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| "The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP |
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| A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized |
Showing posts with label dead to rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dead to rights. Show all posts
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense
[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could. Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]
Saturday, September 28, 2019
A simple either-or-or (re "educators" and "white privilege")
Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege." Can this be expected to:
(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way
"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1). Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are? Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?
I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes. The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.
They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.
Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?
The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.
Am I missing anything here?
I'm going with (2). Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward? If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?
[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones? The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks. No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly. See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]
(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way
"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1). Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are? Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?
I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes. The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.
They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.
Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?
The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.
Am I missing anything here?
I'm going with (2). Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward? If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?
[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones? The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks. No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly. See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Demo rats vs. Kavanaugh, again
The rat-like elected creatures of one of the two major political parties seem to operate on the assumption that the rest of us think and moralize as sloppily and dishonestly as they do. The latest accusations against now-Justice Kavanaugh does not (and cannot) vindicate these creatures and what they were up to the last time around.
They blew their credibility when they deemed credible the evidence-lacking accusations made against him in 2018 (including, as in the case of Sen. Warren, the ridiculous repeat-drugged-gang-rapes allegation from Swetnick).
They looked the other way when a Demo rat president was accused of rape.
They refused to impeach a Demo rat president even though he lied under oath, even as they now call for the impeachment of Trump and Kavanaugh.
They looked the other way when Demo rats in the highest offices in the state of Virginia faced scandals and Republicans would be their replacements. (When it comes to comparable claims made against Republicans, they routinely immediately assume the worst.) As one article put it, Demo rats were rendered speechless as scandal engulfed Virginia's Demo rat leadership. Isn't being caught dead to rights something that naturally causes speechlessness? (Rand-bashers also get speechless - and also not contrite - when their reckless misrepresentations and smears are refuted.) They have no defense for their blatant double standards, after all, and no one will believe their bullshit anyway.
This isn't to comment on the credibility of the latest accusation or new shit brought to light by the latest NYT piece. It is, however, to say that Demo rat politicians (along with various others in the media) should be left out of any discussion of these things, as they only bring toxicity and deliberate partisan water-muddying.
I mean, think about it from the perspective of anyone who wants to build a credible case against Kavanaugh: how on earth would such a person make any use of anything that the elected rats have had to say on the matter? Bringing in what they say could only damage one's credibility.
It's epistemic chickens coming home to roost, is all. The bums lost. If getting Kavanaugh ousted is what justice requires, then let's find some credible spokespeople for the cause, which means encouraging the elected rats to STFU so they don't manage to build sympathy for their target.
Addendum: Any responsible inquiry into this sort of thing will involve looking at the pushback from the other side, which Demo rats clearly refuse to do. One example: "What Pogrebin and Kelly left out of their story, yet reported in their book, is that the alleged victim doesn’t remember the incident and refuses to talk about it. That’s journalistic malpractice." Is it really too much to ask for "reporters" at "the paper of record" to, well, report such things in their article? (Using the Witch Hunt Epistemology of the Demo rats, the alleged victim's lack of memory should probably be attributed to drunkenness on her part.) (The linked NY Post piece also discusses - although this isn't new - the glaring holes in the Ramirez story about drunken junk-exposing at Yale.) Or: how is it that the author of the National Review piece could come up with ample grounds for skepticism, right on the spot (namely: how does the logistics of a classmate directing someone else's junk work? Witch Hunt answer: Kavanaugh must have been so blacked-out drunk that he didn't mind someone else pushing his junk in this or that direction), whereas elected rats treat the allegations as a basis for impeachment? (The phrase "journalistic malpractice" also comes up in that piece, for the same reason. So either some coordination of talking points is going on, or the authors are simply speaking common sense, independently. And it is common sense. The "paper of record" apparently lacks it.) One of the rats, Scumbag Kamala Harris - again, a career prosecutor who cannot fail to know about the obligation to hear both sides before rendering a verdict - appears to believe (both in 2018 and this time around) allegations after having heard only the allegation-side. Other things being equal, it is better for such a rat to remain a Senator where the alternative is being elevated to President. [Edit 9/16: Six '20 Demo rats on twitter immediately called for impeachment after the latest "news": Scumbag Harris, the two outright fools O'Rourke and Castro, Warren, Sanders andBooker [edit: Mayor Pete]. Scumbag Harris in particular claims that Kavanaugh lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearings. This is one example of how destructive a format twitter is. A "longer" format would virtually call forth evidence for such a serious charge, some weblink or explanation or other, because unlike Scumbag Harris many Americans don't find it remotely obvious that he lied to the Senate. But this serially dishonest and unaccountable, and ultimate unimpressive creature abuses the twitter format to make unfounded charges. How is she supposed to be better or more impressive than the Orange Man?]
Addendum #2: Even if Kavanaugh lied to Congress, that doesn't in any way vindicate or excuse the rats' epistemic criminality. (Heck, even if the accusations against him are true, the Dems did a terrible job of justifying their position that the accusations were credible, just as they routinely do a terrible job justifying their positions generally nowadays. Heck, even if Republicans are scumbags, that still doesn't vindicate Demo rats. The best they could hope to show in that case is that they're less scummy than Republicans, but I very much doubt that they could show that, either. Today's Demo rat party is too much of a sick puppy and, given the nature of epistemic justification, if they happen to be right about something [e.g. climate change] it is an accident. Since when do Demo rats listen to experts on subjects where the expertise would not vindicate the Dem viewpoint? They routinely ignore the majority of economists when it comes to the minimum wage, for example. And anyway, neither Dems nor Reps have particularly good arguments for rejecting libertarianism, and neither party is remotely progressive when it comes to philosophical education of the citizenry which is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time.)
Addendum #3: Some more pro-Kavanaugh commentary that the epistemically reckless Demo rats ("epistemically reckless" is the minimum charge I would level at these willfully scummy creatures) can be relied upon to deliberately/culpably ignore: Dreher and Kimball. And it's not like it pleases me to say that the only thing Demo rats are reliable about these days is being intellectually reckless, lazy, etc. I would rather that they behave like decent human beings.
They blew their credibility when they deemed credible the evidence-lacking accusations made against him in 2018 (including, as in the case of Sen. Warren, the ridiculous repeat-drugged-gang-rapes allegation from Swetnick).
They looked the other way when a Demo rat president was accused of rape.
They refused to impeach a Demo rat president even though he lied under oath, even as they now call for the impeachment of Trump and Kavanaugh.
They looked the other way when Demo rats in the highest offices in the state of Virginia faced scandals and Republicans would be their replacements. (When it comes to comparable claims made against Republicans, they routinely immediately assume the worst.) As one article put it, Demo rats were rendered speechless as scandal engulfed Virginia's Demo rat leadership. Isn't being caught dead to rights something that naturally causes speechlessness? (Rand-bashers also get speechless - and also not contrite - when their reckless misrepresentations and smears are refuted.) They have no defense for their blatant double standards, after all, and no one will believe their bullshit anyway.
This isn't to comment on the credibility of the latest accusation or new shit brought to light by the latest NYT piece. It is, however, to say that Demo rat politicians (along with various others in the media) should be left out of any discussion of these things, as they only bring toxicity and deliberate partisan water-muddying.
I mean, think about it from the perspective of anyone who wants to build a credible case against Kavanaugh: how on earth would such a person make any use of anything that the elected rats have had to say on the matter? Bringing in what they say could only damage one's credibility.
It's epistemic chickens coming home to roost, is all. The bums lost. If getting Kavanaugh ousted is what justice requires, then let's find some credible spokespeople for the cause, which means encouraging the elected rats to STFU so they don't manage to build sympathy for their target.
