These are not worthy fucking adversaries

https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+romney+not+taking+questions+from+media

So Romney has gone 22 days at a time without taking any questions from the press, and Obama has gone six weeks at a time without doing so.  They do not want to be caught in any "gotcha" moments.

This is not accountability or transparency.  This is a sham.

Fuck it, dude, let's write in Glenn Greenwald.

(Oh, snap.)

Now there's a worthy fucking adversary.

I'm pretty Saganized at the moment. :-D

UPDATE: I've heard that the Romney/Ryan ticket is too odious even for some serious long-time students of Objectivism (SLSOs) despite Ryan's professed support for Ayn Rand.  When you get some of those SLSOs migrating to even the "subjectivist, anarchist, and nihilist" Libertarian Party candidate (ze nihilists [not an ethos], zay vote for CHONSON!!!), you know what a joke this whole election is. The serious change can only come intellectually/culturally, as the SLSOs know quite well.  This time around, I'm at least as "apathetic" about a presidential election as I've been since Bush/Gore 2000.

UPDATE: Miguel Cabrera - HOF or no?  (Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron are the most similar through age 29!)

UPDATE: Bigger circle-jerk: FOX News or /r/politics?  The FOX pundits are all working themselves up into a lather in expectation of a Romney upset.  I guess it just makes them and their audience feel better to ignore the statistically-best projections?

The 2012 Presidential Election

I try to write this blog's contents "for the ages," i.e., for audiences at some point in the indefinite future with all the advanced content-assimilation technology at their avail.  As such I don't care to focus much on the short-term, the ephemeral, the insignificant-in-the-long-run.  I don't think the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election - whether it's Obama who wins reelection, or Romney who wins - would make much of a difference to the long-term well-being of Americans or of the world polity.  Life will go on pretty much "as usual" regardless of the outcome.

This wouldn't matter the slightest bit to those of you reading this in the year 2112, but in one of the recent presidential debates there was a verbal gaffe/oddity from Romney when he referred to "binders full of women."  This tiny little unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) event caused several days of fascinated commentary from TV pundits and bloggers (and blog commenters with nothing better to do with their precious time, apparently).  My only interest in this is a socio-cultural one: why would people be so fascinated by something that no one in ten years' time - much less a year's time - will care about?  This verbal whatever-it-was told those folks-who-have-a-clue nothing they didn't already know about Romney or his policies.

This was nothing more than fodder for that curious phenomenon known as the News Cycle, which is a big "thing" in our culture because the majority of viewers have ADD or something, and have little capacity to isolate what is important long-term from the noise - hence the oft-observed short-lived memory among the citizenry.

Then we have this endlessly-fascinated day-to-day focus on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog.  Is Obama's projected chance of winning 70% today, or 73%?  This is a big deal to some people.  The important question is, Why?  How does it affect the living of one's life, one's character, one's destiny, one's sense of meaning and purpose?  What the fuck difference does it make?

If and whenever the American people need a political sanity check on a daily or semi-daily basis, they can always head on over to Glenn Greenwald's column for ongoing reminders that The System is deeply structurally unsound and changes in personnel do little to affect that.  One could point out that the political system has become a corporatocracy (become one? was it ever not one?), but that hardly explains why the bulk of the American citizenry with its partisan in-ground cognitive biases finds the torture of out-group-members acceptable, or why (as Greenwald constantly harps about, hoping some people might get a clue) the current adminstration decided to grant full and final prosecutorial immunity to officials who (merely short of an official acknowledgment of such) murdered detainees under their control.  Not only that, we now have a president who has a secret, unaccountable, due-process-free "kill list" with American citizens on it.  You can be sure as fuck that had Obama campaigned on this rather than "Hope and Change" in 2008, he'd have been electoral toast.  Or perhaps the American electorate wouldn't care and would prefer ignorance.  That appears to be the case now, after all - with a "binders full of women" gaffe commanding so much more enraptured attention.

