Politics vs. honesty?

Based on a mound of evidence culminating in the shitshow going on these past few days, I think I can safely conclude that American politics right now is too far gone beyond the point of intellectual discipline and honor for anyone reasonably to expect an honest debate about impeachment and other Trump-related matters.  The partisan excuse-making (for their own) and vilifications (of their opponents) pretty much preclude and honest debate at this point.  This is the wages of a national intellectual and moral bankruptcy, becoming more and more distilled over time.

The only main question remaining now, is whether Americans should simply drop the pretense of honesty, respect for the rule of law, extending the benefit of the doubt to opponents, and so forth, and simply admit that their opponents are or must be up to such bad, hypocritical, etc. activities that extraordinary (by moral standards) measures must be taken to stop them.  It's obvious the Democrats and Republicans think these things about one another today; those who don't think it are being drowned out in the media circus.

The people heavily involved in the political process especially should come right out and admit that we've come to the point that politics is akin enough to war by other means, that the normal rules just don't apply any more.

Is this recommendation for transparency of motive a satirical one?  How would one be able to tell, given what a shitshow things have become?

I'm one of those who find the Demorats in particular to be especially vile and dangerous and socialistic and intellectually and morally bankrupt.  (As I've pointed out, gone are the days of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent figure of intellectual seriousness and moral decency, in the Demorat Party.  It makes me fucking angry that I can't think of a Demorat politician today anywhere close to Moynihan's level.  The current political "team" fielded by the American Left is the best that all of its supposed intellectual prowess and university provenance could cultivate?  That should make anyone pissed.)  I think for doing what they did to Brett Kavanaugh, they deserve to lose at least one more SCOTUS seat until they learn a little decency.

If Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the Court in calendar year 2020, I expect Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans (there was a time - during the waning years of the GWB administration and culminating in the nomination of the dolt Sarah Palin for Vice President - when I held Republicans in such low esteem that I adopted the term "Refucklican" to express my disgust, and I may well have to return to using it) to move ahead with confirming another Trump appointee to the Court.  This despite McConnell & Co. saying (when the president was Obama and the nominee was Merrick Garland) that SCOTUS confirmations shouldn't happen during a presidential election year.  (McConnell used this reasoning in 2016, citing Demorats from 1992 [including Uncle Joe Biden] making the same assertions).

So we pit Demorat intellectual and moral bankruptcy as evidenced by (e.g.) their treatment of Kavanaugh, against the expected partisan hypocrisy of McConnell et al.  I'm conflicted about it.  On the one hand, Demorats deserve to lose at least one more SCOTUS seat; on the other, it would be hypocritical Refucklicans lowering themselves closer to the level of the Demorats, squandering what intellectual and moral credibility they have remaining.

At the very least, couldn't McConnell & Co. admit that the moral rules against hypocrisy no longer apply, and that they're basically forced to be partisan pieces of shit in order to prevent Demorats from inflicting even more destruction on the nation's intellectual and moral fabric than they already have (which I, for one, believe they would do if given the chance to run amok; see, for instance, the bang-up job Demorat-dominated universities are doing to destroy good-faith debate).  They might credibly rationalize their hypocrisy by saying that run-amok Demorats would be even worse in the hypocrisy department.

You have Demorats 100% convinced that Trump is some kind of racist, on the basis of obviously suspect lines of reasoning, and this has them believing (if their words and behavior are any sign) that the normal rules have to be bent or broken to keep Trump & Co. from running amok and making America more racist again.  (Any number of Demorats have suggested that by "MAGA" Trump means to return the country to a past involving racial segregation and other evils; obviously this is a suspect line of reasoning to say the least.)

I think what particularly disgusts me about Demorats a lot more than with Republicans, is the thoroughly, utterly discreditable and disgraceful way they (and their allies, enablers, leftist fellow travelers, etc.) attack, belittle, ignore, and smear an intellectual figure whose ideas I've studied in-depth over a long period of time: Ayn Rand.  Here I happen to know pretty much all the ways Demorats are willing to be intellectually lazy and/or reckless, apparently (if their words and behavior are any sign) out of the belief that less- or un-regulated capitalism is evil and dangerous, that the precious welfare state has to be preserved (because of all it's done to reduce poverty levels, right?), that the universities as we know them must be integral institutions of learning (justifying a neglect of the likes of Rand, and a discounting of pro-capitalism arguments generally), and perhaps a number of related ideas and themes within their precious worldview.  So it doesn't really matter to them what Rand actually said about, e.g., the virtue of selfishness; it's the fact that she supports laissez-faire capitalism on such a grounds that motivates how they have chosen to (mis)represent Rand's views on selfishness.  It's not exactly complicated; it's intellectual dishonesty with a lot of clever but twisted rationalizations and a compliant community of university professors.

(Unless one finds a higher road to take, there is no win-win in an Ayn Rand vs. Mainstream Academy face-off.  Either she is (basically) correct that the university culture is corrupted by leftism and bad ethical theories to justify it, and needs some serious overhaul, or the Mainstream Academy is (basically) correct that a figure like Rand is a crank who merits no serious attention/study [except perhaps as a "cultural phenomenon," a "study" about which was published earlier this year under a patently dishonest title, Mean Girl, by a thoroughly dishonest "researcher," and loathsome leftist loser, Scumbag Lisa Duggan].  One side of this Rand/Academy divide can win only by (basically) discrediting the other.  I've already blogged about how the Academy is fast in the process of discrediting itself at least in the eyes of mainstream producing/taxpaying America.  This also goes for perhaps quite a lot of so-called philosophers I simply cannot trust not to be selective about which facts to acknowledge and admit into evidence; in this they are little better than your typical partisan and most likely leftist asshole you'd find in lots of university departments [such as the ones that Scumbags Duggan and Nancy MacLean are in].)

Anyway, I'm one of those who do happen to value (however imperfect the result) intellectual honesty and consistency, and who are disgusted by obvious partisanship.  (Can we at least admit that the partisan hackery going on right now in Congress is obviously partisan?  Is anyone but True Believers in either tribe somehow fooled that it's not obvious, perhaps blatantly so?)  And I happen to have enough experience and examples on hand to spot such blatant hypocrisy when I see it -- and the present political scene is fucking chock full of it.  Nor - absent an overhaul of the nation's current "educational" infrastructure - do I see things improving here.  The "education" system has churned out a shit-ton of people who can't or won't think carefully, thoroughly, or consistently.

I've been proposing philosophical education, beginning at a young age (and with helpful pointers in the Aristotelian, intellectual-perfectionist direction so that they might learn the art of dialectic as an ethical imperative) as a remedy for this situation, for the better part of a year now on this blog.  Not that it really affects my long-term outlook (for which I believe this blog will become legendary, whatever its flaws), but short-term-wise I consider it a major indictment of our nation's media infrastructure that such kick-ass, commonsense-on-steroids recommendations, and this blog generally, have gone almost entirely unnoticed.  I place part of the blame on the authors of (evidently inferior) philosophy blogs who do or should know about this kick-ass remedy and yet fail to act accordingly by speaking out and promoting this epic no-brainer.

To reformulate a point Rand made about the role of philosophy in society/culture/politics:

A nation's culture is, on the most thorough analysis, the result of the state of the nation's philosophy profession.  We have come to the nakedly partisan shitshow we are currently witnessing because of what the philosophers have done or failed to do.  There's only one philosopher I know of currently who is working on a book project with the theme and working title of 'Better Living Through Philosophy,' and this philosopher has been rigorously and self-consciously pursuing a policy of intellectual perfectionism (inspired by the examples of Aristotle and Rand) long enough for 'Better Living Through Philosophy' to be a more or less natural and inevitable thematic outcome of that pursuit.  Pulled off right, it will be revolutionary.  Pitting the greatest ancient Greek philosophers against (the anthropological "truths" of) Christianity in what may very well be a kick-ass way, is a pretty big fucking deal IMO (whether or not anyone else ever gives due credit for doing so).  There isn't academic hyper-specialization here, as that is described by one of the better philosophy blogs besides this one.

(In some way this here blog is pitted against the Academic-Philosophy model.  Isn't it?  As with the Rand vs. Mainstream Academy dichotomy, is there no win-win to be had here?  Or . . . are we each just taking different specialized-expertise paths, each with their own useful fruits?  I'm no polymath, and have next to no expertise (yet) in such areas as metaphysics, and yet I don't see any other philosophers out there calling out the nation's evident intellectual bankruptcy and political shitshow for what it is.  If the collected wisdom of the Academic Experts can't bring about such an uncompromising, chock-full-of-evidence call-out, then someone has to step in to do the job, right?)

