "I'm already committing the evil of war, I might as well loot, rape, and massacre, too", but it also leads to the far worse idea, "Any evil we commit, if it shortens the war, is actually good." Read some quotes by William Tecumseh Sherman if you don't believe me.


• Another example of "it's fine because it made the war shorter" consequentialism would be the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The issue is more complex than it's generally considered, since Japanese wartime manufacturing was largely a cottage industry (therefore it's very hard to distinguish "civilian" and "military" targets), but "it saved lots of lives on both sides" is not a legitimate argument. Cowing Chinese resistance by the atrocities at Nanking might've saved a lot of lives (and that verbal mood is called "irrealis" for a reason); that doesn't make it right.
  
  Personally, what I would've done with the nukes, is say, "On (whatever day, time), be observing (some uninhabited location where Japan could put military observers)." Then I'd nuke that, and say, "Surrender or your asses are next."


• Know what's funny? When modern "pagans" say "If it harm none, do as thou wilt", they are actually paraphrasing a Christian poet, Rabelais. The Rule of the "Monastery" of Thelema is "'Do as thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law, but keep ye to honor." In plain English, "Do whatever you want, since we're presuming you were raised right."
  
  Which is fine for a monastery—made up of and freely entered by adults. Not so great as a basis for a society, and "metastable helium in the birthday balloons" level stupid in child-rearing. But Rabelais wasn't trying to set up a new religion anyway; he died at least as firmly in the Faith as Pascal did.
  
  Funny varmints, humans, that Rabelais and the borderline-Puritan Pascal are both not only the same religion, they're from the same country.


• It makes sense for materialists to be individualist, of course—and as I mentioned, Marxist "dialectical materialism" actually isn't, it's actually naturalist Platonism. Anyway individualism is a form of philosophical atomism—it denies the reality of groups, and asserts that only the unit (one person) is real. Just because its atom is a bit larger doesn't actually make it any different from Lucretius.
  
  So, then, why do so many modern thinkers who rightly sneer at materialism, assert the doctrine of the atomized individual? As far as I can tell it's just from force of habit, coming from Protestant cultures.
  
  Sigh. I'm going to go over here and pretend anyone else is intellectually consistent.


• Oh wait, Buddhism exists! So there's at least a few other intellectually consistent people. Buddha's doctrine of anatman, roughly similar to the Panta Rhei of Heraclitus, denies the reality of what we'd call Formal Parts, the permanent identity of things. It arises from the doctrine of metempsychosis. The Mahayana doctrine of advaita, Non-Duality, arose as a way out of the infinite regress all denial of Forms causes, by asserting that only the Dharmakaya, the Monad of the Platonists (and therefore also the Christian God), is real.


• Did you know that that idea, a denial of permanent identity arising from the doctrine of metempsychosis, is shared by most of North India's thought? And did you know that it's why I became a Thomist?
  
  It's true. I was arguing with, I kid you not, a Hare Krishna, on the campus of Northern Arizona University. He was saying that you're not only reincarnated after you die, but continually inhabit different bodies, since your particles are always being traded out for new ones, in a little thing called "metabolism". I wished to assert that nevertheless there is a continuity of identity, and remembered Aquinas' definition of Transubstantiation. And the rest, as they say, is history.