America doesn't have leading lights such as Franklin and Jefferson these days, no examples of great political leaders to emulate.  We have a crumbling national infrastructure - not just physical infrastructure, but educational, social, cultural, fiscal.  In 300 years, Snooki will be a footnote at best - does anyone remember the name of her equivalent in ancient Rome? - and yet for some reason very foreign to me (maybe I need to prick up my sociological-analysis antennae more?) she is important in enough people's lives to be a "household name" in 2012 USA.  Speaking of ancient Rome, are we repeating that history?  Americans are, on average, so historically ignorant that they couldn't tell you.  So there you go.

Then we have this long-running mythos - it's a myth especially with our McPrepackaged two-party American political system - that voting for candidates neither of which will fix any of the nation's fundamental problems is somehow an important act, even expressively or participatory.  As to how one's activity of casting a statistically-insignificant vote for deeply flawed candidates in a deeply flawed system somehow contributes to one's well-being, sense of meaning, character or destiny, there is no clear answer that I can fathom.  If it were a choice between Jefferson and Franklin in a non-insane polity, I could see the "civic participation" angle carrying some weight; I would be proud to cast a vote in such an election even understanding the statistical-insignificance aspect.

So that leads to the question of the 2012 Presidential Election: just who would I vote for on the assumption I consider this corrupt, cynical and ignorant system worthy of my grudging participation?  Or at the minimum, which candidate would I endorse?  I don't have a good answer there.  I don't even know how to answer whether - if we're limiting the question to the two candidates with a realistic chance of winning - Obama or Romney would be the better choice for president in the next four years.  I really think it all comes down to the public character of the American people, to whom the leaders are still accountable (to the extent that they still have to garner a majority of electoral votes).  Greenwald's column pretty much tells the story, I think.  For the time being, the situation is grim.  It's a good thing that I don't have to vote for or endorse either of the two McCandidates, given the alternatives.  I'd prefer some combination or other of Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green), but that's out of the question practically speaking (if only because it's two persons, not a hypothetical fusion into one; also, I have little idea as to their qualifications).  That basically leaves the write-in option.

Among well-known public figures with the character, ability, and any remote inclination to preside over our executive branch, who is there to write in?  Would Greenwald himself have any such inclination?  Chomsky?  Krauthammer?  Kurzweil?  Dennett?  Wales?  Gates?  Buffett?  Howard Stern?  (Drawing a blank here.)  Assuming I'm eligible for the office, should I just write in myself?  I'm all for self-government, after all.  Given that it would be a symbolic write-in anyway, does it even really matter?

Does it?

In any event, I think the more significant election issue, long-term-wise, concerns the cannabis legalization initiatives on the ballot in a few states. Carl Sagan would be encouraged by that; the American people could use what cognitive boost they can get.  (Being staunchly pro-self-government - this is supposed to be a free country, right? RIGHT? - I have to ask how it is anyone's fucking business whether I choose to toke or not.  Those of you reading this in 2112 realize, of course, how amazingly stupid our drug laws were ca. 2012, but you do realize, I am sure, that some of us did not stand in the way of reaching the technological singularity ASAFP.)  There is hope yet.

UPDATE: This has come to my attention.  It's President Obama saying something about a philosopher, and fucking up with the usual caricature stuff.  I don't know how many times I have to point out how the understanding of Ayn Rand's philosophy you see on display in such (extensively-researched!) works as Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, or Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, is wildly at odds with the various "understandings" of her core messages you find out there in the popular media (and, evidently, among our political leaders).  So, rather than going on and on about that again, I'll essentialize my observation thus: Thomas Jefferson is one President of the United States whose grasp of philosophical ideas would not have been so superficial and pathetic.  There's just no disputing this point.  If it's any consolation to whomever it may concern, at least he's not a dingbat.  UPDATE #2: That link with Obama's answer about Rand - the whole link - quite perfectly captures current American popular culture in a nutshell, right down to an asinine meme-posterization of Rand in the comments section.  I'll just leave this (UPDATE #3: and this) right here.  Jefferson and Franklin would be deeply saddened.