So here we are, headed into Impeachment Season, with an angst-ridden populace ill-equipped to resolve crucial key issues and where so many cannot even get on the same page when it comes to basic facts.  (See the comment thread here, for example.  I discovered this link via a left-Dem facebook friend [somehow I still manage to have one or two of these :-o ] who I don't have any good reason to think had ever consulted or referenced the American Conservative website on any other topic, ever.  See the problem?)  At some point I might end up having to experiment with "channeling" Rand given what I know about her style of cultural and political commentary.  Certain phrases she would use, such as "I told you so," come readily to mind.  The root cause of this shitshow is intellectual bankruptcy, and the root cause of that is the collective output of the community of philosophers.  This, Rand already told America decades ago when she went out to diagnose the intellectual bankruptcy that resulted in her novel Atlas Shrugged being so badly smeared.  (Few of the nation's intellectuals were of the caliber of Hospers, apparently.)  That Rand's root-level diagnosis has gone disregarded by those very intellectuals for decades only reinforces her point.  Again, it's hard to see a win-win here.  (The higher road would be for the Academy to improve its practices to avoid such obvious fuck-ups as Rand and Mises going so badly disregarded, and also for Randians to clean up their own double-standard polemical practices so that we stop getting such obvious, gone-off-the-rails-somewhere horseshit as Kant being "evil.")

I really don't see anyway around this.  There wouldn't be a partisan shitshow populated by obvious scumbags if genuine philosophical practices (the most reliably productive being Aristotelian-style dialectic, according to both my well-honed hunches and apparent historical application) were to become widespread.  Barring that, we can't rationally expect the upcoming Impeachment Season to be much of anything but destructive.

An "optimistic" take on all this dishonest-shitshow stuff is that we're at a point in human historical development somewhere between primitive ignorance and brutishness and the end-of-history ideal alluded to by the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Rand in which unbreached excellence of mind (and body and spirit) is the cultural norm.  And we'd have to also concede that there can be stalls, regressions, and other failures along this path of big-history-scale development.  And so we can have such phenomena as the United States of America being founded by seriously philosophical people, followed some 240 years later by a shitshow run by philosophically-vacuous people (remember the point above about Moynihan), where dolts like Palin and AOC have dedicated and fierce defenders and critics, all depending on party affiliation.

The 2020 election year is shaping up quite nicely to be a fucking circus.  More and more people caught in the abject fools' partisan crossfire will become dismayed and disgusted by what their fellow humans are willing to reduce themselves to, the policy preferences which these fools seek to force on everyone (none of which include philosophical education, BTW) being so preciously important to them that all considerations of honor, decency and dignity must go by the wayside.  We will be hearing a lot about how saving the country from immanent destruction requires their own side to win this next election cycle.  (No matter how what they're willing to do for such short-term political advantage stands a good chance of making things worse long-term.)  You will surely see a lot of political operatives behaving one minute as we might expect normal, decent, likeable people to behave, only to turn around and - shouting all along about their righteousness - partake in the most despicable behaviors.  (See, again: Kavanaugh confirmation/smear process.  Sen. Hirono pretends at the "Ford" portion of the hearing to be interested in the truth, playing nice with Kavanaugh, perhaps smiling and cracking a joke, just days after wickedly and maliciously telling America that Ford is to be believed automatically.  Actually, there is a term for such "nice and decent one day and scumbag the next" behavior: scumbag behavior.)

You'll hear every which conspiracy theory about the other, "bad" side, every which effort to explain away malicious behavior by the "good" side, every which immediate hysterical reaction to some "fact" that common sense already suspects is fake news . . . in other words, what we're pretty much getting already, only more extreme and appalling.  I expect it to be bad enough that even a great many so-called philosophers will get it on the act.  Heck, just witnessing how Objectivists (Randians) - much better on average than the typical political arguers - argue with one another about Trump is enough to call into some question the abilities of humans to reliably meet a higher intellectual standard.  (Criticize Trump strongly enough and you're likely to be called an 'Obleftivist.'  I can't remember right off what happens if it's the other way around and it's someone bashing Demorats, perhaps strongly enough to be a Trump supporter by default.  Almost surely, whatever "side" you take in this shitshow, you will be accused of not having a true and proper grasp of Objectivist principles.)

From an Objectivist/Randian here is an interesting episode in American electoral history that may inform one's best analyses of 2020.  In 1972 - Nixon vs. McGovern - it was basically Rand supporting Nixon's reelection by default because the alternative (the far-left McGovern) was dreadful.  She saw Nixon as a "me-too" statist who grew the government at more or less the same pace as his Democratic predecessors - but in this case, she was an "anti-Nixonite for Nixon."  That's more or less my view of Trump vs. the Demorats, although it simply doesn't sit well with me to say that whatever Trump says or (much more importantly) does, he should get away with it if the alternative means Demorats getting back in power.  It would be a short-term patch with bad long-term consequences for such things as moral credibility and respect for the rule of law.  Whether it's Trump or Demorats winning in '20, neither will foster greater philosophical education for the republic, which is the long-term ball I have my eye on.  I was going to write, "I don't expect either Trumpists or Demorats to take loss well," but I can't truthfully say that; based on all I've been able to witness and determine, it's definitely the Demorats who won't take loss well by any stretch.  Politics is basically their substitute religion, after all.  Plus, they really haven't taken their 2016 loss well, either, have they.  Up until the aftermath of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call, the shitshow was all on the Demorat side, with them basically getting nothing right about Trump.  And they're still untrustworthy, unscrupulous motherfuckers regardless of what you think about Trump's Ukraine actions.  (Again, see the Kavanaugh "confirmation"/smear process for incontrovertible evidence of their unscrupulousness and wickedness.)

I'll try to tone it down a bit for my next point, although I might not be able to do so given the facts.  But let's say that political cognition poisons the mind, destroys objectivity, etc.: you could have loving, decent people who, qua political thinkers/actors, turn into obvious scumbags.  (I've conceded such a point about those I term loathsome leftist losers - qua leftists, leftism being a thought-cancer overtaking otherwise honest and rational thinking.)  But how do I done my point down after the one I made above about behaving decently one day and like a scumbag the next?  How is that duality not itself scummy?  And what if it's not even true that political cognition per se poisons the mind, etc.?  I don't see Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls or Nozick getting all scummy once they move from non-political theory to political theory.

So what if the truth is more like the following instead: entering the realm of political activism, in an intellectually-bankrupt cultural-political environment, tends to stimulate scummy thought/speech/behavior.  This entails that heightened character-scrutiny of those drawn to political activism in such an environment is eminently warranted.  In such an environment, politics becomes more and more about how to force your preferences on others, not about how to rationally justify them.  This becomes a worse problem - Hayek's "why the worst get on top" phrasing comes to mind - in a polity infected by statism.  The politicians in the American Framers' day were at each other's throats a lot, with lots of slander and whatnot, in spite of the philosophical inclinations of the Framers.  But the government's share of GDP was a mere fraction of what it is today, so how much damage could possibly be inflicted on a people via the levers of power?  (Demorats on their better days are fine with people acting democratically to seize wealth created by others, as long as there's "checks and balances" that include a Court selectively reading into or out of the Constitution whatever it needs to in order to justify such legalized theft; see Wickard v Filburn for one such dubious legal interpretation - of the Interstate Commerce clause, in this case, and after Court-packing threats by FDR/Demorats - with its granting of nearly a blank check to the exercise of Federal power.)

So take an intellectually bankrupt culture and a statist mentality and you have a double-whammy of toxicity that leads the political participants inexorably to hate and distrust one another, and to behave in ugly/nasty ways considered by all of them to be beyond the pale in private life.  How can this not put current political practice fundamentally at odds with intellectual honesty?  Fuck, it's like a no-brainer at this point, with an obvious no-brainer solution in sight.  Right?

A bit of stoned blogging re Battle of the Billionaires

^_^

So I happen to know certain things (I've got information, man) about the "professional wrestling" industry (from which McMahon made his billion(s?)).  I happen to know that Trump happens to know what is or isn't fake, hence his constant and consistent use of the term "fake news."  (The whole thing where he "said" that Charlottesville neo-Nazis were "very fine people" and that either he never explicitly repudiated at least 3 or 4 different forms of "far right" racist groups or his very repudiations must have been a dog whistle, somehow, is essentially nothing more than a fabrication of a fevered leftist media.  You can look this all up, google is your friend.)  So Wrestlemania 4 (1988) was held at Trump Plaza, where there was this fake wrestling "tournament" (all in the span of 4 hours, mind you, and you'd think Macho Man Savage and Million Dollar Man DiBiase would be absolutely spent by the final fake-title-match...), where the Hulkster (Chump Hogan, as Jesse the Body always called him) used a chair when the referee was "knocked out" to knock DiBiasi out and win the title for his then-buddy Macho Man (the Mega Powers the duo would be called...).  This, mind you, all after Hogan fake-lost the title the previous month or so to Andre the Giant through a whole shenanigan involving a fake referee who was a not-fake identical twin of the real referee (and on the pay by Million Dollar Man, to whom Andre was just going to give the title he won right away to Million Dollar Man; then-WWF "president" Jack Tunny decided the most "fair" solution to this whole dirty trick once inevitably exposed is to vacate the WWF heavyweight title and have a tournament - all in one day, all within a 4-hour span - for the belt at, you guessed it, Wrestlemania; it's all quite believable to a credulous preteen audience of that certain time period before all the fakeness was exposed for sure at last...).

