Author Archives: Gary Herstein

I F*cking Told You So

07 Friday Mar 2025

Posted by in Fascism, Politics, Trump

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(Warning for the tragically delicate: “adult” content)

Yeah, so, I fucking told you so. The professional, “adult” way of saying that is something like, “events have evolved along the patterns we previously anticipated”, but I’m fucking done with being an “adult”. I told you that Trump was a fucking fascist; I told you more than once. Ironically enough (assuming I’m using the term “ironically” correctly, which assumption may itself be a bit ironic) Robert O. Paxton, the scholar upon whose work I lean most heavily for my understanding of fascism, was quite slow in acknowledging the fact that Trump is a fascist. The last straw for Paxton was Trump’s ginning up the mob on January 6th in his (previous) last ditch attempt to overthrow the government. It was the invocation of the mob that turned Paxton’s opinion, but Paxton is (I am arguing) in error on this matter. J6 was the time Jabba-the-Trump succeeded in ginning up the mob, it is scarcely the first or only time he made such an attempt or appeal. Trump was and is constantly calling for mob action, whether in the form of beating up someone he dislikes, or more general intimidation tactics. Stochastic terrorism is Jabba’s bread-and-butter. J6 stands out not because it was the first time Jabba made such a call; it stands out because it was the time the mob actually turned out en masse. And as Paxton himself astutely notes, it is not success that makes a fascist movement fascist, it is the fascism itself; the intent, not the achievement.

Realistically, Paxton’s hesitancy is quite understandable and worthy of respect. “Fascism” is one of the most promiscuously abused terms out there, second only to “communism” and “scientific.” So while I do contend that his reluctance was misplaced, I nevertheless recognize that it was misplaced for reasons on intellectual integrity. The fact that even the most cautious expert in the field has now (however reluctantly) acknowledged what I insisted was the case almost 10 years ago is enough for me to take a victory lap, declaring I was right all along (regardless of whether it was only a sadly accurate guess at the time.)

A reminder for those who don’t want to go back and read those earlier posts, fascism is:

… a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

– Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism [4267] Kindle edition.

It might be petty of me to note that this definition makes no mention of the invocation of mob action, but I am feeling petty (and bitter) so I’m going to pretend I didn’t say anything about it. What had been previously lacking in Jabba’s rhetoric was not the call for mob action, but rather the call for external expansion. That has now been radically changed with the Orange Shitgibbon’s demands to seize Canada, Panama, and Greenland.

Jabba is now assisted by the even more racist born-rich illiterate buffoon whose name I’ll not mention here. Let’s call him “Leon Cuck.” As the richest man in the world, Leon is the living demonstration that wealth is absolutely no indication of intelligence, integrity, or decency. For the last 8 or so weeks, President Leon and his neutered lapdog Donald have been destroying the framework of democracy in this country with promiscuous abandon, aided and abetted by members of the Republican party, everyone of whom has had to get reinforced kneepads sewn into their clothing for all the time they spend on them copping Dear Leader’s joint.

Leon’s shiny new disregard for any pretense of legality, the Department Of Unelected Cunts Harming Everything (“DOUCHE”) – enthusiastically manned by his pimple-popping brigade of cultish InCel blackshirts – is going well beyond any mere grab for, and exercise of, hegemonic domination. This is actually new in the history of fascist movements. In the past, fascist programs were aimed at unfettered power, without let or hindrance. But it was power over an intact social infrastructure. Yes, the fascists always aligned themselves with big money; yes, they always suppressed any manner of labor movement, unions, or worker advancement. But they didn’t set out to annihilate them either. Fascists set out to seize the government, not destroy it and all of the citizenry along with it. But that appears to be the path Leon is following.

Of course, Leon is also a fucking moron, and so he’s constantly being caught off guard by his own incompetence. Keep in mind that this individual is nothing more than a born-rich grease-stain like his new best buddy Jabba, a “man” – a term that must be used advisedly – who has never actually created or built anything of his own, but who has only ever leveraged his inherited wealth into taking over other people’s creations and then squeezing more wealth out of those things. Along with Jabba, stripped of his inherited money he is nothing more than a low-rent school yard bully. So it is unclear what he expects to accomplish by destroying the very possibility of economic production, especially since the effects of his actions will ramify around the globe.