Items for the Day

1. Why so aloof?

So, what have I been up to lately to occupy my time? In short: consulting various online information bases, e.g., wikipedia, reddit, rateyourmusic, acclaimedmusic, Scaruffi, Amazon, Oxford philosophy podcasts, Arts & Letters Daily, Greenwald, Sullivan, etc., really studying up on the world of Western classical music (next: rock, jazz and popular music), following lots of links, and vigorously applying the motto just below this blog's headline. (C'mon, whatever else you think of Rand, she's really right-on with this one.) How many of your "leading philosophers" out there today can lay claim to be doing all that? :-) (Next up: publishing the results of all this research ASARP.)

2. Mahler = the first supermusic?

That's the question that arose in my mind recently, since I absorbed his music more deeply and observed how it really seems to take music to the next level. That only prompted further curiosity about the rest of the world of classical music I had yet to "get," including especially Bach, Wagner, Bruckner, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich, or music I had been downgrading for not being robustly Romantic enough, e.g., Mozart. This also leads me further to question what I may have missed about the world of rock, jazz, and popular music. At the present time I have yet to find music that exceeds Mahler's in power and beauty, and there hardly seems any music since that matches it. From my experience the closest that comes to it in rock music, I believe, is work like Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer (emerging over time, as younger generations age, as the most acclaimed album of the rock era). I don't think it meets or exceeds Mahler, however, and my hope is that one day the younger music fans out there will see this, too (along with having a general education in philosophy / critical thinking).

3. Politics and the 2012 election

Unless either of the two major presidential candidates has the balls to address $46 trillion dollar fiscal elephant in the room that are the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, I may find it hard to get at all excited about this year's race. (We already know they won't touch things like long-term climate change and potential resource-depletion, issues a science-literate polity would be concerned about, with a ten-foot pole.) I've seen estimates go as high as $70 trillion.

[EDIT: Okay, so for those of you reading this in 3012, what does $46 trillion mean? Well, in 2012, the national debt is somewhere around $15 trillion, nearly the size of the U.S. economy (GDP). This figure is actually the "gross federal debt" figure which includes some $5 trillion or so which is owed by one part of government to another, namely, the money in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds." The $15 trillion figure is what gets cited a lot in the media. It is widely considered a staggering sum perhaps never to be paid back, though we have a number of commentators telling to take into account the load of debt relative to GDP and put this in historical context. Alright then: At the end of World War II, the USA had a national debt of around 125% of GDP. What that dollar figure was in 1946 I have an admittedly vague idea, but it is somewhere around $100 billion. $100 billion in today's dollars would be less than one percent of GDP. That was money all owed to "the public," being that Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare had yet to be formed. Further, the USA at the end of World War II was in such a position relative to the rest of the world that the 25-year postwar boom was pretty much inevitable, and since that time real median living standards have only crept up slowly and are now almost stagnating, with an increasingly uneducated and undercapitalized populace, particularly relative to world standards. On top of that, now consider this: the $46 trillion dollar figure is a present value figure, that is, the estimated obligations to come due to these "trust funds" in the future comes to around 3 times our present GDP. Present value means the time-discounted value of a sum divided into equal payments over a period of time. We actually have to discount by two factors: the time discount (the rate of interest) and the inflation discount. In the case of the United States government, the assumed time period involved approaches "the infinite horizon," and over that same period the present value of expected accumulated future GDP comes out to somewhere around $1 quadrillion dollars. In other words, as things are on there present course, we are basically on the hook for about 4.6% of our nation's entire productive future to cover coming Social Security and Medicare obligations. This is in comparison to the approximately 1.5% of our nation's entire productive future committed to paying off the national debt. In non-discounted terms, this comes out to the hundreds of trillions, or perhaps more, some decades down the line - an amount that seems staggering to us now the way that $100 billion doesn't seem like so much to us now, the way it did in 1946. Anyway, bottom line: if we're going to be crippled by debt nearly equaling our current GDP, then what about the looming obligations presently valued at around 3 times our current GDP? Think what might happen if 1946 USA were on the hook for obligations coming due totaling around $400 billion in then-present value with an annual GDP of $80 billion? And without the ignorant and decadent citizenry that is the norm today?]

Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you who Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are). And were it to be addressed more than nominally, you'd have one side, driven along by the Occupy Wall Streeters, blaming capitalism (not enough taxes) and another side blaming government (too many promises in face of domestic and global economic reality). I can see where the capitalism-blamers are coming from, and still think they've got some head in sand about some economic fundamentals, stuff that the likes of Krugman, Mankiw, Cowan or Caplan wouldn't buy into. As for who is to blame, it really all comes down to how ignorant and decadent the American public have gotten over the years; the consequent vices comes out in both private and public sectors. As to whether the GOP has dodged its political bullet by nominating Romney (the only GOP candidate besides John Huntsman minimally qualified to mount a serious challenge to President Obama), that certainly remains to be seen. The crazy is strong in the party (the birfer stuff still won't go away, for one thing, and its approach to science is now certifiably pathological), and never forget 2008: a "reasonable" candidate was nominated, and we still got a flaky, fundamentalist ignoramus proposed - with an actual straight face, mind you - as ready to have control of the red button. Now that's crazy. In fact, seeing what the party base might still have up its sleeve in the train-wreck department may be the only motivation for watching the whole electoral charade.

4. Is it just me... or was the internet just a lot smarter back in the days of Usenet? Try as one might, I don't think one could find the true equivalent to alt.philosophy in today's internet. (Anyone who remembers those days and uses reddit much for discussion knows that reddit's format simply doesn't cut it compared the Usenet's newsgroups.) Which begs the question: What happened?!

Republican Roulette

Sarah "Refudiate" Palin being at around 18% on Intrade twenty or so months out from the '12 election was insane enough, but it's now less than 9 months away from election day:

The GOP Field (and Perry vs. Willingham)

Intrade provides the current odds for the 2012 GOP nomination. It shows, in effect, that the choice in 2012 is between the status quo (which is bad enough as it is), and an even worse GOP candidate. Roughly, the odds break down as follows:

Perry - 39%
Romney - 30%
Palin - 8%
Huntsman - 7%
Bachmann - 5%
Paul - 3%

(This gives a total of about 92%, meaning the prediction market is holding out an 8% hope for someone else to jump into the fray.)

Romney is simply not popular with the party's base (given his liberal past and his Religious Incorrectness), which means it'll take a big-money Establishment push to make him viable. I don't see how he could be any more or less status-quo-ey a candidate than Obama. Bachmann is batshit crazy, and Palin is a Dingbat. Paul doesn't really stand any actual chance, and his run will be a repeat of '08. Huntsman is about the only candidate who doesn't look like crap. All in all, it's obviously a really slim field if you're looking for a quality candidate, and this is a problem the GOP has brought on itself.

To illustrate that problem, let's consider Rick Perry, the current front-runner. Everything I've seen and heard about the guy suggests to me that he's as dirty a politician as they come, and he's got all the anti-reason, anti-science credentials the southern party base craves these days. Already on the campaign trail he's said thoroughly dumb things and has gone back on things he wrote in his book only 9 months ago.

But the main thing that pops into my mind whenever I hear Rick Perry's name - the thing that most represents to me what Rick Perry is as a politician and a human being - is his handling of the Texas Forensic Science Commission's inquiry into the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Zack Beauchamp over at the Daily Dish sums it up nicely:

I doubt, sadly, that the Willingham case will have much of an influence on Perry's chances. The real reason to talk about it is to point out the absolute insanity of a situation where someone with Perry's record can be thought of a "serious" candidate. The man was complicit in covering up the truth about the execution of an almost-certainly innocent man. That's outrageous, and should be disqualifying. But it's not, which says a hell of a lot about American political culture. This problem - whatever its source - is something we ought to be highlighting.