So, after about the time that Hogan fake-lost the WWF heavyweight title "fairly for the first time" to Ultimate Warrior in what was otherwise an epic-ly billed WM 6 (1990) face-off between two truly iconic figures of fake wrestling - it's basically up there by that point in time with the WM 3 (1987) battle between Hulk and Andre the Giant.  (I guess the idea there was for Andre to "lose" the match in a gesture of good will or whatever for the profession or the company, handing the torch much as Hulk would do himself at WM 6....)  (Also, let's not forget that the venue for WM3 was the Pontiac Silverdome with a crowd of over 90,000, setting some kind of record for like an indoor venue or something.  I just remember this kind of shit, somehow.... :-/ )

Then fast forward about 20 years to WM 23 (2007), and there's this "Battle of the Billionaires" between Trump and WWF/E founder Vince McMahon.  As you can see above, Trump ends up shaving McMahon's head while McMahon "protests."  It's all staged, all faked, of course.  But by then, the staged/kayfabe thing itself became part of the whole WWE shtick in a meta/ironic/satire way; it's all more like a stage play at this juncture with real life people "acting" for a crowd the role of heel/face/turn/troll/etc.

Anyway, come 2020, another Battle of the Billionaires may take place, and it might not be so staged/fake/kayfabe this time around.  "Little Mike" Bloomberg, as the mini-Billionaire said of the $50B man, has jumped all into the race.  I may have to eat my words from earlier this year about Trump being a guaranteed victor in the 2020 election since at the time Mike B had said he had no plans to run.  (I'll let the differently honest context-erasing fake-oppo dig up that post, where they'll also find an inductively compelling bundle of links, all taken together proving beyond a doubt the intellectual bankruptcy of the American Left.  June or July of this year is that post.)

Now, one thing that a philosopher armed with (a) a general knowledge of the whole fake-wrestling/kayfabe/acting thing that Trump's been involved in (did I mention he's in the WWE Hall of Fame? Not in this post I hadn't...), and (b) with a reasonably good working knowledge of the American national political system and scene over the last quarter century or so, must do is to determine all of the relevant differences between one "kind" of (scripted, dramatized, fake/not true to fact) Battle of the Billionaires and another.  To identify all relevant differences one would have to also have a good way of identifying relevant similarities, whatever those might be (beyond the similarity of there being two billionaires "cast" against one another).  And integrating and differentiating so, a philosopher might also have a pretty fun time, and perhaps even more fun of a time doing so while enjoying whatever creativity boosting substances one might find.

[Gotta take another hit, hold on.]

(in the meantime, ponder also the Schiff-Lebowski connection.  Evidently Schiff believes the prick is stonewalling him.)

Okay, I am thinking of how to liken and differentiate late-1980s WWF matchups from late-2010s presidential matchups.  As far as billionaire net worth is concerned, Mike Bloomberg is in the top 8 or so, so think the tier of WWF wrestlers who were in the "main event" of the first (1987) Survivor Series, maybe?  Well, only about 5 of those top-tier guys are really memorable; this would include (for sure) Hulk, Andre, (likely) King Kong Bundy, Bam Bam Bigelow, Ravishing Rick Rude (pretty great qua heel personality, as well as being totally ripped), (maybe) One Man Gang and Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff.  But top 5 or 8 is only a number; what's the proper adjustments?  There were maybe a few dozen "star" wrestlers at any one time (including tag teams), and perhaps up to 10 or 12 superstars (the 1987 Survivor Series tier-2 undercard included such superstars as Macho Man, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat (and the Honky Tonk Man was the Intercontinental Champion at the time, and I know who he lost it to in like 12 seconds hee hee . . .).  So what's the comparable population, the top few dozen billionaires with like 10 or 12 "superstars" which would include most likely Bezos, Gates, Buffett, and . . . Bloomberg?  But there are like at least a few hundred billionaires in the USA alone.  In the WWF you had in addition to the superstars and stars the "jobbers," the weak wrestlers with no stage personality to speak of who may not even ever appear in more than a match or two; the jobbers are basically there for the stars/superstars to showcase their skills against, although the superstar-against-jobber action was pretty limited, of course.  Let's just say that the jobbers aren't part of the regular rotation, but the numbers still seem a bit off here using a raw numbers-vs-numbers comparison.

What if we try out comparing the population of the few dozen stars/superstars in WWF in 1987 with the population of US billionaires?  The ratio is something like, roughly, 10 to 1?  And Bloomberg is in like the top 3% of the few hundred or so U.S. billionaires?  So the top 3 percent of WWF stars is basically the heavyweight champion himself.  (We have to take into account the fact that the wrestling talent that year was also spread out across wrestling associations.  In 1987 the key superstar in the biggest non-WWF wrestling association was (of course? the legendary?) Ric Flair.  Sooner or later they'd all basically merge, or something.  (I lost track not long after WM6 and then Warrior "losing" the title not long after.  All I know is, 13 years later there was the Battle of the Billionaires.)

So Trump's net worth is legitimately/documentably something like $5 billion.  He boasts that his brand name itself is worth (an additional) $5 billion on top.  (Is that a heel move?  What would the Million Dollar Man - a pretty memorable heel character, BTW - do?)  So that's in, what, like, the top half of U.S. billionaires, I might plausibly guesstimate?

That's assuming that measured net worth is the criterion on which to compare the "cards" here.

As far as heel stuff goes, the American Left does indeed have its heel figure in Trump, although that's mainly their problem since they're so deranged these days.  (These are the same losers who treat Ayn Rand as a heel figure - Scumbag Duggan's 'Mean Girl' is the best/worst smear effort the left could come up with in all of 6 decades after Atlas; pathetic.)

I do like how this will throw the Demorats into a bit of disarray.  Doesn't the existence of billionaires basically victimize the bottom 99%, or something?  Are the less deranged/corrupted among them ready to examine more carefully the whole value-added-by-billionaires thing as they possibly end up explicitly or implicitly rating Mike B higher because of the rare-skills value-added generated by someone whose net worth is about ten times higher than his opponent's.  (No doubt some hack-level MSDNC types are forming a wealth/skills narrative in their heads that conveniently fits with their possible Bloomberg-over-Trump narrative, seeing as they will also regard center-left politics as the view espoused by the more highly skilled people [unaccountably disregarding the libertarians as MSDNC hacks can be expected to do, of course].)

Trump says that Mike B would be the man he'd love running against the most.  Now, Mike B got into this race because he rightly suspects that the non-Bloomberg crop of Demorat candidates don't have what it takes to beat Trump.  The Demorat Party has (perhaps inevitably) let itself become beholden more than ever to a far-leftist-loser constituency and the public sector unions, giving the "moderates" like Biden that much harder of a time landing the nomination unless they shift their positions leftward.  And I think there may be a good chance that the gradually dwindling number of non-insane Dems and lefties end up seeing the merits in his view that he's probably the only one who could beat Trump in the general election.  (If he does become the nominee, then pretty much all but the staunch anticapitalist radical-left losers will rally around the "less-worse" non-Trump candidate.)  Given his wealth, can his doing an independent run for the office be ruled out?  (See, Ross Perot was the first billionaire [I think] to run for president (1992), and at the time his net worth was maybe like $1.8B, which was a much bigger deal back then.  He gets 19% of the vote, even after a mid-election-year flake-out....)

Anyway, what possible connection is there between Trump's asking Little Mike to bring it on, and the imagery/promotion related to a Battle of the Billionaires that must have been going through his head all this time?  Given his entertainment background, his mindset is only all that much more prepared for the concept.  Exactly how, I don't know.  It couldn't hurt his being prepared, could it?

Unserious Halls of Fame

First, let's consider a serious Hall of Fame, the Baseball one.  Now, one of the criticisms one can make of the baseball HOF is that it's selection criteria are loose enough to allow the likes of, say, Tony Perez or Billy Williams, who are marginal HOFers (whereas marginal HOFers for me would be players who are, well, more famous).  But the induction standard is also pretty high there, requiring 75% of the vote, so maybe the voters know more than I do about HOF-worthiness.