Addendum: Any responsible inquiry into this sort of thing will involve looking at the pushback from the other side, which Demo rats clearly refuse to do. One example: "What Pogrebin and Kelly left out of their story, yet reported in their book, is that the alleged victim doesn’t remember the incident and refuses to talk about it. That’s journalistic malpractice." Is it really too much to ask for "reporters" at "the paper of record" to, well, report such things in their article? (Using the Witch Hunt Epistemology of the Demo rats, the alleged victim's lack of memory should probably be attributed to drunkenness on her part.) (The linked NY Post piece also discusses - although this isn't new - the glaring holes in the Ramirez story about drunken junk-exposing at Yale.) Or: how is it that the author of the National Review piece could come up with ample grounds for skepticism, right on the spot (namely: how does the logistics of a classmate directing someone else's junk work? Witch Hunt answer: Kavanaugh must have been so blacked-out drunk that he didn't mind someone else pushing his junk in this or that direction), whereas elected rats treat the allegations as a basis for impeachment? (The phrase "journalistic malpractice" also comes up in that piece, for the same reason. So either some coordination of talking points is going on, or the authors are simply speaking common sense, independently. And it is common sense. The "paper of record" apparently lacks it.) One of the rats, Scumbag Kamala Harris - again, a career prosecutor who cannot fail to know about the obligation to hear both sides before rendering a verdict - appears to believe (both in 2018 and this time around) allegations after having heard only the allegation-side. Other things being equal, it is better for such a rat to remain a Senator where the alternative is being elevated to President. [Edit 9/16: Six '20 Demo rats on twitter immediately called for impeachment after the latest "news": Scumbag Harris, the two outright fools O'Rourke and Castro, Warren, Sanders and
Addendum #2: Even if Kavanaugh lied to Congress, that doesn't in any way vindicate or excuse the rats' epistemic criminality. (Heck, even if the accusations against him are true, the Dems did a terrible job of justifying their position that the accusations were credible, just as they routinely do a terrible job justifying their positions generally nowadays. Heck, even if Republicans are scumbags, that still doesn't vindicate Demo rats. The best they could hope to show in that case is that they're less scummy than Republicans, but I very much doubt that they could show that, either. Today's Demo rat party is too much of a sick puppy and, given the nature of epistemic justification, if they happen to be right about something [e.g. climate change] it is an accident. Since when do Demo rats listen to experts on subjects where the expertise would not vindicate the Dem viewpoint? They routinely ignore the majority of economists when it comes to the minimum wage, for example. And anyway, neither Dems nor Reps have particularly good arguments for rejecting libertarianism, and neither party is remotely progressive when it comes to philosophical education of the citizenry which is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time.)
Addendum #3: Some more pro-Kavanaugh commentary that the epistemically reckless Demo rats ("epistemically reckless" is the minimum charge I would level at these willfully scummy creatures) can be relied upon to deliberately/culpably ignore: Dreher and Kimball. And it's not like it pleases me to say that the only thing Demo rats are reliable about these days is being intellectually reckless, lazy, etc. I would rather that they behave like decent human beings.
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Reminder: Leading '20 Dems smeared Kavanaugh
In the polling (not as much the betting markets) the leading 2020 Democratic candidates are: Biden, Harris, Warren and Sanders.
All four of them got in on the act of recklessly smearing Brett Kavanaugh, when the chips were down, when a man's career and reputation were on the line. It reveals not just an intellectual bankruptcy in the Democrat Party, but also a moral bankruptcy.
I've commented in detail on this before. (the context) A brief recap:
(1) Biden is quoted by AP (9/28/18) as saying that Dr. Ford, Kavanaugh's accuser, gave credible testimony (9/27/18) and that both he and the country believed her.
(2) Harris appeared on CNN on 9/18/18, two days after Ford's accusation became public, to say she believed Dr. Ford. This career prosecutor said this before hearing from both sides. This is in addition to her almost surreal interrogation of Kavanaugh in the main portion of the confirmation hearings (where it turns out Harris wasn't holding any cards).
(3) Warren on her facebook page (9/28/18) referred to "multiple, credible accusations" against Kavanaugh, including the ridiculous Swetnick allegation of serial drugged gang rapes (which not only falls apart on its merits but about which Swetnick herself fell apart under scrutiny).
(It should be noted that all three of the above are career attorneys, charged with the professional duty to assess the credibility of putative evidence with care.)
(4) Sanders, in a 9/27/18 press release on his own Senate website, said he believes Dr. Ford.
Ford couldn't remember details about time or place of the alleged incident. Not only that, no one else came forward to say where and when this event might have taken place. Not only that, all of the supposed witnesses to the alleged event, including her friend Leland Keyser, provided sworn statements - statements Biden and Warren, at least, chose unaccountably to disregard - that they have no memory of the alleged event. Not only that, Kavanaugh supplied what would be exculpatory evidence in the calendar he kept.
All this, while fellow Democrats and their enablers in the media either fed the anti-Kavanaugh hysteria (which exploited and weaponized the otherwise honorable and valuable #MeToo movement) or failed to speak up about the injustice of the smear campaign. This goes, as far as I can tell, for all the other '20 Democrat candidates. This goes for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who withheld Ford's accusation for weeks until leaking them to the press at the last minute. My sentiments are with Sen. Graham.
Donald Trump hasn't forgotten about any of this, and will do whatever he can in the general election to eat them alive because of it. As far as I'm concerned, these four leading candidates are caught dead to rights in their epistemic criminality, which they conducted for the sake of power and partisanship. I have some choice expletives for these creatures which I'll refrain from stating here.
What these Demon Rats would have you believe is that their media-frenzy-fed-and-feeding smear campaign is normal and acceptable. They might have you believe that this smear campaign was necessary because the man accused wasn't just anybody, but someone who would assume a position of great power and therefore needs extra "scrutiny." And they would gaslight the rest of us when it comes to standards of evidence and credibility. They then turn around and give fellow Demon Rats a pass under similar circumstances. And if they're this bad when it comes to this no-brainer, how bad must they be on matters of ideology and policy, pray tell? This is the best crop of leading candidates this party can come up with?
The only '20 Dem candidate with much of any prominence in the polling or betting markets, who hasn't morally and intellectually stained himself with this ugliness (except perhaps with his silence about this intended injustice), is Mayor Pete.
"But Trump" or "but Kavanaugh's high school yearbook" (whatever that shows) won't save them from the truth of their own sliminess.
What makes them think they can get away with what they did?
All four of them got in on the act of recklessly smearing Brett Kavanaugh, when the chips were down, when a man's career and reputation were on the line. It reveals not just an intellectual bankruptcy in the Democrat Party, but also a moral bankruptcy.
I've commented in detail on this before. (the context) A brief recap:
(1) Biden is quoted by AP (9/28/18) as saying that Dr. Ford, Kavanaugh's accuser, gave credible testimony (9/27/18) and that both he and the country believed her.
(2) Harris appeared on CNN on 9/18/18, two days after Ford's accusation became public, to say she believed Dr. Ford. This career prosecutor said this before hearing from both sides. This is in addition to her almost surreal interrogation of Kavanaugh in the main portion of the confirmation hearings (where it turns out Harris wasn't holding any cards).
(3) Warren on her facebook page (9/28/18) referred to "multiple, credible accusations" against Kavanaugh, including the ridiculous Swetnick allegation of serial drugged gang rapes (which not only falls apart on its merits but about which Swetnick herself fell apart under scrutiny).
(It should be noted that all three of the above are career attorneys, charged with the professional duty to assess the credibility of putative evidence with care.)
(4) Sanders, in a 9/27/18 press release on his own Senate website, said he believes Dr. Ford.
Ford couldn't remember details about time or place of the alleged incident. Not only that, no one else came forward to say where and when this event might have taken place. Not only that, all of the supposed witnesses to the alleged event, including her friend Leland Keyser, provided sworn statements - statements Biden and Warren, at least, chose unaccountably to disregard - that they have no memory of the alleged event. Not only that, Kavanaugh supplied what would be exculpatory evidence in the calendar he kept.