My hope is that the Willingham case isn't kept under the rug like it has been so far, and that this issue dogs Perry throughout the campaign season. By the way, the Willingham case is not an isolated instance of Perry's complicity in his state's corrupt capital punishment system:

In the Hank Skinner case, Perry has actively fought DNA testing that could confirm the innocence (or guilt) of another Texas man on death row. Skinner was at one point hours from execution before the Supreme Court intervened (the intervening justice was Antonin Scalia, believe it or not). In Skinner’s case, the prosecution actually began to conduct DNA testing on crime scene evidence, then stopped when the first tests confirmed Skinner’s version of events. Perry again justified willful ignorance in this case by simply noting that he’s personally convinced of Skinner’s guilt.

It will also be interesting to see just how willfully ignorant the GOP primary voters could possibly be when it comes to these matters.

All in all, the 2012 election season is shaping up to be a nice, big shit sandwich.

Cultural Wasteland/GOP Primaries Watch

12 months out from the GOP primary debates, the field is beginning to clear, leaving Romney and the Dingbat in a close "race," way out ahead of the others.

I believe the Dingbat will make a run for it, just to see how far she can get, to see just what she can get away with. That would be so like her. The primary debates will be a rehash of Dingbat-Biden '08, with canned talking points and a constant stream of winks at the camera. The average GOP primary voter will simply be mesmerized just like with the '08 debates. I don't think she or her base realizes - or cares - just how badly she'd be pulverized in a general election. For her, the spectacle will be enough. The Establishment may try to buy Romney the nomination and a semi-respectable showing for the party in Nov. '12, while the Tea Partiers and the Dingbat-faithful will mount a counter-insurgency. It's going to be a debacle however it plays out.

The Left, meanwhile, seems to be capable of offering little more than the same ol' seething resentment toward capitalists and capitalist institutions. At least the pragmatistic, empty-suit Obama can be applauded for abandoning them to stew in their resentment.

What a shitty election it's going to be....

[ADDENDUM: Dish under-bloggers have documented yet another Dingbat lie. This isn't just another of the many "odd lies" that can be thrown onto the pile of 50 or so and counting. This is just a flat-out lie. Further, the fact that she corrected "refudiate" with "refute" instead of "repudiate" is ample proof of her proud ignorance of the English language. Why no one else seems to have caught onto this point is way beyond me. Is the culture really that low?]

Palin: Unqualified. End of Story.

I have posts on the metaphysics of perfection, on where is-ought unity obtains, and on sense-of-life defects in Atlas Shrugged in the queue, and yet I've gotta spend my valuable fucking time addressing something else here.

Sarah Palin is a dingbat. She exercises poor judgment on matters political. She couldn't hack it for more than half a term as governor of Alaska. She's proudly ignorant. She's proudly anti-intellectual. She's incompetent at basic grammar and spelling ("refudiate"). She's unqualified to be president of the United States. She was unqualified two years ago when she ran, and she's unqualified now. Nothing has changed in this regard. It's the same old Sarah Palin. She's demonstrated amply that she refuses or is simply unable to do the work necessary to get or be ready for such a job. She's nothing more than a celebrity these days, riding her name-recognition for all it's worth. She's a phony and a fraud, which alone is enough to disqualify her from the office. She refuses outright to answer any hardball questions from the media. Whenever she is caught off guard with a question from someone and stoops to answer, she makes an ass of herself all over again.