This might be a good time to interject a fairly obvious point: Leon is a billionaire many hundreds of times over, yet it is not possible – not even in imagination, never mind reality – to earn a billion dollars. The only way a person can acquire that kind of obscene wealth is through theft, fraud, &/or extortion. (Or maybe marrying and then divorcing someone who has acquired that kind of money.)

Under ordinary circumstances – or even just slightly less outrageously extraordinary ones – we in the US could take some small comfort in the thought that the electoral massacre the Republicans would suffer in the 2026 midterms would finally put a check on Jabba’s and Leon’s rampage. But they have largely achieved the hegemonic domination fascists dream of. Even as a few courts get all pouty-faced and call them naughty boys, there is no agency capable of enforcing any judicial ruling against them. If they back down on any issue, it is purely because the choose to do so, as no one now can compel it of them. And those midterms, will there even be any?

At this point, I rather expect Jabba and Leon to continue to run roughshod over everyone and everything until they finally gin up large scale civil protests. At that point, Jabba calls out the military (the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs are both kneelers) to start shooting people. He then declares a nationwide emergency and suspends the Constitution.

I would like to be proven wrong about this, but I’m beyond holding my breath for anything.

Precept, Contract, and Relation

10 Tuesday Sep 2024

Posted by in Ethics, Objective Morality, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

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An article by Yonaton Zunger from seven years ago received some new legs on social media, enough that I was made aware of his argument.1 Zunger’s basic argument is that what seems like a moral “precept” of, say, tolerance, is in reality a social contract. This is why when individuals break that contract – for example, neo-fascists like Trump and his cultists – we are no longer under any obligation to show such people the tolerance which they categorically refuse to show to others. It is a good essay and worth reading.2 And it did what such essays are supposed to do: it got me thinking. So I am going to do my own spin on this idea, but from a Whiteheadian and Process orientation.

The basic claim in Zunger’s article is that “tolerance” is not so much a moral ideal as it is a social contract. As a moral ideal, it saddles us with the “paradox of tolerance,” where we must either be tolerant of the intolerant who will not hesitate to obliterate us, or else we must violate our moral ideal and be intolerant in response. There have been various responses to this so-called paradox, but most of them have stayed within the bounds of treating tolerance as a moral precept. Zunger’s move is that he denies the status of the idea of tolerance as a moral precept entirely, arguing instead that it is a social contract.

The idea of a social contract goes back at least as far as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), though arguably its best early formulation can be found in the work of John Locke (1632–1704); it’s most famous contemporary advocate would surely be John Rawls (1921–2002). The basic idea of the social contract is simple enough: members of a society enter into a kind of contract with one another in which they agree to certain rights and responsibilities with respect to one another. Insofar, it is really indistinguishable from a standard business contract, the idea of which most of us are at least marginally familiar with.3 The difference here is that there is no actual contract in law.4 Rather, there are patterns of behavior and expectations that can be represented as exhibiting contract-like agreements of mutuality between members of a social group. The term “mutuality” is going to come front and center in a moment, hence I highlight it now. So the social contract theorists provide a metaphor and an example of how social interaction ought best to function in the ideal, based upon this concept of a contract binding each to all.

In contrast, a moral precept is often taken to be a kind of “absolute,” although even here there is a dangerous superficiality and dogmatism in the suggestion. Arguably, such precepts should be viewed as guiding ideals, heuristics in the exercise of moral inquiry, and not as rigid and non-negotiable demands. It is this latter approach that creates the so-called paradox of tolerance, where tolerance is treated as just such a moral absolute, rendering it impotent to defend itself against the savage onslaughts of the willfully intolerant. Zunger’s argument is that tolerance is not a moral precept of any kind: rather it is a social contract, an agreement implicit in its formulation but binding in its application. Thus there is no “paradox of tolerance” for the simple reason that no paradox is involved in showing no contractual obligations to someone who has already willfully destroyed the very basis of that contract.

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Better in The Original German

23 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by in Authoritarians, Donald Trump, Fascism, Project 2025

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The title refers to a meme going around on social media comparing the Heritage Foundations (“HF” going forward) “Project 2025” (“P25” hereafter) to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The comparison is apt, as the neo-fascist intentions behind the more recent document are disturbingly obvious. The full text of this horrifying document continues to be downloadable,i but as more people become familiar with its contents it remains to be seen how eager HF will continue to be for people to learn what it actually says.