All this, while fellow Democrats and their enablers in the media either fed the anti-Kavanaugh hysteria (which exploited and weaponized the otherwise honorable and valuable #MeToo movement) or failed to speak up about the injustice of the smear campaign. This goes, as far as I can tell, for all the other '20 Democrat candidates. This goes for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who withheld Ford's accusation for weeks until leaking them to the press at the last minute. My sentiments are with Sen. Graham.
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| Well-placed outrage |
Donald Trump hasn't forgotten about any of this, and will do whatever he can in the general election to eat them alive because of it. As far as I'm concerned, these four leading candidates are caught dead to rights in their epistemic criminality, which they conducted for the sake of power and partisanship. I have some choice expletives for these creatures which I'll refrain from stating here.
What these Demon Rats would have you believe is that their media-frenzy-fed-and-feeding smear campaign is normal and acceptable. They might have you believe that this smear campaign was necessary because the man accused wasn't just anybody, but someone who would assume a position of great power and therefore needs extra "scrutiny." And they would gaslight the rest of us when it comes to standards of evidence and credibility. They then turn around and give fellow Demon Rats a pass under similar circumstances. And if they're this bad when it comes to this no-brainer, how bad must they be on matters of ideology and policy, pray tell? This is the best crop of leading candidates this party can come up with?
The only '20 Dem candidate with much of any prominence in the polling or betting markets, who hasn't morally and intellectually stained himself with this ugliness (except perhaps with his silence about this intended injustice), is Mayor Pete.
"But Trump" or "but Kavanaugh's high school yearbook" (whatever that shows) won't save them from the truth of their own sliminess.
What makes them think they can get away with what they did?
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Scumbag Kamala Harris vs. Obama
If Joe Biden has a spotty record on civil rights, why would Obama make him his VP?
Evidently that is a question that didn't occur to Scumbag Kamala Harris as she schemed her bad-faith ambush on Biden.
Evidently that is a question that didn't occur to Scumbag Kamala Harris as she schemed her bad-faith ambush on Biden.
Terms I've come up with to describe Sen. Harris, descriptors of what people hate in politicians (and it's almost amazing so many observers have failed to notice these in Scumbag Harris): dishonest, phony, opportunistic, panderer, cynical, more clever than wise and not very clever at that, intellectually shallow, race-baiter, malicious, demagogue.
Her role in the Kavanaugh smears when the chips were down says it all; of the Dems getting in on that appalling act, she is surely the most despicable. How would you feel about having her as prosecutor in a case against you? Kavanaugh found out the hard way.
And this is the candidate the betting markets are assigning the best chance to win the nomination?
[Addendum 7/6: Others are catching on!]
[Addendum 7/6: Others are catching on!]
What makes the Left so loathsome and dangerous?
Two major problems with present-day left-wing American politics:
1. The usual problems with leftism I've discussed before, but in particular the clamor among left-wingers - and the lefter the more bizarro and unhinged - for more government taxes, controls, etc.
2. The left's refusal to engage in a serious, responsible, accountable dialogue with the opposition (much less the strongest representatives among their opposition [e.g.]). (The irony of the left's defecating all over Habermas on this count is lost on them....) Today the leftist trend is ever more toward deplatforming, shaming, shunning, ignoring, strawmanning, contempt, hubris, flat-out dishonesty/evasion, ridicule, echo-chambering, mob intimidation, screaming and shouting, gaslighting, crying racism/sexism/transphobia/etc. on razor-thin pretexts, smearing . . . those are some big intellectual vices, and they explain a ton about the deplorable intellectual degeneration/atrophying/disease of the present-day left.
So, combine 1 with 2; what does that mean?
It means that the left seeks to impose their values and vision on the rest of America, through the ever-expanding power of the state -- but they don't want to engage in a good-faith conversation with those upon whom they seek to forcibly impose their values and vision.
This makes today's leftists something other than ordinary fellow citizens: it makes them domestic enemies.
1. The usual problems with leftism I've discussed before, but in particular the clamor among left-wingers - and the lefter the more bizarro and unhinged - for more government taxes, controls, etc.
2. The left's refusal to engage in a serious, responsible, accountable dialogue with the opposition (much less the strongest representatives among their opposition [e.g.]). (The irony of the left's defecating all over Habermas on this count is lost on them....) Today the leftist trend is ever more toward deplatforming, shaming, shunning, ignoring, strawmanning, contempt, hubris, flat-out dishonesty/evasion, ridicule, echo-chambering, mob intimidation, screaming and shouting, gaslighting, crying racism/sexism/transphobia/etc. on razor-thin pretexts, smearing . . . those are some big intellectual vices, and they explain a ton about the deplorable intellectual degeneration/atrophying/disease of the present-day left.
So, combine 1 with 2; what does that mean?
It means that the left seeks to impose their values and vision on the rest of America, through the ever-expanding power of the state -- but they don't want to engage in a good-faith conversation with those upon whom they seek to forcibly impose their values and vision.
This makes today's leftists something other than ordinary fellow citizens: it makes them domestic enemies.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
"Trump's racism" vs. his opposition's dishonesty
[Warning for snowflakes: drill instructor mode below.]
Here's a question that would be asked in a polity governed by reason and wisdom:
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump said that neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017 were "very fine people" - purportedly an implication of his statement that there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017.
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump's statement emboldened and gave succour and comfort to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists, white nationalists, etc.
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, there's nothing that Trump said or did since that time to downplay his giving comfort and succour to white supremacists.
So, the question:
Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?
Isn't that what Trump's haters/opposition would have predicted might ensue? That non-whites would have to live in fear in Trump's America?
The reason there hasn't been a repeat of Charlottesville is because the narrative Trump's haters have promoted since that time is a lie - the product of willful dishonesty or stupidity. In short, his haters are almost unbelievably stupid, or fucking liars, or a combination of the two.
And it really isn't difficult to figure this out, with some intellectual honesty and a bit of persistence.
The facts:
Politifact provides the transcript from Trump's Aug. 15, 2017 press conference in which the "very fine people" phrase is used. (The posting of the transcript at Politifact is dated Apr. 16, 2019. Question: why the fuck would it take Politifact almost 2 years to post the transcript? More on that in a bit.)
Now, Politifact has a rating system for the truthfulness of a statement, ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."
Politifact's "rating" or determination at the bottom of the posted transcript is: "full context is needed."
Well, no shit. But what does that imply about Trump's haters (including those in the press - and you can see how even the reporters questioning Trump in his press conference seem to have comprehension issues [where did they receive their "education"?])?
If Politifact were to do what it really ought to do in addition to posting the transcript, and that is to assess the truth or falsity of the Trump haters' claims that he called neo-Nazis "very fine people," what would be the correct rating for Politifact to give those claims?
The claim that Trump said neo-Nazis were "very fine people" is a pants-on-fire lie. It indicates such a degree of disregard for truth and context by his haters that they shouldn't be considered credible sources about what their opposition says or thinks.
And what's more, it definitely damns the "news" sources - Trump is exactly right to call this "fake news" - who emboldened Trump's haters and gave them aid and succour in their lie. The "news" organizations - and this goes definitely for CNN - either knew it was a lie, or failed in their job as news sources to get the full story. Scott Adams has all the archived evidence of CNN's blatant dishonesty. Will CNN ever issue a correction, or will it slink away into silence in hopes that they won't be called to account about this again? Will they admit that they unprofessionally peddled a lie to the American people, or will they unprofessionally avoid all accountability for their peddling the lie?