So why in the fuck is Sarah Palin still even a prominent figure in American politics? And why does the GOP establishment run around like panicked pragmatistic cowards trying to contain the Palin Phenomenon? Since political operatives tend to be so anti-ideas (it's essentially not about ideas but about strategy - basically, Machiavellianism and narcissism), they have no clue at all how to contain it. To those embroiled in the political cesspool, the Palin Phenomenon is a given, something that simply cannot be beaten down because her following is so rabid and willing to believe pretty much anything.

Given that context, the political establishment cannot even wrap its puny intellectual capacities around the glaringly obvious fact that she is unqualified to be president. What's the upshot of the intellectual mess here? A concern that she is unelectable. They are apparently incapable or unwilling to address the core fundamental problem, which is her lack of qualifications. Almost no one in the lamestream media seems able or willing to address this very point in the necessary bold and clear terms. The only name that comes to mind is Keith Olbermann, and he has a "boy who cries wolf" problem anyway, while his ratings and audience are disgruntled-left-focused. The only other place you get a rational Palin-is-unqualified analysis is Sullivan's Daily Dish.

Sullivan specializes in shooting GOP fish in a barrel, see. He's really good at that, seeing as he's a political wonk and in a similar trap of confronting Palin as a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of sorts. Sullivan, being ignorant of Ayn Rand, hasn't the faintest how to deal with this phenomenon at a deeper, wider and long-term level. But at least he identifies Palin as thoroughly unqualified and thoroughly lacking in any credibility whatsoever. That part he's obsessively gotten right for two years and counting.

So why won't anyone but a couple lone voices in the media-political establishment call out this fucking farce for what it is? I mean, it's a plainly obvious fact to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that she's way out of her depth qualifications-wise. Then again, it should be plainly obvious to anyone capable of even semi-principled integration that the whole political scene today is a circus of insanity, or that Ayn Rand offers the appropriate long-term intellectual solutions to what ails Americans individually and collectively. Only a small minority of people - mostly those deeply familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas - seem able to recognize the problem and the solution.

Absent such an engine of cognitive integration, you're at the mercy of the outside forces that are a seeming given. Just the very idea of Palin having a roughly 20% shot at the 2012 nomination is a kind of uncertainty that a rational polity shouldn't and wouldn't be subject to. So the conclusion to draw here is that we simply don't have a rational polity right now. Not rational in any deep and fundamental sense. Maybe at some superficial social-scientific pragmatistic "rational irrationality" level, what we do have is a rational polity. What democratic polity isn't rational by such a standard?

Back to the fucking Republicans. Their chief concern seems to be her electability, as no prominent Republican has the guts to call it like it is concerning her being unqualified. Everyone with a lick of common sense knows that the GOP would be all over a Democrat candidate so lacking in qualifications. Say it's not even a matter of guts, but plain old intellectual recognition. Are they so lacking in that? They may very well be. Politics today is so extremely cynical and anti-intellectual as it is (this comes from a pragmatistic orientation towards life), so such a lack of recognition would not be surprising in the least. Whatever the causes, we're left with a totally pathetic GOP reduced to the complaint that she is unelectable, and what's more - anti-concept alert! - she's "polarizing" and "extreme." Ayn Rand is so prescient on these things. This is also to say that the reason for, scratch that, the cause of Palin's popularity is intellectual disintegration. A polity incapable of recognizing the more fundamental underlying problem - not just that she is patently unqualified, but how someone patently unqualified has any place of prominence in the world's most significant polity - has much bigger problems than whether some dingbat is electable or too "polarizing" or "extreme."

At this point, there's really nothing further to be said. An unqualified dingbat has prominence of place in our insane politics because our insane politics is the product of intellectual disintegration. Perhaps the intellectual elements in our society had better get past their issues/phobias and consider a paradigm shift by seriously considering Ayn Rand's consistently-reason-based, pro-integration alternative. Just maybe?

Obama = President Rawls

To follow up my postings yesterday on pragmatism, what we have today is an extremely pragmatistic president in the epistemic mold of Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What does Obama stand for? He doesn't appear to stand for anything other than an undefined, please-everybody reconciliationism. He's like the perfect pragmatistic president.