Critiquing the document from a philosophical, and specifically metaphysical, perspective is not difficult. The bald-faced essentialism dripping from every page is so thick in its presentation, and so breathtakingly infantile in its assumptions that it leaves one wondering how the authors ever even mastered their own toilette, much less earned advanced degrees at presumably respectable universities. One scarcely needs a background in process metaphysics to shred this fatuous, and tediously long (almost 900 pages) piece of pretentious twaddle. Consequently, I’ll waste none of my own time, much less any of yours, saying any more on the matter.

Rather, I want to drill down into a few specifics that will exemplify the general trends of this blueprint for the destruction of the Republic. I’ll have a few words of criticism along the way for critics with whom I might otherwise agree, but who have failed to do their due diligence. This document is too important, and too simply monstrous, to entertain ourselves with vague, histrionic arm wavings and dismissals. I believe it is important that we actually know what we are talking about, and then talk about it with care and accuracy. Let us then turn to the meat and potatoes:

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Man Up

18 Saturday May 2024

Posted by in Objective Morality, Personal History, Personhood, Politics

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This has been an on-and-off again topic of discussion for some time now, long enough that I’ve more or less assembled some thoughts of my own on the subject. Obviously toxic manhood is “bad” – I mean, “toxic,” after all – but that by itself tells us very little about what it is. One might suggest starting off with a definition, except that in any rational mode of inquiry, definitions only come at the end, not the beginning of thought. I’ve recently talked about this HERE. So no, I’m not going to offer any definitions; rather I will follow a pattern akin to Plato in the Symposium (and which Iris Murdoch brilliantly adopted in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) by trying to “spiral in toward” the topic with a few chosen examples and stories.

There is a meme currently circulating in social media asking women if they’d rather find themselves lost in the woods with a bear, or with a man who was a stranger to them. By some significant margin, the preference appears to be for the bear. Frankly, if you are not between the bear and its cubs (if it is female) then the chances are the bear will let you back away unmolested. A great many men are also (evidently) tragically butthurt by this revelation. So then the next question gets asked: how would you feel if it was your own daughter, rather than just some woman in general? How does that preference get simplified if it is between a bear and another woman who is a complete stranger? Unless one is profoundly delusional, the answers are not difficult to understand, even as they are revelatory. This is one of the legacies of toxic masculinity in our culture. (I’ve said more about this subject here: Un-Bear-Able | THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION (garyherstein.com).)

As a concrete example of a bearded boy with a mouth, we have the recent commencement address by Harrison Butker. Butker is not noted for his intellectual achievements, or his determination in overcoming a lifetime of personal hardships. Instead, he kicks footballs. Evidently, he does a very good job of this, but quite frankly it is the only thing he does, at least when his mouth is not running into sudden death overtime.i Now, I’ll admit to being old-school; I think commencement addresses should be delivered by people who don’t need assistance with the big words in a Dick & Jane story. But for reasons that transcend the possibility of rational explanation, the good Benedictines in Atchison, KS, deemed otherwise. So this young … ‘man’ … who is not notable for anything other than kicking footballs, proceeded to lecture women on how their only real fulfillment can come from being brood mares in service to a man. He also spewed about “bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane,” which is ironic especially given his apparent inability to grasp what irony is, as well as spewing about knee-jerk neo-fascist tropes like, “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media.” Of course, he considered himself obliged to yatter on about “being a man.” (No fucking wonder they prefer the bear …) (The full text of Butker’s, er, “presentation” can be found HERE.)

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Un-Bear-Able

05 Sunday May 2024

Posted by in Meme, Politics

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or
Why You Got to Hate So Hard on Men?

It has been a while since I’ve gone explicitly political, but that’s as much a matter of inspiration of the moment as design. If you’ve been following social media and the news stories generated by its trends, then there is a good chance that you can guess what my topic here will center around. For those who do not spend their days immersed in social media (and may the gods bless and smile upon you all your days!), I’ll offer a brief survey.

This question is posed to women – You are lost in the woods. You turn a corner and you confront one of either A) or B)

  1. A wild bear, or
  2. A lone man unknown to you.

Which would you prefer?

Drama bear being dramatic

A significant majority of women choose the bear. Needless to say, as unsurprising and reasonable as this answer is, it has caused an enormous number of Tragically Histrionic Butthurt Men (“THBM”) to delaminate over the “injustice” of such “rampant” and “indefensible” “man-hatred”. Yet, as I just mentioned, the response by women is BOTH unsurprising AND reasonable. Let me say a few words on why that is.