Anyway, the main point I want to make here is that while there might be some dubious inclusions in the baseball HOF (what if Perez weren't part of the Big Red Machine with such no-brainer HOFers as Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Pete Rose [rendered ineligible for the HOF for betting on the game but otherwise an easy "95% on the first ballot" entrant]?), the baseball HOF has no glaring exclusions.  What counts as glaring these days, in the age of more advanced baseball value-metrics?  Well, if, say, a player has more than 90 career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) but is kept out, then that is glaring.  Such players with 90 or so career WAR - e.g., Cal Ripken, Roberto Clemente, Bert Blyleven, Cap Anson, Al Kaline, Wade Boggs - are all no-brainer HOF inductees.  Indeed, on that all-time WAR leaders chart, the first player to appear who isn't a HOF inductee is Lou Whitaker with 75 or so WAR.  Almost all players with 70 or more WAR are HOF inductees.

Long story short, a pretty good (but not altogether infallible) measure of HOF-worthiness in baseball is career WAR.  If there is a player with 90 career WAR kept out of the HOF, that would seriously call into question whether the voters were doing their jobs.  (Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are kept out of the HOF on suspicion of use of illegal performance-enhancing substances; otherwise their omissions would be even more glaring than Rose's.)  But the HOF voters appear to be doing their jobs well enough to take the Baseball HOF seriously.

One Hall of Fame one cannot rationally take seriously is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.  In such an area as music, how could one determine HOF-worthiness, anyway?  Music appreciation is a form of aesthetic appreciation, which is based on ordinal rather than cardinal value.  (WAR is a cardinal measurement, whereas Babe Ruth's #1 ranking is ordinal.)  But let's say that one could develop certain "advanced" metrics of aesthetic value in music derived from some more-or-less sophisticated application of cardinal value.  I have one such a metric in mind: the top-ranked artists based on rateyourmusic (RYM) user ratings.  (I haven't found full-time music critics to be any more reliable a guide to interesting music than the user ratings at RYM.  And RYMers are, by and large, analytically-inclined music enthusiasts whose opinions would be unwise to ignore if one is seeking promising music leads.  The ranking rationale for this list is explained at the link.)  I would consider pretty much any top-100 artist on this RYM-derived list to be HOF-worthy (even if I'm hardly a fan of many of the artists listed, myself).  But if an artist who is ranked only, say, 80 on this list is kept out of the Rock HOF, that would not be what I call a glaring omission.  But if an artist in the top 20 in this list were kept of the Rock HOF, that would be a red flag that the Rock HOF is more a popularity contest than a recognition of merit (and one key function of a HOF is to confer fame where it is merited, where the inductee is otherwise much too overlooked).  And here are examples of artists that hardcore music enthusiasts (with as much claim to expertise as anyone) are big on but who are still being kept out of the Rock HOF:

King Crimson, Iron Maiden, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno

I can't think of any good reason for why these artists aren't in the Rock HOF.  This calls into question the very credibility of the selection criteria the selectors/voters are using.  But the incompetence/unreliability of the selectors is revealed not just in whether such artists are inducted or not, but in whether they are even nominated.  Here's a list of a bunch of worthy artists snubbed by the Rock HOF, some of whom haven't even been nominated.  (I see that Captain Beefheart hasn't even been nominated [even this comes as surprise...], which is about as glaring a HOF snub as any, even if he doesn't appear in that RYM-derived list.)  How is it that Iron Maiden hasn't even been nominated?  What is wrong with these people?

It doesn't matter how many snubs there are in this or that HOF: if there is so much as one glaring omission (of which there are none in the Baseball HOF), that calls into question the voters' competence or selection criteria.

Now for another HOF that isn't serious: the National Women's Hall of Fame.  Guess Who is a glaring, inexcusable omission among the inductees?  I did just send a message to the NWHOF asking what good reason there is that Rand isn't among the inductees, and did just receive a reply that all inductions begin with a member of the general public making a nomination.  I was invited to nominate her, but . . . well, why hasn't she been nominated by anyone yet?  How does that even happen?  (I note that the baseball HOF doesn't require nominations from members of the general public; I take it that the BBWAA members are entrusted with having enough expertise to make their own nominations.)  And it's not like I really care whether this or that figure makes it into this or that HOF.  Awards and Honors are only as good as the process by which they are conferred; the Baseball HOF induction process pretty much ensures that the greatest players are inducted, leaving debates over which inductees are (properly considered) the marginal ones.  The Rock HOF and NWHOF haven't ensured that the greatest artists/people are inducted (and my nominating Rand obviously won't ensure her induction).  It's the very fact that as of 2019 something called the National Women's Hall of Fame hasn't inducted Rand that doesn't sit well with me, making me that much more turned off to bothering with submitting a nomination.  It's up to me to make the first nomination, because no one else apparently has had the good sense to do so, while a bunch of other women have already been nominated?  (What, you hadn't heard of, say, Julie Krone?)  How does the logic of all this end up making the NWHOF look worth taking seriously?  What if I decide as a sort of experiment to see how long it takes for anyone else to nominate Rand?  What if it takes until 2050?  Would the NWHOF consider updating its nominating/inducting criteria then?  I don't mind waiting them out on this to make the point.  (I had considered that maybe it's blatantly political, but famous left-anarchist Emma Goldman isn't in the NWHOF, either, so we have another glaring omission.)

I hadn't even heard of the NWHOF until a day ago.  Now, if Rand had been inducted into the NWHOF, chances are very good I would have heard about that and hence would have heard about the NWHOF.  Indeed this raises a very interesting question: which entity is more well-known: Rand, or the NWHOF?  And why?  Perhaps the NWHOF would have a boost in its cultural recognition/standing if Rand had been inducted when she should have been (i.e., at or near the NWHOF's outset, just as Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, Johnson and Mathewson were the first Baseball HOF inductees).

I mentioned above that I don't even really care all that much whether this or that person is in a HOF.  King Crimson is still easily one of the greatest rock bands whether or not the Rock HOF people are idiots.  HOF induction doesn't itself improve the quality of the inductee.  It's like if there were an Architecture HOF and we asked Howard Roark whether he belongs there: his response might well be, "But I don't think about it."

Likewise, we could look at the Academy Awards with all its glaring omissions over the years; Kubrick (ranked #2 here) received all of one Oscar (for [Trumbull's] special effects on 2001, which is such a no-brainer that even the Academy couldn't fuck that one up).  (On a completely related note, however, the Academy didn't even consider 2001 eligible for Best Costume Design, since apparently the judges thought the apes in the opening sequence were real.  IOW, the costumes were too good.  I mean, why the hell else wasn't it nominated for the category?)  (On another note, if the Academy's attitude toward Kubrick films was all that much like critic Pauline Kael's dipshit ones, then it's no surprise he was snubbed so much.)  Or, why did Russell Crowe not get a no-brainer Oscar for A Beautiful Mind?  Or, how did all those rich fucks in the Academy overlook the Coen brothers 1998 masterpiece The Big Lebowski, now an iconic cultural phenomenon?  Are we dealing with morons here?  I mean, say what you will about the tenets of Shakespeare in Love or Saving Private Ryan, but at least they could have nominated Lebowski and its ethos rather than snub it.  (What, did the Coens' skills magically take a dive between the Oscar-nominated Fargo [1996] and Lebowski?  That's fucking interesting.  What, were the other top movies in 1998 better than those in 1996?  [It so happens that RYM users are aesthetically attuned enough that their movie ratings blow away just about any other movie ratings/rankings resource out there; the IMDb ones are a joke by comparison, although its users' aggregated pick for #1 is likely correct.])

So perhaps the point of this post is to call into question the very idea, legitimacy or usefulness of a Hall of Fame (or perhaps even Awards Ceremonies) of anything.  Or, at the very least, to question the grounds upon which we would or should take any HOF seriously.  Of the three discussed above, only the Baseball one seems to have its act integrally/reliably together.  But the WAR chart at baseball-reference.com may well be regarded among hardcore enthusiasts nowadays as more authoritative than anything that the HOF does to confer recognition/status.  Aside from the experience that visitors to Baseball's HOF exhibit in Cooperstown get (I'd visit it...), what does the HOF accomplish in terms of recognizing player greatness that isn't already being accomplished by other means?

Links for the day (with relevance to the eventual Aristotelian/perfectivist cultural singularity)

(A note on terminology: The "cultural singularity" would basically be the vast majority of people adopting an "Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian" way of life.)

1) On the 14th of this month, I promised something on the subject of "force, alienation, and the dialectical tradition."  (April 15th in America is a date widely noted for the federal government's use of physical compulsion or force against its citizens, see, and so the timing seemed appropriate.  Alas, I've been busy, hence the delay.)  In relation to that grouping of subjects, I floated this posting over at the philosophy subreddit (but, /r/philosophy being such a joke, it got next to no traction there, and it even received a downvote from an anonymous coward, probably an anti-Rand one if that forum's history is any guide).  Perfectivism, of course, urges the student of P/perfectivism to present the best theory he or she possibly can, with due engagement with the philosophical tradition.  This linked posting represents the state-of-the-art in such a process of dialectic.  Methinks that forums like /r/philosophy may very well just have to learn the hard way, whatever that turns out to be.