It's most fitting that both of these Elites define the culture that is the Harvard culture. They're the consensus pick of the fellow elites for the best that America has to offer. According to these elites, Rawls's Harvard colleague Robert Nozick is the best representative of libertarian philosophy anyone has to offer, and it is a left-liberal mythology of these elites that Thomas Jefferson today would side with Rawls over Nozick. Ayn Rand, in this elitist mythology, is a reactionary-capitalist antisocial individualism (she did say that selfishness is a virtue, after all, and it's obvious to anyone what she must have meant by that: antisocial individualism) that defines the "libertarian" side in politics which Nozick, via Kantian intuitions, does a more respectable job of defending and is one of the two big "sides" Rawls incorporates into his Great American Synthesis along with the effective de facto abolition of private property (via trump-claims on individual talents by the community) so as to please the kindly, well-intentioned Marxists.

Here's a blatant falsehood in the elitist mythology: Jefferson today would not side with Rawls. He would side with Rand and Nozick. He would be a radical for capitalism, a libertarian, and he would affirm these things as a matter of common sense. He would not be a "progressive" who defines away capitalistic freedom, by piecemeal concession, into some bizarre and insidiously anti-American caricature of it (as with, e.g., John Rawls). So while Obama the pragmatist represents intellectual stagnation in America, Jefferson represented intellectual radicalism and progress, a President Rand if you will. Jefferson, in his radically libertarian, capitalistic, natural-law political ethos, was more progressive than self-styled "progressives" are!

Oh, my brothers, the Established Elites will scoff at first upon reading this, but what comeuppance they will receive, oh what comeuppance!

One great thing about Jefferson was his contempt for class-minded elites. So just keep that in mind. A President Rand (Jefferson) today would be against a corporatist economic elite in bed with the government, so let's just chalk Rand's "economic elitism" up to ignorant misunderstanding on the part of her opponents. (That's usually how you can chalk up liberal-left characterizations of Ayn Rand. They're really just very ignorant and point-missing. Once the liberals get the same education in Randianism that Leonard Peikoff's students have gotten, they'll be way on board with pretty much the entirety of her philosophical edifice, mark my words. All it takes is mental focus and some conscientious integration, for crying out loud.) So this mythology about Rand as a voice of an angry American "right-wing" bent on being callously selfish assholes to their fellow human beings, is just plain old intellectual incompetence fostered by a pragmatistic spirit of intellectual conformity amongst America's pragmatism-eaten elites.

You know what the problem is with these fucking pragmatist elites? Just take all the evil ideas in the world and the pragmatists' lack of any deep ethical, epistemological and metaphysical commitments, and just hand all the deep commitments to the America-destroying, man-destroying Bad Guys, why don't we. Really, now? Really? Say what you will about the tenets of Totalitarian Islam, at least it's an ethos. At least they've got the deep commitments that the cowardly Established American Elite lack. Dinesh D'Souza is onto something here in his own demented right-wing theocratic-authoritarian way ("let's be more like the Islamofascists; at least they maintain law and order and virtue and tradition")! All we get with pragmatism is intellectual chaos. (Didn't Rand say this throughout her Vietnam-era essays, like, a hundred times? Also, Peikoff's recent DIM Hypothesis work deals with the implications of an intellectually disintegrated worldview in contrast to an integrated worldview with deeper commitments. American liberals have pretty much disarmed themselves intellectually due to their ever-insidious pragmatism - especially when their opponents offer a whole moral and intellectual package-deal along with Americanism. This is true whether the package-dealing is a fundamentalist-Christian one or a rational neo-Aristotelian/Jeffersonian one.) The cashing in: Let's reconcile the opposing views. Let's be more like them, but not too much. Let's be less like them, but not too much. Let's keep mixing politics and religion together in vaguely defined ways because that's how things have been done before and it works well enough. Let's keep trying to mix socialism and liberty and keep genuflecting to John Rawls who has no deep commitments on the really big philosophical issues that matter - and on those issues let's have an unsteady, unseemly, and unsanitary admixture of all three of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

That works. Right? Maybe.

