[First, admin matters. I did contact Friend George. You need to understand that he is doing a private email list, which is why I give him that pseudonym. He simply sends out an email with an attached pdf. That pdf contains articles that interest him, with his comments. Many of those articles are machine translations from Russian, others are from Western sources. George’s response to my query was that he wants to continue, for now, with his private email list.]
It’s a holiday weekend, but I want to push a few things out. Let’s start with a tweet by Dr. Peter McCullough that addresses the massive number of persons who have been seriously harmed by subjecting themselves to repeated experimental injections:
That leads directly into an article at American Greatness:
The same medical establishment that denied the existence of effective treatments for COVID in their push for vaccines, now works against those injured by them. But there is hope.
It seems Fox personality John Roberts asked on Twitter:
I have no idea what he was thinking—maybe he just wanted to boost his Twitter stats. However, as Debra Heine puts it, “Over 4,600 replies later” we get the picture:
… many of his Twitter followers have indeed suffered chest pain, along with many other adverse events after getting injected with the mRNA or Adenoviral Vector DNA genetic products.
I won’t go into the stories. It’s all anecdotal stuff—which means the stuff that leads to science. Observation, data gathering. It’s interesting, as in human interest. One tragic story after another.
Ed Dowd responded:
The title suggests that there is, nevertheless, hope for at least some of these unfortunates. Interestingly, among the doctors who are on board with the effort to treat those whose health has been damaged is Pierre Kory. Kory, a prominet exponent of treating Covid rather than attempting preemptive experimental injections pushed onto the entire population. He used to be a committed liberal, but recently he—Elon Musk-like--announced that he would be voting Republican because he’s so disgusted with liberal truth suppression. His close collaborator, Paul Marik, pushes out the hopium:
Hopefully, he’s right.
Also this morning and also at American Greatness, Roger Kimball has a lengthy attack on philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre:
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Essential Liberalism
In recoiling from the fragmentation of values that characterizes modernity, MacIntyre has presented less an alternative to the depredations of liberal individualism than an escape from its challenges.
Kimball starts out doing a bit of justice to MacIntyre, then goes on at length to determinedly refuse to understand what MacIntyre is saying. Kimball thinks liberalism has been a rip roaring success, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Admittedly, the business of coming up with working living arrangements for mass societies—a replacement for liberal democracy—is problematic at best. That doesn’t detract from what MacIntyre has to say, but since this is a holiday weekend I’ll simply excerpt the first part—those who wish can follow the link for the rest. I’ll simply add that I’m somewhat bemused to see so many commenters who are still on board with the concept of enforcing America’s “rules-based order” anywhere our ships and/or planes can penetrate. This attitude seems to me to ignore the momentousness of what’s happened to the American Republic—massively woke military, LE, courts, education, etc. My own view is we should be tending to business at home rather than pushing more and more money at our oppressors and potential oppressors.
Here’s Kimball doing justice:
A few weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the hive mentality that stands behind the administrative state. In the course of that column, I quoted Glenn Ellmers on the shaky foundations of public morality. “What is left of public morality,” he wrote, is now understood in terms of ‘values,’ or subjective preferences based only on individual will. Even in the small handful of healthy institutions in civil society, the political and civil rights of the ordinary citizen rest upon a precarious foundation, threatened and undermined by the powerful claims of social progress.” What chance do an individual’s “subjective preferences,” his “values,” have against the tide of “social progress”? Not much.
This was something the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb analyzed with dispatch in her book The De-moralization of Society, which traces the path from “Victorian virtues to modern values.” Writing in the 1990s, Himmelfarb noted that “it was not until the present century that morality became so thoroughly relativized and subjectified that virtues ceased to be ‘virtues’ and became ‘values.’” That transformation is now so far advanced that can be difficult for us values-saturated moderns to distinguish the two ideas. But Himmelfarb is right. The evolution, or devolution, from virtues to values marked “the great philosophical revolution of modernity.” Among other things, it gave currency to the assumption that “all moral ideas are subjective and relative, that they are mere customs and conventions.” The idea of virtue, on the contrary, “had a firm, resolute character.” Virtues are objective in a way values are not.
“Values, as we now understand that word, do not have to be virtues; they can be beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, conventions, preferences, prejudices, even idiosyncrasies —whatever any individual, group, or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason.”
The difference between virtues and values is adumbrated by everyday language. “One cannot.” Himmelfarb points out, “say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone’s virtues are as good as anyone else’s, or that everyone has a right to his own virtues.”
I was reminded of Himmelfarb’s important distinction when reading Stephen Soukup’s reflections on the Uvalde shootings in which he cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion, in his book After Virtue, of the replacement of virtue by what Soukup calls “a state of emotive expression, a condition in which feelings and sensations are elevated above objective reality and traditional conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, etc.” Soukup broadens MacIntyre’s analysis, showing how it helps explain the structure and impetus of the administrative state. “Broadly,” he writes,
“MacIntyre’s critique is that bureaucracy/management is emotive in practice. Because management is concerned EXCLUSIVELY with process, with means and NOT with ends, it is, almost by definition, an amoral scheme. Management is purportedly rational, but rationality can only apply to means, and therefore the ends become the purview of the manager/administrator who substitutes his own personal preferences for genuine moral positions.”
In another column, Soukup glosses MacIntyre’s argument, arguing that “One of the greatest tragedies of the Enlightenment was the abandonment of virtue ethics.”
“Prior to the Enlightenment, the entire history of Western Civilization—from (at least) the ancient Greeks right up to the American Founding Fathers—virtue ethics dominated moral philosophy and the expectations of moral people.
“In brief, virtue ethics posits that the most effective and functional means by which to create a civil society, foster good citizenship, and encourage the pursuit of a ‘good life,’ is the identification, propagation, and encouraged PRACTICE of virtues deemed universally important and universally affirmative.”
That “short excerpt” should also give you an idea of how long the article is! I’ll add this: The Founding Fathers didn’t talk about a constitution for a “values oriented” people. They spoke of virtue, because that’s the world they still lived in. Does this suggest why our constitutional order seems to have irretrievably broken down? Regaining an understanding of reality based on intelligent insight rather than emotion, preference, WILL, is not the work of a single generation, just as its devolution has not been the work of a single generation.
I’ll finish with two links. The first is to Robert Malone’s latest substack:
The unresolved conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton enables WEF hegemony.
Malone sketches out the financial/banking arrangements that connect the American Founding to the Modern world. Or maybe Post Modern.
Tom Luongo’s latest podcast is a fascinating conversation with James Howard Kunstler. It’s a bit over an hour, but you won’t come away thinking you’ve wasted your time. The description “we try to piece together just how cartoonishly evil these Davos types are” doesn’t do justice to the wide ranging discussion.
Podcast Episode #108 – James Howard Kunstler and That Thing We Do
Catching Up: Covid, Liberalism
Best column you've written. We're drowning in 'values.'
Karma - Ca’s gov just came down with Covid, just after getting his second booster. Supposedly had bad side effects after his first booster.
And ca is passing legislation to make medical Covid by Doctors misinformation a bad thing…
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-california-state-legislature-wants-you-to-trust-the-government-not-the-experts