The following statements are copied and pasted directly from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) (so I’ve skipped the quotation marks):

  • One in five women in the United States experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime.
  • Nationwide, 81% of women and 43% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime.
  • One in three female victims of completed or attempted rape experienced it for the first time between the ages of 11 and 17.
  • Almost one in four undergraduate women experienced sexual assault or misconduct at 33 of the nation’s major universities.

This is only a partial list. All of these numbers are on the low side, since they are based (as they must be) exclusively on acts of harassment and assault that are reported. Per the first one, I’ve seen reports that set the number of women raped in their lifetime at 1-in-3. But for purposes of consistency, I will stick with the NSVRC statistics. Notice also the third bullet point: they experienced the rape … for the first time. Let the implications of the qualifier “first” sink in, for a moment. (Sources for the data are provided at their website, linked to above.)

Let’s be clear about something else here: these acts of harassment and assault are not being perpetrated by bears, and only under the most vanishingly rare of circumstances are they committed by womeni. These acts are committed by men.

One can add that the “strange man” in the above scenario is being encountered in a context that is largely outside the scope of social norms and constraints. But, of course, it is the behavior of so many men nominally within those constraints, that makes the thought of one encountered beyond them so disturbing. And the behaviors involved are not merely limited to those so egregious and carefully defined that one can collect statistics on them.

For example, anecdotally there are plenty of stories, none of which are hard to come by if one only listens to women. One such story that recently struck me (since it was associated the appearance of the bear meme) was a woman talking about a delivery driver whom she’d simply been decent to, smiled and said “thank you,” and now he’s creeping on her: sending inappropriate notes, acting grossly familiar, and so on. She wrote something to the effect that, from now on, she’d only accept packages delivered by bears. Incidents such as this one fall outside of the NSVRC’s collected statistics. Yet for women, it is a kind of daily, even minute-by-minute aggression and denial of their own agency that is so much a part of their basic experience that it starts to fade into the background; it is as though it is as ubiquitous as gravity.

So what, then, about bears?

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Definition (and Proof)

06 Saturday Apr 2024

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

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I was recently in a conversation on social media that – rather magically, I thought – did not instantly zig into infantile spew. It did, however, take the predicted zag into a stream of superficial (if rather more maturely presented) fatuous nonsense that gave me enough pause to suggest this post.

There is, especially among persons of an especially right-wing political leaning, an inclination to demand simple, clear, and absolute definitions with regard to all terms in general, but especially those with even a patina of political significance. Thus, with the histrionic attacks on that vanishingly small minority of persons who identify as “trans” (a group that comprises <0.5% the last time I looked it up) the demand by persons of a neo-fascist inclination (and TERF’s; politics makes for strange bedfellows) the self-righteous demand to “define” “woman.”

(Funny how they never demand a definition of “man.” But then, it is only women whose rights they wish to strip away, after all.)

Back in Aristotle’s day there was yet some hope of justifying a faith in definitions as being foundational to rationality. That said, Diogenes going about Athens with a plucked chicken (a ‘featherles biped’) mocking Plato by shouting, “Behold! A man!” might have inspired a measure of humility. But these days, any such sophomoric dependence upon definitions is patently childish, if not downright infantile. Let us call such juvenile insistence the “Dictionary Game.”

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YAAFI

21 Thursday Mar 2024

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Humor

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What does “YAAFI” mean? Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, let me say that this little editorial addition to my blog is not going to be explicitly or obviously “Whiteheadian,” although everything I write is to some considerable degree informed by those studies. That said, this will be more in the way of a personal screed mostly (if not entirely) lacking in scholarly &/or academic virtues. In other words, I intend to not only go full snark, but to occasionally employ “adult language.” Now, said “adult language” will certainly not exceed anything you’d hear with profligate abandon among a bunch of teenagers. Indeed, I consider “profligate abandon” far more adult language than the “fucks” I’m about to liberally dish out. I mean, seriously: when was the last time you saw “profligate abandon” used in a YA novel? When was the last time you saw a YA novel that didn’t have at least one “fuck”? (I don’t actually know; I read fucking adult literature.)

I needed a picture, and I thought “Storming the Bastille” was either subtle and clever, or irrelevant and funny.

Oh yeah, perhaps I should add that my tongue will, on at least an occasion or two, be squarely planted in my cheek. I will trust to the context to make those occasions obvious.