Say that Obama wins in a landslide in 2012, which is the likely outcome absent a major short-term game-changer. Contra the reactionary Tea Party types, the progressive pragmatistic Rawlsian Elites will feel short-term vindication. ("He improved the economy! Right? Maybe.") Not having the wherewithal or deep enough commitments to view the world in terms of the Big Picture Issues, they do not foresee the long-term triumph of the Randian model over theirs. Ideas do rule human history, as Ayn Rand - given all her deep commitments - recognized and affirmed, and Pragmatism as an idea has had its time and failed.

Ground Zero Mosque: A and not-A

First, the bigotry:

Palin (7/18): "Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. ."

Gingrich (7/21): "There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia."

Pawlenty (8/6): "I think it's inappropriate... From a patriotic standpoint, it's hallowed ground, it's sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way."

Huckabee (8/4): Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgement to not build it, given that it’s really offensive to most New Yorkers and Americans? Or is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?"

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom (today): "Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site."

Now that I'm back from vomiting, I'd like to distill the essence of what is going on here.

All of these 2012 hopefuls are looking to secure the nomination of a party that is intellectually hopeless. This playing-to-the-base is religious bigotry and runs counter to all liberal values of the West. But here's the disgusting part: They are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, they are trying to have their irrational religious bigotry and they are trying their damnedest to reconcile this with some semblance of reasonableness and tolerance.

It cannot be done.

What we have, as a result, is contortions of logic in order to fit the square of unreason into the circle of reason. To anyone who can smell disingenuous bad faith from a mile off, this stuff stinks.

Basically, in order to secure the 2012 nomination, all the likely hopefuls are shitting away any pretense to intellectual integrity. What's more, this is a necessary consequence of what the GOP has become: an intellectual cesspool.

As Andrew Sullivan keeps saying, and the GOP leaders keep dishonestly evading: "It will only get worse before it gets better."

Who is John Thune?

(No, not Galt. Thune.)

Seems that America is facing domestic wars on (at least) two fronts: against elitist capitalism-hating assholes in academia on one hand, and against evangelical reason-hating idiots on the other.

Here are the current odds for who will win the 2012 GOP nomination. The "best" candidate - and Establishment favorite - is Mitt Romney. He has a roughly 30% chance of winning the nomination. It's doubtful he could beat Obama, but at least he would put up a minimally respectable fight. Then you have the Dingbat with a 17% chance. Figgie Newton has a roughly 11% chance and steadily rising. Pawlenty has an 11% chance, but nobody cares about him and his name isn't even presidential. Fuckabee is at 7%. But none of these are the third-place contender. That honor goes to John Thune, junior Senator from South Dakota, at roughly 15%.

Thune has better looks and better hair than Romney. That'll be part of the appeal his fans will tout, just like the (more or less) same fans tout the looks of Dingbat. (As corporate monstrosities like Yum! Brands will tell you, looks and packaging are essential to marketing a shit sandwich.) Here's the money quote from the wikipedia article on Thune:

Thune has described his religious faith as the most important aspect of his political career: "Having a Christian worldview shapes my decision-making with respect to all aspects of my life. I always respect people in public life who are principled, and those principles have to be connected to something. And my faith is what serves as the anchor and directs my actions."[13] In June 2006, Thune reaffirmed his strong support to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage: "The Federal Marriage Amendment debate simply is an opportunity for us to affirm our support for marriage...It is an important debate to have in this country."

So it would appear that a combination of good looks, anti-intellectualism and pathological homophobia is what has right-wing hearts all aflutter.

Didn't we already see where 8 years of this shit got us?

Where's the facepalm emoticon?

Dingbat Futures now up to $21 on Intrade.