2) "What would Socrates do?"  A review by Naomi Schaefer Riley of the late Earl Shorris's The Art of Freedom, in today's Wall Street Journal.  I like how, in Shorris's Western-humanities curriculum which some idiots criticized as culturally imperialist, he opted for the likes of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty over African cultural studies.  Doesn't that rather conclusively demonstrate how some cultures are objectively superior to (i.e., more advanced than) others?  English culture gave rise to On Liberty; to what, comparably speaking, did African culture give rise?   (American culture, meanwhile, gave rise to The Fountainhead and Google.  America, fuck yeah!)  My, how easily the idiots can miss a point....

Note: Three days until I go on strike.  I'm thinking 4:20 p.m. on 4/20.  Whatever verbal rivers of gold that any of my saganized cognition generates thereafter may be my exclusive private domain indefinitely, unless or until the eminently reasonable conditions I've set forth are met.  I haven't ruled out forming some kind of "Ultimate Gulch" along with high standards for admission, however....

Importance and culture

A key indicator of how perfective a society is, is how important the typical subject matter is in the popular culture and media (including cable news media and the internet).

Concretization question: How important is the typical subject matter on Glenn Greenwald and Glenn Beck's (call 'em "The Glenns" for convenience) columns/programs, as compared with (i.e., contrasted to) the rest of the media?  How about Noam Chomsky?  Whatever else you think of him, the shit he typically talks about is damn important.  And how about what representative members of the Ayn Rand Society have to talk about, as it relates to contemporary political culture?  Why aren't they prominent in today's mass-media discussion?Wouldn't they have the most of importance to offer in explanation of this whole "Ayn Rand phenomenon?"  (One of them is a prominent Aristotle scholar currently at the No. 3 ranked department of philosophy in the English-speaking world, for crying out loud - and is editing a volume on Ayn Rand's epistemology due out this summer, as well another, much-anticipated Wiley-Blackwell volume due out hopefully in the very near future.  Which would be of greater importance for understanding Rand's Objectivist ideas, that or the next rendition of Ayn Rand Nation by a fuckin' amateur?  Which will the leftwing interblogs devote their attention to this time around?  Last time around, with near-identical publication dates ca. March 2012, it was Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation getting all their attention, with Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism getting none of their attention.)  I mean, how fucking low does a culture have to be for their voices not being the most prominent in media discussions of Ayn Rand?  Isn't that pretty much as pathetically bad as Chomsky not being all over the popular media?

Relevant distinction: "Intellectually high-brow" and "Important" (also consider: "Relevant")

More to come . . . .

#saganized

P.S. Another checkmate to come . . .

P.P.S. 24 days left...

What if . . .

Consider this another entry in the ultimate hypothetical department.

What if the mode of philosophizing (guided by a rigorous policy of integration) that characterizes this here blog became a widespread cultural phenomenon?  What would the world come to look like then?

If all the previous postings in this blog were to be condensed (with any contradictions removed) into a single unit for purposes of unit-economy, what would the unit look like?

The Oscars: a cinephile's thoughts

(If you don't know what "cinephile" means and entails, then you're probably much too out of your element to be reading this posting.)

Perhaps the most appropriate response to anyone asking me what I think of this coming Sunday's Academy Awards would be, "I don't think of them."  To explain the basis for this, in full, would involve a systematized presentation best reserved for non-blog publication.  Anyway, I have some rather simple criteria for assessing the merits of a film with an eye to the long-run and history.  The first and most important is, "How likely am I to watch this film again, in the not-distant future?"  That necessarily includes a question: "Is this film useful for purposes of formulating future philosophical and cultural commentaries?"  That automatically cuts way down on the number of films that I think can stand the test of time, in this year's (or any other years') Academy Awards contest.  Another criterion, this mainly for assessing the greatness of past films, is how many times I've actually watched a film.  Having seen Taxi Driver half a dozen times or so, I'm not as likely to watch that again before I watch P.T. Anderson's The Master again (which I intend to do as soon as it comes out on Blu-Ray).  To say I've seen a movie half a dozen times or so would suggest (though not confirm) that I've familiarized myself with it enough not to need to see it again soon.  Point being, that I've seen Taxi Driver that many times and The Master so few, means an adjustment needs to be made for viewing opportunities.  I'll need more time and opportunity to tell for sure whether The Master belongs in the pantheon of great films along with Taxi Driver.

(Speaking of the motion picture pantheon: having just re-watched Michael Mann's Heat, I would place it right up there.  An effing masterpiece of plot-theme-characterization-style integration in which every major character gets more or less what's coming to her/him.  Even better, heroism is evident there.  I had seen it twice or thrice before, but it gets better with additional viewings.  Never mind the cheesy-ish '80s-ish soundtrack; actually, embrace it: it's part of the mastery.  The Pacino/De Niro coupling alone almost certainly makes it a must-see for anyone interested in movies.  I mean, like, duhhh!  [This looks promising.])

Out of the ten nominated films this year, I have seen three of them so far - Django Unchained, Lincoln, and Silver Linings Playbook.  To weed these out: I got the point of Lincoln the first time around; don't need to see it again.  (This is the case for a great many historical or bio-pics.)  Also, it's Spielberg, and I usually don't need to see a Spielberg film more than once these days (if I even see it - amazingly enough, I missed out on War of the Worlds!).  Silver Linings Playbook was good, but certainly not worthy of the Oscar-buzzy 8 nominations.  I'd see it again, but I don't know when.  Its director, David O. Russell, doesn't have a particularly distinguished film-directing career.  Among his other films, I'd be most likely to give I (Heart) Huckabees one more chance before deciding whether or not it's worth a damn.  This leaves Django, which is recycled Tarantino, which does tell me this: I could see it again before all that long, just as I've seen Basterds twice, which was just about the right fill for me (and Django is basically Basterds pt. 2).

Indeed, at an unlikely online resource for movies which carries more credibility with me than any other (and which I'd rather not reveal here, in order to help keep it as exclusive as possible), the top three movies of 2012 are Django, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Master.  I'll take the combination of these three over the three nominees that I've seen, without the slightest hesitation.  (I haven't seen the odds-on front-runner, Argo, but I will on home video; would I ever need to see it more than once?  I have my doubts....)

My approach to these things is rather director-centric, which is natural for a cinephile who accepts more or less an 'auteur' theory of filmmaking - that a film succeeds best as art (as distinguished from entertainment) when it reflects an integral directorial vision, and succeeds even better when it reflects a comprehensive or completist (or perfectionist/perfectivist) approach to the craft, which works out best in proportion to how intellectual the director is.  By that standard, the un-nominated The Master easily outdoes these other three nominated pictures, in terms of value for future cultural and philosophical commentary.  (I envision it being to the Academy's 2012 performance what 2001 is to the Academy's 1968 farce.)  If that doesn't tell you a good deal about the true value of a film (vs. what's popular among the general public or in the academy), then I don't know what does.

Anyway, who are the greatest living English-language directors, by that standard?  To get into a full explanation would, again, require a systematized treatment.  Here's the rough list, followed by key films and the approximate number of times I've watched them:

Scorsese - Taxi Driver (6+), Casino (3+), Gangs of New York (3), Goodfellas (3), Raging Bull (3), Mean Streets (2)

Coppola - Godfather (3+), G2 (3+), Apocalypse Now (3+), The Conversation (2)

Malick - Tree of Life (1), The Thin Red Line (2), The New World (2), Days of Heaven (2+), Badlands (2)

Coens - Lebowski (10+), Miller's Crossing (3+), Fargo (3+), The Man Who Wasn't There (3+), A Serious Man (2), No Country for Old Men (2; more Cormac McCarthy than Coen?)

Lynch - Eraserhead (3), Blue Velvet (2 or 3), Mulholland Dr. (4-ish), The Elephant Man (2), The Straight Story (2)

P.T. Anderson - The Master (1), Punch-Drunk Love (3), There Will Be Blood (3), Magnolia (2), Boogie Nights (2)

Woody Allen - Annie Hall (3), Manhattan (2), Crimes and Misdemeanors (2), Bullets over Broadway (2), Match Point (1), Love and Death (1)

Tarantino - Pulp Fiction (4+), Reservoir Dogs (2+), Jackie Brown (2)

Clint Eastwood - Unforgiven (2), Million Dollar Baby (1), A Perfect World (1), Gran Torino (1)

Terry Gilliam - Brazil (2, and more to come), The Fisher King (2-ish, ditto), Twelve Monkeys (2), Fear and Loathing (1; more Hunter S. Thompson than Gilliam?)