Either alternative puts CNN (and other similar situated "news" organizations) in a very tough spot. They have been caught dead to rights, promoting a lie. The best option at this point for CNN would be to admit that it's no longer a news organization - certainly not in its politics coverage - but a selective and biased source plus selective and biased commentary.
So fuck CNN, and fuck all the Democrats/left/"progressives" who peddled this lie.
One thing that these Trump haters do a lot of, is to say how scared immigrants are that Trump's goons will come into their cities and homes and destroy their lives.
But the real, main cause of the immigrants' fear on this count is that they listen so much to dishonest and/or monumentally stupid Democrats who have every partisan political motivation to stir up the fear among their constituents.
So fuck the Democrats/left/"progressives" yet again for their epistemologically criminal fear-mongering.
Anyway, why did it take Politifact so long to post that transcript? It's because the dishonest partisan Dem/left/"prog" had stonewalled long enough in the face of Scott Adams calling them to task.
Back to the original question: why didn't Trump's remarks about "very fine people" embolden white supremacists? Because very shortly after that press conference, Trump issued an unequivocal condemnation of white supremacy, calling out such organizations as the KKK by name. He sent the unequivocal message that he does not support or condone their activities in any way.
That, too, is a fact disregarded by the dishonest left/Dem/"prog" crowd. (I almost said "stupid/dishonest" but stupidity doesn't explain blatantly disregarding facts. These are intellectually dishonest pieces of shit.)
Fact is, the scummy Dem/left/"progs" weave an entire false narrative about Trump's supposed racism by going out of their way to assume the worst when Trump says something that might be tied to some ethnic or racial subject. This race-hustling has become the stock in trade of the entire party, indeed the entire intellectual culture of the Left, including the parasites of subsidized classrooms (who should be swept aside).
By the way, the URL that I just linked contains as its first search result this item from HuffPo. It's the same basic epistemological criminality, this time applied to Ayn Rand. And I dare say that this example is typical of leftist Rand-bashing:
Given such serious comprehension problems, one has to ask: was he "educated" by parasites of subsidized classrooms?
I dare submit that the entire intellectual culture of the Left has become (if it wasn't always) a dishonest cesspool in which opposition ideas are constantly caricatured so as to be made to look weaker by comparison to the "superior" leftist alternative. Whenever an opportunity for a serious debate about their caricatures presents itself, they run away like cowards. I've seen this happen every time when it comes to their caricatures of Rand (their most formidable intellectual adversary). And in this case it's entirely no accident that the parasites of subsidized classrooms aid and abet them in their smears; if Randian ideas take hold in the culture, they (in their present form, that is) are out of a job and stripped of their power to "educate" the youth.
The way the Dems/left/"progs" treat Trump and Rand falls into a pattern of an intellectually-bankrupt non-approach to examining competing socio-political-economic ideas. It's just that this corruption comes out most blatantly and obviously in the case of Trump (because, well, he's president) and Rand (because she's their most formidable intellectual adversary, and she's got them running around like decapitated chickens trying to "refute" her).
(The intellectual criminality in the latter case, though, is greater because it goes all the way to the upper echelons of the academic food chain, whereas in the former it's mostly political hacks (including the political "news" generators at CNN) doing the dirty work. The chief tactic used among the professional rationalizers in order to rationalize not taking Rand seriously is to pay attention only to her real or supposed weaknesses while disregarding her strengths. That's it; that's all it comes to. There's no way that any of them could honestly look at the goings-on at the Ayn Rand Society and conclude that professional philosophers couldn't take Rand seriously. What makes their rationalizations more dangerous and destructive than those of rank-and-file leftists is that they are trained in the art of making their arguments appear the stronger even if their position is the weaker. (IOW, they're a variety of sophist. One can observe the mental gymnastics of such anti-Rand sophists here, for instance. They might try to rationalize how a high-profile Aristotle scholar such as Gotthelf could also be an Objectivist, but they certainly have no answer that fits in with their highly dubious anti-Rand narrative as to why Hospers would take Rand so seriously despite not being an Objectivist himself. They have no consistent-with-narrative answer as to how this president of the American Society for Aesthetics [1983-4] would praise Atlas Shrugged in such glowing terms. What, oh what, is a sophist to do?))
The "very fine people" hoax is just one clear-cut, dead-to-rights example of Dem/left/"prog" dishonesty, but it's far from the only such instance. Just the other day, commenting on the Democrat debate the night before, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ("Morning Joe") said (paraphrasing) that "Trump called Mexicans rapists." Scarborough doesn't strike me as the dishonest type, so an alternative explanation for this is that he's another victim of the parasites of subsidized classrooms, rendered unfit to think at the higher levels.
If you're not a piece of intellectual shit, on the other hand, you can easily make sense of what Trump was saying, which is that there is too much criminal activity in our country due to way too many people of a criminal bent crossing the southern border illegally (and then coddled by Democrats). (Democrats/leftists/"progs" stupidly/dishonestly conflate illegal immigration and all immigration when they say Trump is anti-immigrant. They then stir up fear among their immigrant constituencies that Trump is hostile to all of them and has an agenda actually in place to deport all people who are here illegally.) Then we have Nancy Peloser lying that "Trump's thing is 'Make America White Again' " and that the border barrier addition Trump wants to build - a barrier that by definition would reduce only illegal immigration - is a symbol of racism.
(And what the fuck is Joe Scarborough doing bringing up something Trump "said" four years ago now, at the very outset of his campaign, when he was a political newcomer with no serious experience in political communication? How the fuck, exactly, was Trump supposed to know about the iron law of politics that if a statement can be construed in its worst possible light it will be and with the aid of complicit "news" outlets no less?)
How can pieces of intellectual shit such as Peloser, CNN, the Democrats, et al, be expected to get it right about anything of fundamental importance in the realm of politics? I mean, they might get it right when they cite this or that fact and figure they have actually studied, or heck, the natural scientists among them might well get it right about the scientific things they study, but as to what constitutes racism, or what constitutes sound government policy, or what constitutes the American ethos, or what constitutes corporations victimizing people . . . how can these people claim so much as a shred of credibility any longer? They habitually lie through their teeth, and/or are hubristic fools.
A few months back I made a post titled "Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and their haters." In that post I said:
But as to the exceedingly shitty nature of Trump-haters as well as the Rand-haters? Well, since right around the time of the posting excerpted above I have made the following abundantly (if not overwhelmingly) documented posts exposing what these creatures are up to.
Trump's haters:
Rand's haters:
Now, I don't know whether the totality of the evidence presented in these links qualifies as a mountain, but it sure is a heck of a lot of evidence and the essential nature of the phenomena are captured well enough for me to rest my case with utmost certainty that any plausible, not-self-defeating defense of these creatures' MO is nowhere to be found. They are a bunch of unphilosophical, caught-dead-to-rights, conceited scumbags who deserve the lion's share of blame for what a shitshow the American political "conversation" has become. The only question remaining is addressed to the remaining decent Democrats whose voices and input have been (inevitably and irreversibly) drowned out by the ever more strident, ever more statist, ever more anti-Western-civ scumbags (a group now spearheaded by an ignorant, toxic moral exhibitionist) who've taken over the party: And you are still a Democrat?
If the Dems/left/"progressives," in the name of the best within themselves (it's in there, somewhere), ever manage to get their act together, that means having to confront the Randian "menace," discover that their fears are entirely unfounded, and become Aristotelians - in short, jump on the team and come on in for the big win, for fuck's sake already.
[Addendum: The potential/future leftist "recruits" for philosophy boot camp could sure use a drill instructor highly skilled in the art of integration/dialectic. Where might such possibly be found, I wonder?]
[Addendum #2: In the interests of full dialectical non-one-sided context-keeping, the best piece of evidence that Trump harbors animus toward a minority group is his original proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. The proper term for this proposal would be Islamophobic, not racist, since Islam isn't a race (a point Trump's haters are too stupid or dishonest to grasp). Trump's haters might have gotten more mileage out of his apparently unqualified Islamophobia (as well as his early 1970s housing company policies) if they hadn't already blown their credibility on just about everything else, as already demonstrated.]
