No Hands Clapping

On today’s Ruminant, Jonah discusses everything from obscure existentialist philosophy to the realism of zombie ...

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On today’s Ruminant, Jonah discusses everything from obscure existentialist philosophy to the realism of zombie TV. Rank punditry is first on the docket, as Jonah examines Biden’s poor handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and Republican efforts to whitewash the events of January 6. Afterward, Jonah defends his recent comments about Tucker Carlson and explores the world’s progress on vaccinations. Is Western civilization buckling under the weight of liberal guilt? Should America be the world’s policeman? And will Ramesh Ponnuru ever persuade Jonah to change his mind about the death penalty?

Show Notes:

– Biden brings the Afghanistan withdrawal date forward

– The New York Times’ devastating January 6 video 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Count me as someone also tired of hearing about CRT. I was tired of critical theory back in college. There’s not a lot of new ground to tread here so I would be fine if Jonah stopped talking about it. Tucker too - I’ve never cared much about what he’s doing or saying, but I get why Jonah’s talking about this latest thing.

    On another note, I sure hope Guy is getting a visa or something for all the trouble he’s gotten. Dispatch subscribers would gladly welcome a new citizen.

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  2. Dave Tenn

    The Tuskegee Airmen and the "Tuskegee study" are two different things. I think this is the second time that I've heard you mention the Tuskegee Airmen when the context suggested that you meant the Tuskegee study.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      That’s what I thought. When Jonah said that, I wondered if maybe I didn’t know something about the airmen and they were in the study. Thanks for clarifying.

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    Joel Stewart

    Watched the video at your recommendation. What a way to start a Monday

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  4. Richard Fulmer

    I think that Conservatives should embrace Jonah’s “CRT divided by 10.” Yes, there is discrimination built into some of our laws, policies, and regulations and many of those are on the books thanks to Progressives. Minimum wage laws and the Davis Bacon Act are still on the books, and both were initially supported, at least in part, because they helped to lock Blacks out of the job market. Ditto labor unions.

    Many of FDR’s New Deal programs such as the National Recovery Act (dubbed, in the African American press, the “Negro Removal Act”), the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act had adverse effects on Black Americans. LBJ’s Great Society initiatives have also had a disparate and destructive impact on Black families (though its malign influences haven’t been confined to Blacks) by penalizing marriage and subsidizing out-of-wedlock childbirth.

    More recently, Progressive efforts to water down education – for example, by automatically promoting students whether they’ve learned the material or not – have further disadvantaged minorities who can’t escape failing schools.

    Perennial Progressive favorites such as rent control, onerous business start-up regulations, and job licensing laws hurt all Americans but disproportionately harm minorities.

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  5. Jonathan Barker

    As a philosophy professor and longtime Remnant listener, I was thrilled to hear about Jonah's new interest in dialethiesm!

    As Jonah says, dialetheists reject Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction, according to which no proposition is both true and false. In other words, they believe that some contradictions are true. Jonah correctly cites logical paradoxes like "the liar" as the main motivation for dialetheism. And he's definitely onto something when he says that this paradox alone isn't enough to prove that there are contradictions in *reality itself.* Even if the dialetheist is right that "this sentence is false" is both true and false, that may just be a quirky feature of self-referential language and thought. But some dialetheists make the further claim that reality itself is sometimes contradictory. They argue that there are other paradoxes the linguistic explanation can't account for.

    For example, consider the process of fertilization. At the end of the process, when fertilization has clearly occurred, there is a new embryonic human life. At the beginning of the process, when fertilization has clearly not occurred, that life does not exist. So, at some point in between, the sentence "there is a human life" will seem simultaneously both true and false.

    According to the dialetheist, that sentence seems both true and false because it *is* both true and false-- like the liar sentence, it is a true contradiction. Yet, unlike the liar sentence, the sentence "there is a human life" isn't self-referential. Nor can we pin the contradiction on any of the sentence's other semantic features. So maybe this sentence is contradictory because the reality it represents is contradictory. That is, maybe the new human life *itself* both exists and does not exist! Or, at any rate, that's what some dialetheists are inclined to say about paradoxes like this one.

    For what it's worth, there are lots of other ways to account for these paradoxes, many of which aim to preserve the Law of Non-Contradiction and other laws of classical logic. If you're interested in this stuff, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great place to start! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/#OtheMotiForDial

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  6. Avatar photo
    Michael Darwin

    I greatly enjoy post-apocalypse tales and zombie tales in particular, and I agree with your recommendation of Black Summer. For my money its the best zombie story since Max Brooks' World War Z (the book, not the film - two very different beasts). While I agree there is a streak of nihilism in it, I'd argue it also serves up very basic morality lesson. Almost everyone in the story (or at least those in it more than 5 minutes) shows shades of good and bad, and given the dire circumstances, we can at least understand if not excuse the moral transgressions. It is telling that the one character who gets an unambiguously happy ending (as of the end of season 2; let's see if there's a third) is also the one character who consistently chooses the moral path. For what it is worth, the director of Black Summer, John Hyams, sat in on my podcast (the flagship Dark Discussions podcast for the Dark Discussions News Network #shamelessplug) for an hour long interview. If anyone is a fan, I suggest keeping an eye out for it. Mr. Hyams is a great interview and put a lot of thought into this show. He gets into the show's structure, its morality, its future, and how he gets such gripping set pieces.

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  7. linda

    The biggest reason the school curriculum has come under fire is distance learning. Parents, who were working from home got to hear first hand what their kids and grandkids were learning at school.
    In case you didn't know there are no school books anymore for the parents to see. There are only handouts and in the case of distance learning online assignment usually provided by some non profit with an agenda.

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  8. Avatar photo
    Eric "Otter" Stratton

    #SponsorGuy’sVisa2021

    Also Taiwan is a country.

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  9. anonvet

    I think the question about what the difference between what a proper white ally (positive) is and what a white savior (negative) is is...a perfectly valid question. The problem is that we tend not to ask that question and, if we do, we don't wait for an answer. We do what you describe, which is to immediately freak out and say WAIT ARE YOU SAYING EVERYTHING IVE DONE IN GOOD FAITH IS FOR NOTHING?!?!?!?

    Or we ask it cynically and rhetorically, as if there isn't an answer to begin with.

    Maybe we should ask it a) calmly and b) not hysterically. Have someone on to talk about it. It's part of what I love about TD, ie-the calm discussion of things the rest of the internet hyperactively emotes about.

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  10. Dennis A Garcia

    Could Jonah give some recommendations--maybe a top ten list--of "noodle salad sweatless sweater lake people" movies? Because that sounds like an amazing subgenre with which I am not familiar.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Old guy named Bill (OGNB)

      Perhaps there will be a Hallmark movie where a zombie disillusioned by city life returns to her home town and reconnects with her old high school boyfriend who's now a vampire. Hijinks ensue.

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