Transgender? Why not Transrace?

"Transgender Equality" is becoming all the rage. Don't feel like the sex you were born? Declare otherwise, and get legal imprimatur.

Surely race is no less constructed than sex. Race, unlike sex, has rather little biological validity.

I've long felt African-American. Caucasian just isn't me, despite my assigned birth race.

I demand Transrace Equality. Where are my affirmative action perks! 

The Twenty Four Thomist Theses

No, this is not punishment for Lent. I love Thomism, and in 1914 the Catholic Church endorsed these Twenty Four Theses as the core of Thomistic philosophy and a reliable guide for genuine philosophical insight.

These Theses are seriously Thomistic-- they are profound, employ a technical vocabulary, and require quite a bit of thought and reflection and some background familiarity with the issues and concepts involved. In other words, they are excellent philosophy. They represent the core of Thomist metaphysics, and thereby the core of Western philosophy. One of the real indictments of our educational system is that most even well-educated people don't even know these exist, let alone have any familiarity with them.

I'll try to take them one by one over a series of posts. My interpretations are of a very amateur sort, but I hope they convey some of the truth expressed in each and serve to inspire deeper reading and contemplation.

Thesis 1:

Potency and Act so divide being that whatsoever exists either is a Pure Act, or is necessarily composed of Potency and Act, as to its primordial and intrinsic principles.

The distinction between potency and act is the core of Thomist metaphysics. Act means actuality-- the aspect of something that exists that is perfect, in the sense that it is what makes it what is truly is. Potency is possibility-- potency does not exist, but it potentially exists. Being-- all that exists-- is wholly described by either act alone or potency mixed with act. 

An example of a combination of potency and act in a substance is an acorn. The act of an acorn is what it actually is: a little hard roughly round seed made of organic matter, with a shell, of a brownish-greenish color, etc. The potency of an acorn is an oak tree and all of the intermediate stages of growth of the acorn. The acorn itself is not an oak tree, but it has the potency (the potential) to become one. Potency is, in this sense, in between existence (act) and non-existence (non-being). 

Aristotle's brilliant doctrine of potency and act-- adopted by St. Thomas-- solves the ancient riddle of change in nature-- the debate as to whether change exists (Heraclitus) or is an illusion (Parmenides). Aristotle's answer is that there are three ways of delimiting existence-- actuality, potency, and non-existence. Change is the elevation of potency to act. 

In an acorn, the acorn per se is act. The oak tree is potency. And a Corvette is non-existence. An acorn is an acorn, it can be an oak tree, and it can't be a Corvette. 

Everything that exists-- God, angels, man, animals, inanimate things-- must be either Pure Act-- actual perfection without admixture of potency (possibility), or a mixture of potency and act, which is something capable of perfection, but actually in admixture of imperfection (potency) and perfection (act). The term "perfection" in Thomist metaphysics does not mean quite what the modern term perfect means. It means (in Thomism) that a substance has all of the attributes it can have, with no possibilities left unrealized. 

Only God is perfect Act. All created substances are admixtures of act and potency. 

It is a mistake to see the Thomist delineation of potency and act as metaphysical speculation unconnected to reality. Werner Heisenberg, who unlike most modern scientists actually knew something about metaphysics, famously observed that the quantum mechanical collapse of the waveform is an obvious example of reduction of potency to act. 

Centuries before modern physics, metaphysicians like Aristotle and St. Thomas laid the groundwork for an understanding of nature at its foundation. 

What happens when ethics are based on "reason"?

A superb essay on the holocaust of atheist ethics. 

Schools reject "abstinence-only" approach to school shootings

"Teaching shooting abstinence doesn't work".
Planned Fratricide map showing the failure of an "abstinence only" approach to school shootings

(Dissociated Press) In a nationwide trend, schools are rejecting the "abstinence-only" approach to preventing school shootings. Many schools across the country are instituting Safe School Shooting programs to educate teens on safer school shooting practices.

"The evidence clearly shows that the 'abstinence-only" approach to school shootings, like the "abstinence-only" approach to sex education, has failed" said Sam Columbine, public relations director of Planned Fratricide, the organization devoted to promoting the safe shooting lifestyle. "We must recognize that our kids are going to shoot each other, whether we want them to or not. Adolescents are driven by hormones, and there's not much we can do to stop them. We need to be realistic, and not tied to outdated religious dogma."

Columbine raised an eyebrow. "Religious instruction is a violation of the Establishment Clause. You can't enforce chastity-- The Seventh Commandment-- in our schools. You can't enforce the The Sixth Commandment-- thou shalt not kill-- in our schools, either."

Planned Fratricide has introduced several instructional modules in school districts across the country, including a short text titled "Shoot for the Legs" that provides safety tips for safer mass shootings, and a video titled "Why Reload?", which educators have praised for advocating moderation and responsible shooting practices. In Planned Fratricide classes, students practice putting ten-round magazines on AR15's, instead of the lethal thirty-round assault weapon magazines.

"Shooting classmates is a natural expression of adolescent non-conformity" said Columbine, showing a glint of exasperation. "You can't stop kids from doing what comes naturally. The best we can do is to train them to shoot each other more safely."