[Addendum #3: I've been getting some pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post where I've been posting it online, but the pushback hasn't been very good. One objection I am getting is that I'm really hard on Dems/left/"progs" while not being "fair and balanced" enough to acknowledge all the misdeeds and intellectual bankruptcy among Republicans/right/conservatives (with or without scare-quotes), such that I might appear to come off as some kind of partisan GOP shill. So let me start by saying, the GOP has a shitty track record on LGBT+ rights, and clearly so. So while the left want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings (you see, the left got its well-earned victory with gay marriage, but it just couldn't help overstepping into trampling on others' freedoms, now could it), if the GOP had its way there wouldn't even be gay civil unions. So fuck 'em on that score, they have a lot of rehabilitating to do to regain the moral credibility squandered there. One can find a good amount of commentary (including polemics) on the GOP under my 'republicans' tag. One extensive listing of GOP intellectual misdeeds is contained in this post in a long paragraph beginning with "Before continuing...". Another point of pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post has to with data purporting to show a rise in hate crimes, particularly murders by white supremacists, under (and therefore presumably attributable to) Trump. One such releasing of data, by the Anti-Defamation League, is relayed uncritically by WaPo writers while being torched by someone who looked into the ADL report. (Further context.) This, all in connection with my lead question, "Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?" The Dems/left/"progs" would have the American electorate believe that this sort of thing would be a regular occurrence under Trump because of a culture of hatred he would unleash. As it turns out, the number of what the ADL calls extremism-related murders (using its methods criticized at the "torched" link) in the year 2018 is all of 50 in a nation of 340M+. 39 of those are murders "by white supremacists," whether ideological or non-ideological in nature, and this figure evidently includes the 17 people gunned down in the Parkland, FL school shooting (2/14/2018), which all on its own would nearly account for the increase from 18 "murders by white supremacists" in 2017 to 39 in 2018. Be very wary of statistics cited by known-to-be-partisan "news" outlets. Has the worn-out credibility of the anti-Trump media not been made thoroughly apparent yet? ffs Anyway, there seem to be a number of readers who just don't like to see it being said that vast swaths of today's Dem/left/"prog" crowd have become basically demonically warped morons in their (political) thinking, or that the intellectual culture of the left is essentially a basket case, but that's what the exhaustively-documented facts say, so tough shit. Just follow the gobs of links I provide in this and other posts tagged 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' for incontrovertible proof of this seemingly hard-to-swallow truth. It pains me that it is true. But I offer an undeniably no-brainer solution, goddammit.]
[Addendum #4, in the interests of dialectical completeness: Well, guess what. Here is an alternate, well-supported take on Trump's remarks about Charlottesville. It is decidedly negative. It hits Trump right where he usually or often deserves to be hit, and for which he has been caught out countless times -- his casual relationship to the truth. But what it is NOT is the line of attack that Trump's haters and opposition media have put forward, because that line is absolutely indefensible given the context, which includes multiple statements across a few days in which he condemns in no uncertain terms: hate; bigotry; racism; white supremacy; white nationalism; neo-Nazis; KKK; and "other" hate groups. The only term he apparently left out was: alt-right. (Is Trump ideologically aware enough to know what the "alt-right" is? How many people can pin down the meaning of "alt-right" so that it isn't used as some fast and loose smear, as though that sort of thing would ever happen in politics?) Nowhere in this piece is it asserted that Trump stated, implied, insinuated, or anything else that he considered white supremacists to be "very fine people." That is as much a lie as ever.
And guess what else. This eminently reasonable takedown of Trump on his handling of Charlottesville is performed by an Objectivist (adherent to basically the entirety of Ayn Rand's philosophy, or at the very least all its fundamental principles [and he was one noteworthy player in the "Peikoff-Kelley schism" literature, siding against Kelley on technical grounds within Objectivist epistemology...]). So how is it that an Objectivist can outperform by a mile a whole army of Dem/left/"prog" people, I wonder?]
[Addendum #5: This contains the most brutal anti-Trump comments section I've encountered, with lots of erudition to boot. But it's a bunch of conservatives doing the brutalizing, not the left/Dem scum who've squandered all their credibility. Trump's best critics are not to be found on the intellectually bankrupt/collapsing scum-left.]
Here's a question that would be asked in a polity governed by reason and wisdom:
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump said that neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017 were "very fine people" - purportedly an implication of his statement that there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017.
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump's statement emboldened and gave succour and comfort to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists, white nationalists, etc.
If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, there's nothing that Trump said or did since that time to downplay his giving comfort and succour to white supremacists.
So, the question:
Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?
Isn't that what Trump's haters/opposition would have predicted might ensue? That non-whites would have to live in fear in Trump's America?
The reason there hasn't been a repeat of Charlottesville is because the narrative Trump's haters have promoted since that time is a lie - the product of willful dishonesty or stupidity. In short, his haters are almost unbelievably stupid, or fucking liars, or a combination of the two.
And it really isn't difficult to figure this out, with some intellectual honesty and a bit of persistence.
The facts:
Politifact provides the transcript from Trump's Aug. 15, 2017 press conference in which the "very fine people" phrase is used. (The posting of the transcript at Politifact is dated Apr. 16, 2019. Question: why the fuck would it take Politifact almost 2 years to post the transcript? More on that in a bit.)
Now, Politifact has a rating system for the truthfulness of a statement, ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."
Politifact's "rating" or determination at the bottom of the posted transcript is: "full context is needed."
Well, no shit. But what does that imply about Trump's haters (including those in the press - and you can see how even the reporters questioning Trump in his press conference seem to have comprehension issues [where did they receive their "education"?])?
If Politifact were to do what it really ought to do in addition to posting the transcript, and that is to assess the truth or falsity of the Trump haters' claims that he called neo-Nazis "very fine people," what would be the correct rating for Politifact to give those claims?
The claim that Trump said neo-Nazis were "very fine people" is a pants-on-fire lie. It indicates such a degree of disregard for truth and context by his haters that they shouldn't be considered credible sources about what their opposition says or thinks.
And what's more, it definitely damns the "news" sources - Trump is exactly right to call this "fake news" - who emboldened Trump's haters and gave them aid and succour in their lie. The "news" organizations - and this goes definitely for CNN - either knew it was a lie, or failed in their job as news sources to get the full story. Scott Adams has all the archived evidence of CNN's blatant dishonesty. Will CNN ever issue a correction, or will it slink away into silence in hopes that they won't be called to account about this again? Will they admit that they unprofessionally peddled a lie to the American people, or will they unprofessionally avoid all accountability for their peddling the lie?
Either alternative puts CNN (and other similar situated "news" organizations) in a very tough spot. They have been caught dead to rights, promoting a lie. The best option at this point for CNN would be to admit that it's no longer a news organization - certainly not in its politics coverage - but a selective and biased source plus selective and biased commentary.
So fuck CNN, and fuck all the Democrats/left/"progressives" who peddled this lie.
One thing that these Trump haters do a lot of, is to say how scared immigrants are that Trump's goons will come into their cities and homes and destroy their lives.
But the real, main cause of the immigrants' fear on this count is that they listen so much to dishonest and/or monumentally stupid Democrats who have every partisan political motivation to stir up the fear among their constituents.
So fuck the Democrats/left/"progressives" yet again for their epistemologically criminal fear-mongering.
Anyway, why did it take Politifact so long to post that transcript? It's because the dishonest partisan Dem/left/"prog" had stonewalled long enough in the face of Scott Adams calling them to task.
