It seems that Seversky has fallen into an exemplary case of error in the nothing certain thread that needs to be headlined and corrected for the record:
Sev, 13: >>What I see in the writings of the likes of kf, BA and BA77 is the same craving for certainty [in context, held by murderous dictators of C20 and compared to “religious zealots” of the remoter past] – some impregnable bedrock Truth – on which their lives and beliefs can be founded. Let me say that I don’t believe for one moment that anyone here would knowingly do anyone any harm in the name of their beliefs. But the siren-song of that need for certainty is what can and has lured people to follow courses of action they they and others have later come to regret. I can’t speak for others at TSZ but I, as an a/mat v2.0, believe that a constant awareness the limitations and fallibility of all of us should entail a humility which is currently unfashionable but is our best defense against the sort of horrors which human beings have unleashed on one another in the past.>>
On right of fair comment and reply . . . after all, I head Seversky’s list . . . I first find this rather unfair, one-sided, ill-informed on the actual views of the evolutionary materialism driven or influenced Communist and neopagan Aryan Man occultist dictators of C20.
In the case of one certain Adolph Schicklegruber in Mein Kampf:
>>Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents . . . Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life [–> reifies natural selection into his neopagan god] . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings [–> a reference to evolution] would be unthinkable.
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice [–> survival of the fittest by using the power of violence to prey on the weaker, a grimly prophetic warning to Jewish and Polish “mice”] . . . .
In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. [–> That is, Darwinian sexual selection.] And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development [–> that is, its evolution].
If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best [ –> NB: this is a theme in Darwin’s discussion of the Irish, the Scots and the English in Descent of Man], if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health . . . >>
That should give food for thought, as should this blasphemous distortion of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus at Jordan, into that of a demonic bomber-bird as Hitler leads an army of the deluded:
Enough has been said to correct the rhetoric of projection. In sum, I find the rhetoric Seversky used abusively loaded and evasive of ideological responsibility, especially on the strength of my longstanding remarks here on, on the sins and blessings of Christendom (note especially Bernard Lewis’ wise balancing words), but I think there are bigger worldview level fish to fry here today.
For, Seversky has managed to make himself a poster-boy for the self-falsifying error of dismissive, hyperskeptical certitude:
KF, 36: >> . . . notice the attempt to convert an argument on logic and facts to an emotional feeling that can be dismissed as a “craving”?
That resort to dismissive motive mongering rhetoric inadvertently tells us Seversky has no answer so a bit of projection will do to dismiss.
In reply, a lesson: no emotion is better or worse than the underlying perceptions, evaluations and judgements that trigger the felt response. So, to the merits, the merits, the merits of fact and logic we must go.
And a sense of duty to seek and respect evident truth is hardly a craving for certainty that is by insinuation always, inevitably ill-founded. And, where did such cynical certainty come from? Is it well founded to be certain that there is no certainty to be had?
(Or, is that not yet another self-referential absurdity that guarantees just what it would dismiss: (1) certain truth exists on pain of absurdity on attempted denial, (2) the certainty that there is no certainty is certainly false by way of self-refutation?)
Okay, to the first steps.
Error exists, E. Try to deny it, ~E — it is an error to hold error exists, whoops.
Undeniably and self evidently true.
Truth, knowable truth to self evident certainty exists and serves as a yardstick or plumbline for worldviews which in general will be much broader than such SETs.
For instance, once SETs exist, truth and knowledge that are objective, connected to realities of the world, exist. Worldviews that cannot handle truth, knowledge and knowledge of reality beyond our inner consciousness are all swept away en bloc. Their name is legion.
But at the same time, yardstick SET no 1 is a warning, a warning on the possibility of error, so one who prizes truth and knowledge will prize the plumbline truths that will allow policing thought-life towards growth in truth and knowledge.
And as truths include moral truths, we have a basis for moral government also: evil like Hitler’s holocaust or the like is abhorrent. But evil is the frustration, perversion, undue truncation or privation of the good, and we must then reflect on the root of goodness.
Where that points via the IS-OUGHT challenge is profound and enlightening, at world root level.
Exactly where so many are desperate not to go.>>
So, ironically, the certitude that there is no certainty to be had refutes itself and shows that on pain of self-referential incoherence, certain truth exists. The first example of which, is that error exists — as the case under the microscope of logic exemplifies.
Let us trust that such hyperskeptical objectors will recognise the error in their implicit certainty that there is no certainty to be had. If not, let us ask such: are you certain that it is certain that there are no certain truths?
If they are not certain, they should at once withdraw their loaded invidious insinuations on “cravings” for certainty.
If they are certain, then they patently fall under their own condemnation and cannot live consistent with their view. It refutes itself.
As a wiser beginning, let us instead reckon that certain, self-evident truth no 1 is that error exists, a direct humbling warning as well as a hope. On the strength of which, we must ever seek and prize those few plumbline truths that allow us to be genuinely critically self-reflective.
And, given the atmosphere poisoning tactics at work, let us heed Bernard Lewis’ balanced caution in his epochal 1990 essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage:
. . . The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty — not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet . . . .
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.
Words for the wise indeed. END