Wes Anderson - The Royal Tenenbaums (2, and more to come), Rushmore (ditto), Moonrise Kingdom (1), Life Aquatic (2)

Polanski - Chinatown (3), Repulsion (2-ish) The Tenant (2), The Pianist (1)

Ridley Scott - The Duellists (3-ish), Blade Runner (3-ish), Alien (1 or 2), Thelma & Louise (1?) Gladiator (1?), Matchstick Men (1; would see again)

Spielberg - Schindler's List (3), Saving Private Ryan (2), Empire of the Sun (1), The Color Purple (1)

Peter Weir - Picnic at Hanging Rock (3+), Dead Poets Society (2), Fearless (2), The Truman Show (2)

Nicolas Roeg - Don't Look Now (3-ish), Walkabout (2), The Man Who Fell to Earth (2)

Rob Reiner - Princess Bride (3+), Spinal Tap (2; will watch again), Stand by Me (2; more S. King than Reiner?)

Hal Hartley - Henry Fool (3+), Trust (1; will watch again), Simple Men (ditto), The Unbelievable Truth (ditto)

Alexander Payne - Election (5-ish), About Schmidt (1 so far), Sideways (ditto), The Descendants (1)

David Fincher - Fight Club (3+; more Chuck P. than Fincher?), Se7en (2 or 3)

That's twenty directors, anyway.  The likes of Christopher Nolan are marginal at best for inclusion here.

For comparison: I've seen the seven Kubrick films from Strangelove onward between 4 and 8 times apiece.

Anyway, that's what I think of this year's Oscars.  And you'll probably learn more of serious relevance about them right here than just about anywhere else you look.

"Checkmate, assholes." - Stanley Kubrick to the Academy

P.S. "Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic." - Jean Sibelius
(take that, Ms. Kael, ya effing philistine)

The primacy of the intellect

[I was originally going to title this posting "America's healthcare affordability crisis," but I just kept integrating to wider and wider principles as I proceeded; the progression unfolds below.]

By this point, regular readers of this blog are most likely used to an inductively-established pattern I'm big on, namely that a great many human existential problems are primarily intellectual problems at their source.  That the intellect - how (well) it is used or misused - has more primacy in human affairs than any other human characteristic, is at the very core of the doctrine I have named P/perfectivism.  I think the distinction between "primary" and "only" is also well-known to Rand-influenced readers; that the intellect is the prime mover in human affairs, doesn't make it the only mover.  But in terms of a correct mode of analysis of human affairs, at the greatest level of fundamentality (and that which is fundamental in any context being what philosophers are supposed to discover), I don't know of anything more fundamental for purposes of explanation than the characteristically human mode of consciousness, i.e., a conceptual or abstractive one (the key faculty of abstraction being the intellect).

And so it is by this mode of analysis that one can only truly get to the root of such a concrete issue as the USA's healthcare affordability situation.

The connection between these two things would probably be met with incomprehension or incredulity among many of today's political observers.  How can something so (seemingly) abstract as the human mode of consciousness come to affect something so concretely-impacting as one's (or one's neighbors) healthcare situation?

I figured I would address this concrete issue in particular after having just had a discussion with Canadians about the qualities of its healthcare system.  The basic message I took from this discussion is that Americans are very ill-informed about the ways in which their own healthcare payment and delivery system compares with others in the industrially-advanced world.  Here in America a cancer diagnosis can wipe out people's life savings; that sort of thing is unheard of in a country like Canada.  (How Obamacare is supposed to address that concern is not clearly spelled out as far as I know.)  But to hear the American national discourse on the healthcare issue, the average American simply does not have the information (or an adequate grasp of it) to make well-considered decisions regarding policy (through direct support or indirectly through voting for leaders), even when some medical situations can be financially devastating to them under current policy.  It sounds like playing with fire, doesn't it?

The way that the issue and the debates about it get framed is all too easily corrupted as long as the polity remains in the dark; we cannot expect to have an integral exchange of ideas about causes and solutions under such conditions.  The healthcare affordability crisis is bad enough; this corruption of the discourse - and it has deadly consequences - is disgusting in its own right.  I mean, if Americans were well-informed about the various alternative healthcare payment and delivery frameworks in place around the world, and still made the determination that, on balance, all things considered, this system is still the one to have in place, that would presumably reflect epistemically-responsible behavior.  (Without some extensive analysis, it isn't all cut-and-dried, as leftist reddiots would have you believe, that transitioning over to a more "social-democratic" model would be a net improvement.)  But that's not what we have here; we have a healthcare affordability crisis coupled with widespread (and deadly) ignorance as to its causes and possible solutions.  That should make one pretty fucking angry, I would think.

Now, just in case this claim (as to Americans' massive ignorance in regard to healthcare systems and causes and solutions) meets with skepticism, we must take into account a wider context: Americans are demonstrably very-ill-informed about a whole range of issues.  From that standpoint, that the healthcare issue falls within this range is the to-be-expected, not something that should come as any surprise.  And from that standpoint, we have an all-encompassing, inductively-established pattern concerning the average American's state of knowledge and awareness.  And from that standpoint, it's virtually a clear path, right on through the levels of abstraction involved in drawing wider and wider inductively-established conclusions, to the most broad, all-encompassing, abstract conclusion we can reach in this context, i.e., that the average American's state of knowledge and awareness stems from the average American's state of intellectual knowledge and awareness.  That is, the average American's state of knowledge and awareness concerning things like current pop-culture (e.g., knowing precisely the differences between American Idol and America's Got Talent) is a selective and compartmentalized knowledge that can still leave the average American oblivious to other issues (e.g., politics) impacting their lives.  That problem - compartmentalization - is also symptomatic of the problem for which the primary diagnosis has already been made: a lack of intellectual awareness, such as the awareness of the cognitive need to integrate the seemingly disparate areas of knowledge concerning matters that affect their lives.

In fact, I do quite firmly believe that many of the various cognitive maladies one could identify as a leading underlying cause for various observed problems can all be inductively-grouped on the basis of the primary underlying cause of all those underlying maladies, that is, the widest integration possible in this context which I have formulated in essence as: a crisis of intellectual awareness.

You'll find many amateur intellectually-minded folks on places such as reddit trying to come up with the most sense-making and at the same time the widest, most all-encompassing, most abstract causal explanation for America's existential trends.  Some of them (many of them, on reddit) locate the primary problem in a corporate plutocracy's stranglehold on the political system.  Stopping short of an underlying explanation for that would indicate the amateur explanation-giver's ascription of primacy to material economic factors.  In the meantime, many a religious right-winger would trace the nation's existential trends to a supposedly growing secularism - a "departure from God" - and then proceed, unsurprisingly, to point to all kinds of data points purporting to support this explanatory hypothesis.

For those familiar with Miss Rand's "Censorship: Local and Express", these dueling modes of analysis can be understood in terms of a more fundamental mode of analysis which she offers: a material/spiritual dichotomy, with each side - the "liberals" on one and the "conservatives" on the other - giving primacy of emphasis to what they respectively consider to be the most metaphysically important.  Miss Rand sums up the essence of this dichotomy as applied to politics here, and - now just as then - it packs lots of explanatory punch, and that being the case within the context of the yet-wider inductively-observed pattern providing a shit-ton of explanatory punch for America's - or any nation's - existential trends, that is, the pattern having to do with the prevalence of reason vis-a-vis unreason in a given culture.  Consistent with Miss Rand's pattern of expertise at identifying the issues of most fundamental explanatory importance - a pattern of expertise that must characterize the philosopher qua philosopher above all else - it is the efficacy and supremacy of reason which Rand explicitly stated was the primary concern of her work, and "the essence of Objectivism."

The primacy-of-something-else amateurs are usually unaware of Rand's core emphasis on the primacy of reason because their standpoint assigns primacy-of-explanation to other things, and so their (lack of understanding) of Rand is filtered through that perspective.  (That's their problem, not hers.)  And so - as a slam-dunk standing-on-one-foot test of someone's level of understanding of Rand - if a person has led her/himself to believe that the primary, fundamental virtue in Rand's ethics is "selfishness," that tells you about that person's frame of reference, but not much about Rand's.  "Selfishness" is, of course, not a primary - it can't be, not without some framework that tells a person what to be selfish about, or what selfishness consists in.  If Rand holds - as she did - that the standard of a person's moral perfection is unbreached rationality, then that makes a good 95% of the usual interwebbed hit-pieces on Rand's egoistic ethics quite entirely worthless as facilitators of understanding.  But what if these intellectually-incompetent hit-pieces are merely symptoms of the wider, more fundamental causal explanation I've offered for the nation's existential direction?  Where else would the chain of explanation end?  What could Rand herself provide as a more fundamental terminus qua "the essence of Objectivism" than the supremacy of reason?  Rand saw that the primary key to addressing human existential challenges - the endeavor which she would call a selfish one - was to be found in how efficaciously human beings employed their reasoning capacity.  Where else would the primacy of emphasis for this existential task be found?