Back to the original question: why didn't Trump's remarks about "very fine people" embolden white supremacists? Because very shortly after that press conference, Trump issued an unequivocal condemnation of white supremacy, calling out such organizations as the KKK by name. He sent the unequivocal message that he does not support or condone their activities in any way.
That, too, is a fact disregarded by the dishonest left/Dem/"prog" crowd. (I almost said "stupid/dishonest" but stupidity doesn't explain blatantly disregarding facts. These are intellectually dishonest pieces of shit.)
Fact is, the scummy Dem/left/"progs" weave an entire false narrative about Trump's supposed racism by going out of their way to assume the worst when Trump says something that might be tied to some ethnic or racial subject. This race-hustling has become the stock in trade of the entire party, indeed the entire intellectual culture of the Left, including the parasites of subsidized classrooms (who should be swept aside).
By the way, the URL that I just linked contains as its first search result this item from HuffPo. It's the same basic epistemological criminality, this time applied to Ayn Rand. And I dare say that this example is typical of leftist Rand-bashing:
Letter from a GaltianThis hubristic piece of shit apparently either didn't read the Galt speech or did read it but has serious comprehension problems. After all, what is John Galt but a scientist? What is Hugh Akston if not an educated member of society?
“I am really curios (sic) to know what motivates the mind of a socialist,” you write. “Why do you think its (sic) fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not?”
(Apparently the email software used by producers doesn’t have a spell-check function. Fitting, I guess, for people whose fictional hero described scientists and other educated members of society as “parasites of subsidized classrooms.”)
Given such serious comprehension problems, one has to ask: was he "educated" by parasites of subsidized classrooms?
I dare submit that the entire intellectual culture of the Left has become (if it wasn't always) a dishonest cesspool in which opposition ideas are constantly caricatured so as to be made to look weaker by comparison to the "superior" leftist alternative. Whenever an opportunity for a serious debate about their caricatures presents itself, they run away like cowards. I've seen this happen every time when it comes to their caricatures of Rand (their most formidable intellectual adversary). And in this case it's entirely no accident that the parasites of subsidized classrooms aid and abet them in their smears; if Randian ideas take hold in the culture, they (in their present form, that is) are out of a job and stripped of their power to "educate" the youth.
The way the Dems/left/"progs" treat Trump and Rand falls into a pattern of an intellectually-bankrupt non-approach to examining competing socio-political-economic ideas. It's just that this corruption comes out most blatantly and obviously in the case of Trump (because, well, he's president) and Rand (because she's their most formidable intellectual adversary, and she's got them running around like decapitated chickens trying to "refute" her).
(The intellectual criminality in the latter case, though, is greater because it goes all the way to the upper echelons of the academic food chain, whereas in the former it's mostly political hacks (including the political "news" generators at CNN) doing the dirty work. The chief tactic used among the professional rationalizers in order to rationalize not taking Rand seriously is to pay attention only to her real or supposed weaknesses while disregarding her strengths. That's it; that's all it comes to. There's no way that any of them could honestly look at the goings-on at the Ayn Rand Society and conclude that professional philosophers couldn't take Rand seriously. What makes their rationalizations more dangerous and destructive than those of rank-and-file leftists is that they are trained in the art of making their arguments appear the stronger even if their position is the weaker. (IOW, they're a variety of sophist. One can observe the mental gymnastics of such anti-Rand sophists here, for instance. They might try to rationalize how a high-profile Aristotle scholar such as Gotthelf could also be an Objectivist, but they certainly have no answer that fits in with their highly dubious anti-Rand narrative as to why Hospers would take Rand so seriously despite not being an Objectivist himself. They have no consistent-with-narrative answer as to how this president of the American Society for Aesthetics [1983-4] would praise Atlas Shrugged in such glowing terms. What, oh what, is a sophist to do?))
The "very fine people" hoax is just one clear-cut, dead-to-rights example of Dem/left/"prog" dishonesty, but it's far from the only such instance. Just the other day, commenting on the Democrat debate the night before, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ("Morning Joe") said (paraphrasing) that "Trump called Mexicans rapists." Scarborough doesn't strike me as the dishonest type, so an alternative explanation for this is that he's another victim of the parasites of subsidized classrooms, rendered unfit to think at the higher levels.
If you're not a piece of intellectual shit, on the other hand, you can easily make sense of what Trump was saying, which is that there is too much criminal activity in our country due to way too many people of a criminal bent crossing the southern border illegally (and then coddled by Democrats). (Democrats/leftists/"progs" stupidly/dishonestly conflate illegal immigration and all immigration when they say Trump is anti-immigrant. They then stir up fear among their immigrant constituencies that Trump is hostile to all of them and has an agenda actually in place to deport all people who are here illegally.) Then we have Nancy Peloser lying that "Trump's thing is 'Make America White Again' " and that the border barrier addition Trump wants to build - a barrier that by definition would reduce only illegal immigration - is a symbol of racism.
(And what the fuck is Joe Scarborough doing bringing up something Trump "said" four years ago now, at the very outset of his campaign, when he was a political newcomer with no serious experience in political communication? How the fuck, exactly, was Trump supposed to know about the iron law of politics that if a statement can be construed in its worst possible light it will be and with the aid of complicit "news" outlets no less?)
How can pieces of intellectual shit such as Peloser, CNN, the Democrats, et al, be expected to get it right about anything of fundamental importance in the realm of politics? I mean, they might get it right when they cite this or that fact and figure they have actually studied, or heck, the natural scientists among them might well get it right about the scientific things they study, but as to what constitutes racism, or what constitutes sound government policy, or what constitutes the American ethos, or what constitutes corporations victimizing people . . . how can these people claim so much as a shred of credibility any longer? They habitually lie through their teeth, and/or are hubristic fools.
A few months back I made a post titled "Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and their haters." In that post I said:
Sure Trump says a lot of dumb things, can be quite the dick sometimes. But have you seen his haters? They often behave like absolute pieces of shit.
Sure Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired, but have you seen how her haters polemicize against her? They often behave like absolute pieces of intellectual shit.
And I can, if and when I have the time and interest to do so, marshal a mountain of evidence to prove all of this....Now, I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Trump says a lot of dumb things and can be quite the dick sometimes (do I really need to go through the motions there? Don't his own fans admit this while still preferring him to the even-more-toxic alternative?), and I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired (which would establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rand isn't the expert on everything philosophy-related as quite a number of her devoted followers believe). (I mean her polemics directed at philosophers, that is; I think at the very least the vast majority of her political polemics are so on-target as to be beyond serious criticism, and her diagnosis for why the political creatures whom she demolishes are the way they are is based on a general fact about our political culture: intellectual bankruptcy.)
But as to the exceedingly shitty nature of Trump-haters as well as the Rand-haters? Well, since right around the time of the posting excerpted above I have made the following abundantly (if not overwhelmingly) documented posts exposing what these creatures are up to.
Trump's haters:
- Philosophy professor on whether Trump is racist (How would responsible philosophers assess putative evidence of Trump racism presented by his haters?)
- Prediction: Trump (or a Republican) will win in 2020 (how today's Dems/leftists/"progs" generally speaking are shitheads, with dozens of documenting links in just one paragraph; the anti-Kavanaugh smears in particular reveal the nature of the present-day Dem/left/"prog" cesspool, and that includes the current top 3, and top 4 out of 5, front-runners for '20, and that goes especially for current front-runner, Scumbag Kamala Harris)
Rand's haters:
Now, I don't know whether the totality of the evidence presented in these links qualifies as a mountain, but it sure is a heck of a lot of evidence and the essential nature of the phenomena are captured well enough for me to rest my case with utmost certainty that any plausible, not-self-defeating defense of these creatures' MO is nowhere to be found. They are a bunch of unphilosophical, caught-dead-to-rights, conceited scumbags who deserve the lion's share of blame for what a shitshow the American political "conversation" has become. The only question remaining is addressed to the remaining decent Democrats whose voices and input have been (inevitably and irreversibly) drowned out by the ever more strident, ever more statist, ever more anti-Western-civ scumbags (a group now spearheaded by an ignorant, toxic moral exhibitionist) who've taken over the party: And you are still a Democrat?