"Abstinence-only" programs always fail, Columbine noted. "Human beings are animals, really, and the best we can do is herd them into safer behaviors. We can't expect true shooting chastity. Safe school shooting, not abstinence, should be our goal."

Planned Fratricide has distributed posters promoting Safe School Shooting for display in schools, including "Do You Really Need Hollow Points?" and "You Shot Them Once. Why Shoot Them Again?"

Imagine... a world without organized atheism

I love Vox Day:

Vox:

What the godless fans of John Lennon always seem to forget is that there is a well-known place where there are no countries, no religion, and nothing to kill or die for. It is a very peaceful place, at least when seen from this perspective. It is called "the grave". And it is no accident that so many people end up there every time a utopian - who is often an atheist, but doesn't have to be - puts himself in a position of power where he can attempt to build a New Man, a New Society, or a New World Order.

It's not atheism that causes this lethal utopianism. But the observable fact of the matter is that atheists are particularly susceptible to it.

That correlation is one reason I take no prisoners in discourse with atheists. I don't care what they tell me they are. I can see what they've done.

Why is atheism so murderous? Vox' assertion that "it's not atheism that causes this lethal utopianism" is very important, and this observation, rather than letting atheism off the hook, is the philosopher's stone in explaining atheism's invariable lethality.

Why is atheism so murderous? The same reason AIDS is more deadly than typhus.

Atheism weakens that ability of a culture to protect itself from evil, like a virus that destroys the immune system, and it lets all kinds of evil flourish.

Atheism is a disease that kills your civilization by leaving it defenseless against all manner of evil. 

Barry Goldwater and the Brown decision

Kevin Williamson at National Review has a fine essay on the important role that Barry Goldwater played in desegregation in Arizona and in the United States.

First, Williamson reminds us of the Brown decision in 1954:

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is one of the great landmarks of American history. It is also a good example of the fact that the law is not about the law. Maybe one in 500 college students ever has read the decision, and probably very few Americans could tell you much about the legal questions involved in Brown, but the moral question at the heart of the case — whether an apartheid regime of “separate but [formally] equal” would be allowed to stand in these United States — is well understood. It was well understood by the Court at the time, too: Remarkably, that contentious issue was settled in a unanimous decision. Even Hugo Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan named to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, was on board — but, in all fairness, Justice Black had not joined the Klan because he hated blacks: He had joined the Klan because he hated Catholics.

Black of course was the father of modern "separation of church and state" jurisprudence,  in which he employed the phrase he used in the KKK initiation oath when he was Kladd of the Klavern-- the initiator of new Klansman-- in Alabama.

"Separation of church and state" was the dog-whistle for anti-Catholic bigots. Still is.

Williamson recounts Goldwater's pioneering efforts in Phoenix to help blacks and advance integration.

He concludes:

Barry Goldwater was not the most important opponent of racial segregation in Arizona, nor was he the most important champion of desegregating the public schools. What he was was on the right side: He put his money, his political clout, his business connections, and his reputation at the service of a cause that was right and just. While he was doing all that, his eventual nemesis, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a low-rent practitioner of the most crass sort of racist politics, was gutting anti-lynching laws and assuring Democrats that he would offer those “uppity Negroes” “just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” 

For more than a century, the Republican party had been the party of civil rights, of abolition, of emancipation, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the NAACP did not represent a break from that tradition, but a continuation of it. 

It was a masterpiece of politics that allowed the Democrats to convince the electorate that they were the party of civil rights, that they had not until the day before yesterday been the party of lynching — even as that very same cabal of segregationist Democrats that had tried to block or gut every single significant piece of civil-rights legislation for decades, still led by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, remained comfortably entrenched in the Senate. To hear the story told today, you would almost think that it was the Republican Barry Goldwater, not the Democrat George Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door shouting “Segregation forever!” Goldwater believed that Title II and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were unconstitutional. How many Americans even know what is in those sections? About as many as understand the legal arguments surrounding Brown. 

The problem for Republicans is that reclaiming their reputation as the party of civil rights requires a party leadership that wants to do so, because it cherishes that tradition and the values that it represents. It is not obvious that the Republican party has such leaders at the moment. The Party of Lincoln seems perfectly happy to be little more than the Party of the Chamber of Commerce. We should not turn our noses up at commerce — though Napoleon meant it as an insult, it was Britain’s glory to be “a nation of shopkeepers” — but it was not commerce alone that freed the slaves or built the nation.

Please read the whole thing.

Republicans need to remind Americans that they, not the Democrats, are the party of racial equality and colorblind law. Democrats have a two hundred year history of race-baiting-- of using race to advance their politics.

We need policies that help minorities and all Americans-- policies that strengthen the family, make the streets safe, revive the economy-- and these policies need to be colorblind. There is much that needs doing, and we need to reject race-baiting and the policies of the Democrat party that destroy minority families, make minority streets into combat zones, and kill tens of millions of minority children in abortion clinics. 

Mary's "Yes"

    The Feast of the Annunciation.

                                    

Gabriel to Mary:

When Eve, in love with her own will
denied the will of Love and fell
she turned the flesh Love knew so well
to knowledge of her love until
both love and knowledge were of sin:
What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal today;
Love's will requires your own, that in
the flesh whose love you do not know
Loves knowledge into flesh may grow.

                                         W.H. Auden