The Thin Blue Line

All that sentimentalism about the boys in blue, how much "blue lives matter.," how there is only a thin line between chaos and civilization, and it is a blue line...what does all the mawkishness come to?

It amounts to this: at some point a madman with a gun may be coming for someone you love, and a police officer may be the only one who can stop the bad guy in time. If so, he will of course DO SO, even at the expense of his own life.

In preparation for that day, we should show him not just respect, but admiration.

Wasn't the Uvalde shooting on May 24 a stunning refutation of such nonsense? For the parents of students at Uvalde, THAT MOMENT CAME. And the lads in blue were nowhere around.

The lies and walkings-back are intriguing here. The first story was the rather incoherent one that the school resources officer had confronted the madman outside the school building. But, the story continued, the madman somehow got past him. Without having to kill him.

People immediately wondered: how? If the school resource officer was in a position to keep a well-armed and Kevlar vested maniac from getting at a lot of 9 and 10 year old children: what exactly did he do? Step aside? Was he the thin blue line that swings open like a gate when chaos comes for civilization?

The story was such obvious hokum that even the authorities in Texas, a state where hokum is the best developed art form, had to back off of it as soon as people started asking questions. The madman wasn't confronted by anybody before entering.

Instead, we soon had videotape of police officers outside the school, DURING the shooting, handcuffing some quite understandably ticked-off parents for supposed interference. Interference with ... what?

Ah, you say, but eventually, after some lollygagging by the good-for-nothings in blue, somebody actually broke down the door and killed the bad guy, right?

No: really, it seems they just used the janitor's key, which they could have used a lot earlier but ... somehow ... didn't bother.

And there is this stunning detail of the final moments of this disaster, a quote from one of the children who survived by playing dead. [At this point, the murderer was going back and forth between two classrooms with a connecting door. The police were opening the outer/hallway door to one of those classrooms.]

"When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her. The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting."

A traumatized 9-year-old boy is an imperfect witness, and this needs to be investigated. But if there is any truth to it, I'm hoping the stunningly negligent moron who said "yell if you need help" and doomed one trusting student becomes quickly unemployed. At best, he will be doxxed.

And then his name becomes known and its recitation becomes a standing refutation to all the mawkish invocations of the wonderful bravery and resourcefulness of your local police officer.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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