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Panpsychi… Wut?

11 Monday Dec 2023

Posted by in Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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There is a philosophical position known as “panpsychism.” While it is not an overwhelmingly popular position, it has been getting some attention of late. And as Whitehead himself is frequently characterized as a panpsychist, it seems worthwhile to cast an eye on this notion and say something about it. And of course, the first thing one should say should be an answer to Gollum’s question (“What is it, Precious?”)

The basic idea of panpsychism is that mental activity (the “psych” in “psychism”) is everywhere (the “pan” part. And by everywhere, it is meant to be at all levels of reality, large or small. Mental activity is, in this view, a fundamental element of all that is real, an ontological “primitive” (if you will) that is not constructed from other elements but rather is itself something that is always already “there.” The advantage of this notion is that it goes a long way to resolving the “mind/body” problem by basically arguing that there was never a real problem, only a problematic and erroneous characterization of the real.

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Topoi? Gud Boi!

30 Thursday Nov 2023

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Process Philosophy

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I am rereading rereading Robert Goldblatt’s book, Topoi, though in many respects it seems like I’m reading it for the first time. When there is enough time and space between myself and some volume or other, that experience of ‘(re)reading it for the first time’ is not all that uncommon. It occurred not too long ago with E.P. Thompson’s The Making of The English Working Class, and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Those works both had in the neighborhood of forty years between the first and the second readings, so I feel less guilty at the sense of surprise and pleasure. With Topoi, my excuses are somewhat more thin, though I can still assert with considerable truth and honesty that there’s been considerable intellectual development on my part since the first time I tackled the book. I mention this not just to make what amounts to little more than a peculiar Facebook post (some people share pictures of their meal, after all), but to set up a discussion of why a Whiteheadian should pay special attention to that area of abstract algebraic thinking known as Category Theory. I’ll first spend a few words talking about the book itself.

The word “topoi” is the plural form of “topos,” which seems rather more elegant than saying “toposes.” A topos is a category theoretic structure that is rich in a variety of “nice” formal characteristics, the details of which I’ll spare you (as that would require an entire book on category theory to explain.) Now, a category (such as might take on the structural features that would further specify it to be a topos) is a mathematical constructions that turns away from “objects” so-called to devote particular attention to functions, transformations, and operations without any special concern for the supposed “what” that is being transformed or operated on. As such, category theory is arguably the purest form of algebraic thinking around. It is scarcely an accident that Leo Corry’s magnificent history of the development of abstract algebra, Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures, ends with the emergence of category theory.

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A Cosmology Group

14 Tuesday Nov 2023

Posted by in Cosmology, Logic, scientific controversy

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It occurred to me the other day that more can and ought to be said about contemporary issues with gravitational (physical) cosmology, especially as this is the source of so much dubious triumphalism from so many physicists. As usual, I want to preface my comments with some explicit remarks about terminology. The word “cosmology” covers a number of topics, not all of them entirely overlapping. So in specifying gravitational cosmology, I am specifically pointing out that branch of astrophysics that deals with the large scale structures of the physical universe. There are also those areas of inquiry that can be qualified as philosophical cosmology and theological cosmology. An example of the former would be Whitehead’s work in Process and Reality (PR) dealing with what he called “cosmic epochs” as these are informed by his work in natural philosophy as found in his triptych (Enquiry into the Principled of Natural Knowledge (PNK), The Concept of Nature (CN), and The Principle of Relativity (R).) As one might well expect, theological cosmology deals with cosmological principles with a focus on god(s) and creation. (Examples here would include medieval arguments for the existence of god(s) from design, etc.)

From JWST

The philosophical and theological approaches can and often do overlap. There is less room for such overlap with gravitational cosmology, because the latter is focused upon scientific – and hence, in some respect or other – broadly constructive and falsifiable principles. Philosophical cosmology can overlap with gravitational when (as is the case with Whitehead’s work) there is a fundamental challenge to the theory of nature that is being employed on the physical side. In such a case, questions arise as to the very nature of the above two qualifiers, “constructive” and “falsifiable.” I am less inclined to see any real overlap with the theological approach, however. When that appears to occur (almost, if not simply, exclusively at the insistence of the theologians), what is really happening (I would argue) is that the theologians are folding physical ideas into their theological arguments, and offering nothing in return to the physicists.

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