If the Dems/left/"progressives," in the name of the best within themselves (it's in there, somewhere), ever manage to get their act together, that means having to confront the Randian "menace," discover that their fears are entirely unfounded, and become Aristotelians - in short, jump on the team and come on in for the big win, for fuck's sake already.
[Addendum: The potential/future leftist "recruits" for philosophy boot camp could sure use a drill instructor highly skilled in the art of integration/dialectic. Where might such possibly be found, I wonder?]
[Addendum #2: In the interests of full dialectical non-one-sided context-keeping, the best piece of evidence that Trump harbors animus toward a minority group is his original proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. The proper term for this proposal would be Islamophobic, not racist, since Islam isn't a race (a point Trump's haters are too stupid or dishonest to grasp). Trump's haters might have gotten more mileage out of his apparently unqualified Islamophobia (as well as his early 1970s housing company policies) if they hadn't already blown their credibility on just about everything else, as already demonstrated.]
[Addendum #3: I've been getting some pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post where I've been posting it online, but the pushback hasn't been very good. One objection I am getting is that I'm really hard on Dems/left/"progs" while not being "fair and balanced" enough to acknowledge all the misdeeds and intellectual bankruptcy among Republicans/right/conservatives (with or without scare-quotes), such that I might appear to come off as some kind of partisan GOP shill. So let me start by saying, the GOP has a shitty track record on LGBT+ rights, and clearly so. So while the left want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings (you see, the left got its well-earned victory with gay marriage, but it just couldn't help overstepping into trampling on others' freedoms, now could it), if the GOP had its way there wouldn't even be gay civil unions. So fuck 'em on that score, they have a lot of rehabilitating to do to regain the moral credibility squandered there. One can find a good amount of commentary (including polemics) on the GOP under my 'republicans' tag. One extensive listing of GOP intellectual misdeeds is contained in this post in a long paragraph beginning with "Before continuing...". Another point of pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post has to with data purporting to show a rise in hate crimes, particularly murders by white supremacists, under (and therefore presumably attributable to) Trump. One such releasing of data, by the Anti-Defamation League, is relayed uncritically by WaPo writers while being torched by someone who looked into the ADL report. (Further context.) This, all in connection with my lead question, "Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?" The Dems/left/"progs" would have the American electorate believe that this sort of thing would be a regular occurrence under Trump because of a culture of hatred he would unleash. As it turns out, the number of what the ADL calls extremism-related murders (using its methods criticized at the "torched" link) in the year 2018 is all of 50 in a nation of 340M+. 39 of those are murders "by white supremacists," whether ideological or non-ideological in nature, and this figure evidently includes the 17 people gunned down in the Parkland, FL school shooting (2/14/2018), which all on its own would nearly account for the increase from 18 "murders by white supremacists" in 2017 to 39 in 2018. Be very wary of statistics cited by known-to-be-partisan "news" outlets. Has the worn-out credibility of the anti-Trump media not been made thoroughly apparent yet? ffs Anyway, there seem to be a number of readers who just don't like to see it being said that vast swaths of today's Dem/left/"prog" crowd have become basically demonically warped morons in their (political) thinking, or that the intellectual culture of the left is essentially a basket case, but that's what the exhaustively-documented facts say, so tough shit. Just follow the gobs of links I provide in this and other posts tagged 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' for incontrovertible proof of this seemingly hard-to-swallow truth. It pains me that it is true. But I offer an undeniably no-brainer solution, goddammit.]
[Addendum #4, in the interests of dialectical completeness: Well, guess what. Here is an alternate, well-supported take on Trump's remarks about Charlottesville. It is decidedly negative. It hits Trump right where he usually or often deserves to be hit, and for which he has been caught out countless times -- his casual relationship to the truth. But what it is NOT is the line of attack that Trump's haters and opposition media have put forward, because that line is absolutely indefensible given the context, which includes multiple statements across a few days in which he condemns in no uncertain terms: hate; bigotry; racism; white supremacy; white nationalism; neo-Nazis; KKK; and "other" hate groups. The only term he apparently left out was: alt-right. (Is Trump ideologically aware enough to know what the "alt-right" is? How many people can pin down the meaning of "alt-right" so that it isn't used as some fast and loose smear, as though that sort of thing would ever happen in politics?) Nowhere in this piece is it asserted that Trump stated, implied, insinuated, or anything else that he considered white supremacists to be "very fine people." That is as much a lie as ever.
And guess what else. This eminently reasonable takedown of Trump on his handling of Charlottesville is performed by an Objectivist (adherent to basically the entirety of Ayn Rand's philosophy, or at the very least all its fundamental principles [and he was one noteworthy player in the "Peikoff-Kelley schism" literature, siding against Kelley on technical grounds within Objectivist epistemology...]). So how is it that an Objectivist can outperform by a mile a whole army of Dem/left/"prog" people, I wonder?]
[Addendum #5: This contains the most brutal anti-Trump comments section I've encountered, with lots of erudition to boot. But it's a bunch of conservatives doing the brutalizing, not the left/Dem scum who've squandered all their credibility. Trump's best critics are not to be found on the intellectually bankrupt/collapsing scum-left.]
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
On rape accusations against political figures (and today's left/Dem scummery)
The first rule of assessing rape accusations against political figures (news-cycle context) is: be very, very skeptical. Why?
I might have thought it should go without saying why. But to spell it out: Because the consequences of a public believing such rape accusations can have major political implications - and people motivated by political considerations know this. That gives people with political motivations an incentive to make (or promote/hype) the allegations, at little to no cost to themselves.
It's almost as though - in the political context - we should assume that the person making the accusation is doing so out of political motivation, unless there is clear and compelling evidence to support it.
(There's also this: politicians in great numbers are intellectually bankrupt, cynical, hypocritical, etc. - but it tends to ruin political careers when serious and especially criminal wrongdoing is uncovered. Despite all the intellectual and moral corruption in politics, there is a vetting process for the really serious shit.)
Otherwise, the rape accusations can be exploited in the expected hypocritical ways by whichever party stands to gain from the exploitation.
The chief offenders in this regard nowadays are Democrats.
Watch for the buzzword "credibly accused." The Demon Rat scum applied that phrase to Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh - a despicable display of Demon Rat intellectual and moral bankruptcy I detail here. (And as I mentioned in a subsequent post, not only could the accuser(s) not provide specifics as to time and place, but no one else came forward to say what supposed party it might have been that both Ford and Kavanaugh attended. Shouldn't that fact have jumped right out at the lawyers on the Judiciary Committee ffs?)
Watch for Demon Rats going through mental gymnastics so that they don't have to call on a Democrat accused of rape (or one proven to have worn blackface - something a GOP politician has next to zero chance of getting away with) to resign if it means losing power to Republicans.
Watch for Demon Rats to get skeptical all of a sudden when a Democrat president is accused of rape.
Watch for Demon Rats to immediately assume the worst (i.e., sexual assault) and go out of their way to ignore context when an opposing politician says "grab 'em by the pussy."
Hell, the Demon Rats' cynical behavior on these counts is exactly why rape accusations against political figures should be met with skepticism, else such behavior only encourages politically-motivated false/unfounded accusations.
It's just like with impeaching a sitting president for obstruction of justice: the Democrats blew their credibility when holding Clinton and Trump to different standards. They are pinned in a corner of their own making, dead to rights. (Same goes for the generations of socialist/leftist intellectuals who by all rights are roundly discredited by historical practice and sound economic and moral theory; they had their chance and they blew it, on a catastrophic scale.) Such is the logical consequence of culpable intellectual bankruptcy/corruption. Until they ever clean up their act, fuck 'em!
