Baxter Bentley

Gentleman traveler and elder statesman of GenX philosophers; I know the answers but make the same mistakes as Russell and Ayer. Mostly: husband and father of 5.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

You know, you never really get over the feeling that there are more KFCs in Europe than you expected.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@jojimbo_ TIL who Godfrey of Bouillon was. Thanks!

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@wil_da_beast630 My question has three parts:

Lead question: Is there one person who is the most annoying ever, and why is it Liz Warren?

1st follow-up: If Jesus and Superman got into a fight, who would win?

2nd follow-up: 1967 Ford Mustang or 1966 Dodge Charger?

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@geraldposner Mr. Vance is a committed peacemaker, but has an exquisite art of making his peace more uncomfortable and unacceptable than war itself.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@TedJoy71 🎯

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

Here's Steven Pinker trying to sound smart and failing (again).

[Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 @JasonJournoDC]

🔥Steve Moore *FIRES BACK* after Steven Pinker accuses @elonmusk of likely "COST[ING] 20 MILLION LIVES" through USAID cuts🔥

"That's the most CORRUPT foreign agency EVER! Show me anywhere where USAID has had a positive effect … It just DOESN’T!”

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@AltCulture Marginalizing caring as "fanaticism" also fails aesthetically: Earnestness is both the riskiest and the most underrated aesthetic value.

Detachment and sarcasm tempt with low-stakes promises of approval without risk, while dismissing the high-stakes game as a "rookie mistake."

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@pegobry_en Dulles is cursed because of its name: There is no possible world in which it is a good idea to name an airport after John Foster Dulles.

But worst by a mile? That prize goes to LAX.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@EveKeneinan @sojourner_James Hobbes argued that if any right is considered inalienable, then all rights would be treated as inalienable, because anything at all can be reduced to a survival claim. Locke didn't listen.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@wil_da_beast630 Nate Bargatze had some pretty good rules for reigning in female therapists: Make their husbands attend. They can't speak, but they can make facial expressions.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@gaptoothdummy The only conspiracy theory I believe is that the Constitution intends to preserve inalienable rights. All the "experts" keep telling me that this has been debunked, but I don't buy it.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@wil_da_beast630 That is a reasonable (if modest) estimation.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@geraldposner @trishaposner The conspiratorial mind: Running the world means permitting campus protests and libelous UN General Assembly Resolutions as part of a larger strategy to distract us from noticing how they really put the screws on Algerian soccer players.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@pegobry_en

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@EveKeneinan Too many progressive academics have this idea that fundamental disagreement with their worldview causes them trauma. This is why so many of them are comfortable censoring truth when they view its consequences as undesirable. It is pretty damned nutty.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

It makes a lot more sense when you consider the philosophies of America's first-rate philosophers. For example, Quine and James explain the gap you identify as much as they illustrate it. They are grounded, flexible, and consequentialist, which deliberately undercuts the preconditions for first-rank, continental-style systematic metaphysics.

Whether this is a feature or a bug depends on how you prioritize practical impact vs. monumental theoretical architecture.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@colonialbot3 One has to wonder what it would take for the American side to walk out of the talks in protest.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

Federico Fellini on America: "The cigarettes were a revelation. We'd never smoked cigarettes like that. If we'd smoked those wonderful American cigarettes, in those wonderful packages, before the war, everyone would have known that no one could defeat America." (from I, Fellini)

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

🤣 JD VANCE DROPPING TRUTH BOMBS WITH BUC-EE’S 

“I know we’ve been talking diplomacy… but the Iranians initially refused to sign the MOU, then they got flooded with videos of Europeans at Buc-ee’s… and realized they could never stand against a nation with so many Buc-ee’s!”

— JD Vance 🔥

This is peak America. Foreign fans coming for the World Cup, getting hit with Buc-ee’s, J.J. Watt tours, and straight-up falling in love with this country.

Freddy the viral soccer fan? Vance said he’d love to meet him and any of these visitors soaking up real American greatness.

We’re not just winning on the field, we’re winning hearts and minds one brisket sandwich and Beaver Nugget at a time.

God bless Texas. God bless the USA.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

MacIntyre's argument would be strong if he could point to a single curriculum that didn't underdetermine the cultural tradition. In fact, no reasonably thorough curriculum could accomplish this. And if there were, it would come close enough to brainwashing that we wouldn't want it anyway.

The idea of a Great Books curriculum is to promote pluralism within a shared civilizational conversation rather than enforced ideological unity. Thus, it purposefully does not resolve the tension between "Homeric versus Platonic, Judaic versus Christian, biblical versus classical, Aristotelian versus Augustinian, the Enlightenment versus the Christian" because that is the point. And this is exactly the tradition that we have inherited. Moreover, it is vastly superior to the increasingly dominant oppressor-versus-oppressed narratives. Some will side with Homer over Plato, Judaic over Christian, etc. And vice versa. But when you accept the framework of oppressor vs. oppressed, who sides with the oppressor?

MacIntyre believes that this kind of pluralism collapses into relativism, but this is a groundless fear. He makes it sound as if the students will drown in an ocean of conflicting claims, and cynically conclude that all the options are equal. In fact, it will teach them to understand positions they disagree with and help them grasp the trade-offs made by different thinkers, allowing them to see their own conclusions as the result of similar trade-offs.

MacIntyre's career-long appeal to self-rooting in your community's tradition does not solve the problem because it falls prey to the homunculus fallacy: the definition of your community's tradition is no more determinate or free of potentially conflicting, mutually exclusive options than the interpretive frameworks available for reading texts. Without this, MacIntyre's plea reduces to a request for a metanarrative that explains why these books are important, and it is hard to disagree with this plea; we should not take the value of such a metanarrative for granted. But this is hardly an argument against a Great Books curriculum. Nor does the omission of such a metanarrative justify his claim that the Great Books curriculum fails to be a concrete proposal.

MacIntyre always dodges the issue of the indeterminacy of traditions. He invokes the self-rooted community tradition as a panacea against relativism. Yet he readily admits the conflicts within any tradition because it is obviously silly to view them as monolithic and unchanging. But when asked how these conflicts do not also reduce to relativism, he talks around the issue by appealing to embedded assumptions that need to be made explicit. He eventually came to describe a dialectical approach in which a tradition can resolve unresolvable conflicts by borrowing from other traditions, as though what is borrowed from which tradition doesn't also fall prey to the same problems. Indeed, throughout his career, he never really improved his approach to answering these questions.

Furthermore, the idea that "until the problems of how they are to be read have received an answer, such lists do not rise to the status of a concrete proposal" is hogwash. First of all, there is not a single significant work, no matter how short or focused, for which there is only one valid interpretive framework. Second, imagine telling Galileo that we didn't trust his telescope because our theory of optics wasn't settled.

If you accept the fundamental value of the texts on their own terms, and teach why they are fundamentally valuable, then which interpretive framework you use for them is an auxiliary technical problem. Macintyre is wrong to treat such frameworks as decisive.

[Baxter Bentley @BentleyBaxter]

@HorrorsGreeley @TedJoy71 ROTFLMOA! Cousin Oliver's SDVI is so high it makes you feel bad for the sharks.

Sharks after eating Cousin Oliver: "That was fucking disgusting!"