Wouldn't Jefferson agree on that, for sure?

(The right-wing religionists who "explain" the USA's existential path in terms of a "departure from God" tend almost uniformly to speak of the country having been founded "on Judeo-Christian principles," that it was the Framers' alleged (right-wing style?) religiosity that informed the nation's founding documents.  What context has to be dropped to claim such a thing?  Right-wing religiosity had been abundant throughout the ages prior to the founding of America, and never managed to generate a constitutional republic founded on individual rights.  That was a historical constant; did it just suddenly work out that right-wing-style religiosity in the minds of the Framers is what made the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Common Sense, the American Philosophical Society, and so on a practical reality?  What's a better fundamental-level explanation for all that: ages-old, right-wing-style religiosity or the very-new Enlightenment culture of learning and boundless intellectual curiosity?  What's the variable of primary or greatest importance in this context?  The economistic Left doesn't fare any better; their mode of explanation comes down to the economic interests that the Framers had in gaining independence from the British Crown: rather than the King exploiting these rich white land-owners, the Framers sought the political framework in which to do (capitalistic) exploiting themselves.  Apparently, all the Left sees as fundamental about America is a history of conquest of economically-underprivileged and non-white peoples, and only after FDR's reforms was the Great American Middle Class made possible.  Seriously.  The GOP party base offers theocracy as the way to go; the Democrat party base offers FDR-style interventionism as the basic alternative.  The pragmatists in both parties are at a loss as to what to do, other than to succumb to mentality prevailing in the District of Cynicism.)

The true explanation and solution - for the nation's healthcare challenges and for everything else - are right under our noses.  There's one public intellectual from the last half-century that has been shouting this from the rooftops to a greater and more potent extent than anyone else.  To the clueless, it would seem outright crazy that some blogger self-identifying as The Ultimate Philosopher would be touting this particular public intellectual, over and over again.  But what other reasonable conclusion is there to draw?  One would presume that the professional philosophical community would be all on board with this true explanation and solution and, as a consequence, go out of its way to shout the very same thing from every available rooftoop, lectern, op-ed page, manifesto, and what have you - to identify, along with Aristotle and Ayn Rand - the primacy of intellectual flourishing to human and cultural flourishing. I mean, isn't that supposed to be the very spirit animating their own profession, for crying out loud?

What we have here is a failure to integrate.  It would be quite the fucking shame if this failure stemmed in significant part from the (by and large politically left-leaning) intellectual community's reactionary attitude toward the politically capitalistic nature of this leading contemporary source of the intellectualist eudaimonism staring them right in the face, now would it not.  But is there some other plausible explanation for this reaction, aside from its being a politically-motivated one?  Sure, their jobs might well be in jeopardy were this thinker's ideas carried out (for one thing, many would lose a lot of credibility for having failed to be Aristotelian intellectualist eudaimonists), but then job-security-motivated behavior wouldn't credibly qualify as philosophical behavior, now would it.  Anyway, this is just some stuff to think about when tying our current healthcare affordability crisis to fundamental intellectual factors.  Much as the intellectuals profess to hate that very crisis, whom else, exactly, do we have to thank for it, in the end analysis?

A subject to which I have been giving some thought (well, more in the way of questioning) is: In a hypothetical world populated (to a considerably greater extent than at present) by learned Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents, just what would the general attitude toward "social welfare" issues such as healthcare payment and provision be like?  If you listen to the mainstream of academic political philosophy, a majority of well-informed agents would be (tah dah!) a lot like them: leftish Rawlsy social democrats who assign a crucial role to the coercive state in matters of provision of goods - in ensuring the provision of goods, as a matter of right and social-political justice - that would foster in individuals the capability to flourish.  If, on the other hand, these agents are eudaimonist libertarians, the provision of these goods would be left up to private institutions - indeed, that were we to come to such an enlightened state of affairs whereby communities were very much concerned with the cultivation of individuals' self-actualization capabilities, they would already have quality institutions in place for that very purpose, without the need for a coercive state apparatus in fulfilling that goal.  What would be the dialectical resolution in debates between the eudaimonist libertarians and advocates of Rawlsy social justice?  We have to assume of course that each side is amply familiar with the mindset behind the other side's views, as Aristotelian-Jeffersonian agents would be.  I'm thinking that it resolves toward eudaimonist libertarianism in practice (de facto), while the Rawlsies would assert a theoretical trump card in the form of a question: However provision of these self-actualization-capabilities goods is carried out, wouldn't the enlightened agents of our hypothetical society affirm a de jure right to such goods - i.e., that provision of these goods would be guaranteed as a basic "safety net" condition of such a society?  They would supplement this question with a hypothetical: If private institutions didn't prove fully sufficient at providing these goods, wouldn't the state have the rightful authority to assert coercive powers to make up the difference?

That would move the dialectic up the ladder to another level: Without begging questions, how do we determine the content of a set of compossible rights upon a eudaimonist foundation, where rights are understood to be enforceable claims based on the requirements of human flourishing?  Freedom to exercise one's independent judgment is such a requirement, but so is the effective possession and use of such Maslow-hierarchical goods as food, clothing, and shelter.  A Rawlsy argument would hold that the structure of a set of compossible rights is determined through a conception of moral reason presented via the "Original Position" and "veil of ignorance" devices, which would derive rights to such things as food, clothing, and shelter.  The eudaimonist libertarian would object that the coercion necessary to implement this Rawlsy framework of supposed rights constitutes an unacceptable deprivation of the freedom of the talented creators, the "men of the mind," based on the principle that the freedom to exercise one's intellect in the pursuit of one's chosen ends is, in effect, morally axiomatic.  The Rawlsy response might be in effect to re-assert that a conception of moral reason represented by the Rawlsy argumentative devices is a superior conception at least insofar as it better tracks pretheoretical intuitions and makes for a more satisfactory reflective equilibrium.  The eudaimonist libertarian in effect (quite plausibly!) re-asserts the same thing about the freedom to exercise one's own judgment using one's own intellect.  Where does the dialectic go from there?

Keep in mind that in this hypothetical enlightened society, not all the agents are sitting around in the academic classrooms; some of them have businesses to run and, besides, short of a "pure" moral rationality devoid of economic incentives, the business community has to more or less be on board with any transition to some social order or other, practically speaking, right?  And, besides, what burdens are the business folk supposed to shoulder over and above doing a lot of heavy lifting, involving maximal use of their intellect, of course (remember, this is an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian dialectic we're talking about here), in making available goods and services on the market, under a rule of law that has a "socially conscious" dimension (pertaining to acts, not outcomes), etc.  And, for that matter, if we are talking about some point in a hypothetical future in which the adoption of Aristotelian-Jeffersonian principles of living has snowballed in positive effect over the course of generations, just how self-sufficient would people end up being, anyway?  And, for that matter, if we're going to hypothesize a dialectic between very-well-informed agents (given the presumed informational benefits made possible by advanced information-age technology), maybe the terms of any dialectic to be had at all will already be advanced well beyond our current ability to predict.  Keep in mind that a hypothetical society built upon the primacy of the intellect would bring with it all-encompassing effects on people's ways of living - more all-encompassing than debates (and their existential effects) within political philosophy.  Keep in mind that change in that direction occurs at the margins, but with snowballing effects at the newer and newer margins until, eventually, the whole of society is engulfed in the new intellectualist ethos (since there's no coherent opposition to be had against intellectualism, and only abundant benefit to be had by its adoption).

Such a line of hypothetical questioning ends up placing the current healthcare affordability crisis in quite a different perspective, doesn't it?  I mean, whatever the hypothetical enlightened society comes up with as a solution, it's sure bound to be a lot more effective and all-encompassing than what we would be able to come up with now, wouldn't it?  (This of course should not be taken as any sort of argument for not putting our best efforts into doing what we can do now, or for waiting around for everyone to be Aristotelianized/Jeffersonianized before we can solve the big problems.  The whole idea is to get better and better at the margins at addressing these problems as time goes on, and actualizing a snowballing effect.  If we have a deficient vision for how fallible humans could make this happen, we just use our noggins to think up a better and more workable vision and make necessary adjustments as we proceed, is all.  Yes we can.)

The somewhat strange thing here is that, given my context, the very activity of discussing this subject matter is no-brainer stuff, because for me the primacy of the intellect in human affairs is no-brainer stuff (and it keeps being confirmed by observations, to the point that the novelty has begun to wear off for me); and yet, it seems no one else out there is saying it - and it's not because it's such common wisdom that it goes without saying.  (How could it be, given the way the culture is right now?)  I even have to ask why Rand herself didn't make the sorts of futuristic extrapolations that I have - because that's what these hypothetical discussions are: extrapolations from the initial no-brainer (to me) inductively-certain principle.  And these discussions also bump up against some inherent limitations; how much further can I even go?  What possibilities do I think of next, from the philosopher's armchair more or less, for how an "ultimate culture" might play out?  I think I really might be speaking of an intellectual-cultural singularity here, with all that such a concept entails.  There's the increasingly-well-known concept of the technological singularity, a point in the not-distant future beyond which we can make no extrapolations beyond foreseeable nearer-future trends.  The futurists talking about the tech-singularity may be tech-centric enough not to be ideas-centric, else they'd be philosophers first and foremost.  What do I do as a philosopher in regard to the idea of a technological singularity?  I think up other possible singularities pertaining to some number of key avenues of human endeavor.  The cultural singularity would, I think, take the form of a widely-adopted intellectualist eudaimonism (what other form would it take if not that?) extrapolated into the currently-unknown.  Now we have two abstract-concretes, if you will, awaiting an inductive treatment: will there be a science singularity, an economic singularity, a political singularity (what would that be if not subsumed under a cultural singularity?), a media singularity, or others in addition to the technological and cultural ones?  And to extrapolate, how would all these intertwine?  Doesn't an accelerated intellectual progression speed up the technological one yet further, with a positive-feedback loop?  What happens if/when all "sub-"singularities converge into a Big Singularity?

And that's not even factoring in the effects of people maximally Saganizing their cognition by way of optimal use of cognitive-performance-enhancing substances....

And where does the discussion even proceed from here?  What are the current limits on the widest-possible, most all-encompassing philosophical abstractions?  What's there left to talk about once you identify the primacy-of-intellect principle and extrapolate?  My best answer right now: under consideration here is a Big conceptual file-folder which contains a whole hierarchy of sub-folders (and sub-sub-folders, etc.), all of the folders considered as (mental) units which ultimately reduce to perceptual units.  And there's plenty of stuff in the sub-folders to inquire about in the meantime, before everyone has gotten on board with the primacy of intellectual principle and run with it.  And I do have in mind what I want to post about next, but that'll remain a private possession for now. ;-)

Poor Sully (poor America!)

[Okay, so America isn't quite as poor as Sully's place in the current discourse would indicate.  But if that status quo were to continue, with the likes of Sully giving away the case for what made America great, we might well end up in deep poop.]

So I was doing an Ayn Rand search in the "Blogs" tab of Google search, and this link by Sully appears, which references Boston U. Professor of Political Science Alan Wolfe's piece-of-shit article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education last year (which I briefly touch upon here).

(Just for once, will there ever be an interwebbed critical article on Rand by a professor of philosophy, conversant with the other side?  There is critical discussion by Swanton and Cullyer in that recent book on Rand's ethics and in the brand-new book by James P. Sterba, long-time proponent of a "from liberty to welfare" argument which I've somehow managed not to address in this blog - yet.  From the available Amazon.com "preview" feature, Sterba correctly identifies Rand's ethics as a version of Aristotelianism [Chapter 5] - now that's progress! - and given all the pages left out of the Amazon preview feature I can't yet adequately assess his arguments there regarding Rand or much of anything else.  Anyway, the Ayn Rand being discussed by these philosophical critics in these hard-copy books bears next to no resemblance to the "Ayn Rand" that Sully and many other fools on the interwebs speak of.  Okay, okay, so there are webbed articles criticizing Rand available here, including from Profs. Bass, Huemer, and Vallicella, which partly answers my question . . . and guess what, that Rand bears hardly any resemblance to the incompetently-depicted Rand appearing all over elsewhere on the interwebs, either.  There are other relevant distinctions pertaining to these articles to make as well, for another blog entry; one of them has to do with whether Randian egoism is indeed correctly interpreted as a version of Aristotelianism - i.e., of perfectivism. ;-) )

Anyway, this blog entry isn't (directly) about Rand, it's about the sad state of the political blogosphere as reflected by arguably its most representative figure, Andrew Sullivan.  (For the positive, the antidote to this sad state, try here for starters.)  The aforementioned Google search brought be to Sullivan's "Dish" (which I hardly read otherwise).

Speaking of sad states, how about The Dish's masthead, taking  pride (however ironically or humorously) in being "biased and balanced"?  The whole idea among philosophers, of course, is to fight like hell against any biasing influences - hence the whole goddamn enterprise of philosophy, to weed out bullshit and fallacies and wishful thinking and inexactness, so as to differentiate mere opinion from knowledge.  (The success of that very enterprise - reflected most smashingly by the success of modern science - gives lie to whatever thrust there might have been behind Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism," discussed here.  We can reason past initial biases which were selected for survival value, and that's all there is to it.  Also, how does Plantinga's free will theodicy account for the suffering of non-human animals?  Is their undeserved and morally-pointless suffering justified by the "greater good" of human freedom?  Is God a utilitarian?  Have I misunderstood the argument?  Have I seen anything by Plantinga to be all that impressed by?  Does the notion of a maximally excellent or perfect being, which is at the root of his modal-ontological argument, make any more sense than Anselm's original notion?  And why is it that, seemingly, the best philosophy of religion nowadays is associated with panentheism, of which Plantinga is not a known proponent?  How did I get off on this tangent?  Oh.  Bias.  It's like Sully takes pride in being a fool.)

So, Sully's "latest keepers" include these items:

Where Have You Gone,
Barack Obama?

Um, Sully is about five years late to asking this question.  Glenn Greenwald - one of the major redeeming figures of the blogosphere - asked this question at the time that Obama voted on the 2008 FISA bill to grant retroactive immunity to telecoms complicit in illegal eavesdropping.  One might well rationalize that breach of integrity as a necessary maneuver to secure establishment support so that the charismatic and very-ambitious ("Yes we can!") future head of state could then reform the establishment from within.  (Was it naivete to buy into that, or was it a last gasp of idealism in an age of cynicism?  Keep in mind that the only reason this asshole got re-elected was because the opposition party is half-nuts, the only viable candidate it offered being an out-of-touch, no-ideals-having, culturally-reactionary, personally-boring, retroactively-retiring plutocrat.)  Even then, the signs of unraveling were already there - as Greenwald was pointing out - in the presidential transition season between Nov. 2008 and Jan. 2009 when the future head of state brought onto his team scores of members of the very cynical, hypocritical establishment he had (fraudulently) rhetoricized against.  It was then that lingering sentiments of idealism about this future "leader" should have been seriously called into question or abandoned outright.  This "leader" is never going to do anything to seriously address the coming $107 trillion Social Security and Medicare cluster-fuck, is he.  None of the "leaders" in the District of Cynicism wants to even mention it.

The story of this "leader's" initial appeal - his stated vision in 2008 - and of his cowardly betrayal of that vision is told in summary essence in this NPR interview with Harvard Law (the irony!) professor Lawrence Lessig.

Sully pleads:
"Come back, Mr Obama. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak (and 72 games out of 73) and hit 361 career home runs with a homer-killing deep left field in Yankee stadium, along with three prime ballplaying years away for military service.  What's-his-face was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing, and then later killed U.S. citizens with no judicial oversight.  What the fuck is the comparison supposed to be here?  I mean, Joe D. wasn't the hitter that Ted Williams was, and neither does the current head of state merit mention in the same breath as the guys depicted on Mt. Rushmore, but c'mon.  Joe D.'s highest similarity score through age 27 was Hank Aaron, for crying out loud.  Who tops the current hypocrite-in-chief's similarity score chart?  I'll let you, the reader, guess who the Babe Ruth of American presidents was.  Babe Ruth was on his way to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher, keep in mind, before going on to slug .690 lifetime.

Hitch And Sully: Is Religion Fossilized Philosophy?

There are various gems from Sully in that exchange; a sampling:

A: But the kind of Christianity that Jefferson espoused—

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A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.

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A: Religion is the practical impulse, it is how do we live, how do we get through the day knowing that we could die tomorrow, knowing that we are mortally—

H: But how does the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin help you to do that?

A: That particular belief may not.

Sully, of course, has no idea just how embarrassing his performance in that debate really is.

Your New Dish

Oh.  Enhancing the blog in the cosmetic dept., not in the dept. it needs real enhancing ("philosophy doesn't help you live" - this sonofabitch taught at Harvard for Prof. Sandel????).  Gee, thanks.

For insight and edification on the nature of today's political-cultural scene, read Greenwald and the other blogs listed in the column to your right, instead.

"Checkmate, asshole."