I might have thought it should go without saying why. But to spell it out: Because the consequences of a public believing such rape accusations can have major political implications - and people motivated by political considerations know this. That gives people with political motivations an incentive to make (or promote/hype) the allegations, at little to no cost to themselves.
It's almost as though - in the political context - we should assume that the person making the accusation is doing so out of political motivation, unless there is clear and compelling evidence to support it.
(There's also this: politicians in great numbers are intellectually bankrupt, cynical, hypocritical, etc. - but it tends to ruin political careers when serious and especially criminal wrongdoing is uncovered. Despite all the intellectual and moral corruption in politics, there is a vetting process for the really serious shit.)
Otherwise, the rape accusations can be exploited in the expected hypocritical ways by whichever party stands to gain from the exploitation.
The chief offenders in this regard nowadays are Democrats.
Watch for the buzzword "credibly accused." The Demon Rat scum applied that phrase to Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh - a despicable display of Demon Rat intellectual and moral bankruptcy I detail here. (And as I mentioned in a subsequent post, not only could the accuser(s) not provide specifics as to time and place, but no one else came forward to say what supposed party it might have been that both Ford and Kavanaugh attended. Shouldn't that fact have jumped right out at the lawyers on the Judiciary Committee ffs?)
Watch for Demon Rats going through mental gymnastics so that they don't have to call on a Democrat accused of rape (or one proven to have worn blackface - something a GOP politician has next to zero chance of getting away with) to resign if it means losing power to Republicans.
Watch for Demon Rats to get skeptical all of a sudden when a Democrat president is accused of rape.
Watch for Demon Rats to immediately assume the worst (i.e., sexual assault) and go out of their way to ignore context when an opposing politician says "grab 'em by the pussy."
Hell, the Demon Rats' cynical behavior on these counts is exactly why rape accusations against political figures should be met with skepticism, else such behavior only encourages politically-motivated false/unfounded accusations.
It's just like with impeaching a sitting president for obstruction of justice: the Democrats blew their credibility when holding Clinton and Trump to different standards. They are pinned in a corner of their own making, dead to rights. (Same goes for the generations of socialist/leftist intellectuals who by all rights are roundly discredited by historical practice and sound economic and moral theory; they had their chance and they blew it, on a catastrophic scale.) Such is the logical consequence of culpable intellectual bankruptcy/corruption. Until they ever clean up their act, fuck 'em!
Monday, June 24, 2019
How shitty is Lisa Duggan, leading Rand-basher du jour?
[Note 2/4/20: I finish up on demolishing Scumbag Duggan's so-called scholarship and credibility here.]
[A follow-up to my earlier post, "How shitty are Rand-bashers?"]
I've already commented on this despicable creature here, primarily on the basis of how she makes a mockery of the very activity of intellectual inquiry. As with other leftist losers/scum, by perverting the very form of intellectual inquiry and thereby undermining its integrity, they produce junk content. The way Duggan replied to me in email when I asked her reasonable pointed questions virtually assures that her "scholarship" is shitty.
Lisa Duggan is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the latest specimen of an author making the (futile) effort to discredit Rand in book form, with Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019). (How this piece of shit got published by a university press is a good question. How low are the standards for the series this is a part of? What clique of leftist scum is involved?) She identifies herself on her twitter as a pinko/commie activist. If Mean Girl is the "best" commentary on Rand the Left can come up with, 62 years after Atlas Shrugged, the left is kaput as a credible intellectual force.
As I pointed out in my commentary linked above, I have not read Duggan's book. All the signs point to it being a waste of time. The usual dishonest/slimy/scummy/lowlife/smear/sneer/strawman leftist tactics appear well on display there, and I've seen the tactics a thousand times. The very title of the book itself is a dishonest smear.
How does Duggan promote her work in excerpt/preview form? Here we go. First off, the premise that Rand is "the spirit of our time" cannot possibly be true, for if it were, Duggan wouldn't be holding a university position (or, preferably, would have her act cleaned way up). (Within the intellectual thug as we know her is an Aristotelian yearning to break out -- but that's up to her.) For another, if it were true, a critical mass of people would have internalized the themes/content of Understanding Objectivism (i.e., become in essence Aristotelian cognizers). But let's get to some specific claims she makes, shall we?
For one thing, Duggan is clueless about the history of Objectivist thought. For instance, she writes:
So why would she lump Jimmy Wales in with the rest of these business people as if they were all more or less alike in their Rand-expertise?
She makes the following claim:
She writes:
Let's say that a philosopher influences a bunch of scumbags who go on to wreak destruction on the world. Karl Marx is one such philosopher. But leftists counter that with "oh, but that's not Marxism proper and those are bad people, how about you pay attention instead to Luxemburg, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm [whose Man for Himself is excellent, BTW], Cohen, Harvey, et al." Good luck getting these same folks to acknowledge Hospers, Gotthelf, Miller, Den Uyl, Rasmussen, Sciabarra, Salmieri, Tara Smith, et al. For leftists, their readings of Rand reign supreme and to hell with how other readers (who must not be very bright/reflective/critical) receive Rand's writings; but turn the tables on Marx/Marxism and they scream foul.
Duggan continues:
One of Rand's wider philosophical principles -- well, in a sense the fundamental one uniting all the rest -- is the necessity of integrating one's mental contents properly, placing them within their proper context and hierarchy, perhaps using the likes of Aristotle as a guide/inspiration for how it's done (most perfectionist-like). By doing so, one should - with enough practice and input - be able to more readily identify phenomena by their essence, which is to say, in Randian terms, the most explanatorily fundamental to the phenomena. And if you're going to get into the topic of sense of life, you might as well get into Rand's view of the subconscious and its relation to the conscious level, a topic for psycho-epistemology (covered most indepth explicitly in such places as Binswanger's lectures).
Here's part of an explanation for how someone like Rand - or Marx, or Aristotle, or other big-impact thinkers - have the influence that they do: the power of mental integration. Taking Atlas Shrugged (or Das Kapital) as an example: the author integrates a vast sum of material that no other authors integrated to nearly such an extent. There's nothing nearly like Atlas Shrugged in existence; perhaps the most comparable case would be Mises' Human Action, itself an integration of vast material. (Let's not forget the work of the sole longtime student of both Mises and Rand, Reisman's mammoth Capitalism.) She covers a vast range of subject matter, tightly hierarchically ordered, with application to a vast range of avenues of human activity. And it isn't just the Galt speech that is the product of an integration or organizing of vast sums of material; it's the integration of plot, characterization, theme, and style into a unity (the theme of Atlas Shrugged being "the role of the mind in man's existence" and all the applications of this all-encompassing theme).
Integrating vast sums of material into a compact/condensed/essentialized form is the aim of my own work, as evidenced in my existing book (see "About Me" above) and in the scope and ambition of my current 'Better Living Through Philosophy' project. (The principle of integration is at work just from the unit-condensation function of all the documenting links I provide in my blog posts.) If ever there is a legitimate product of Rand's influence it's in my own work and/or the sensibility that drives its formation (to whatever degree of perfection in result). I have an eagle-eye out for the principle of integration at work in whatever phenomena where it might be identified. I find Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle, which covers fundamentally important subject matter as treated by two of history's most searching minds, necessarily must be integrated with the Randian project (although tons of promising leads are already there in Sciabarra, which integrates vast sums of material as reflected in his bibliographies).
I could go on. Point being, this is the sort of project someone like Duggan is too intellectually lazy to undertake. Aristotle and Hegel would rightly be disgusted at her intellectually small MO - a case to learn from in the how-to-avoid-intellectual-bankruptcy sense.
As to the key and central claim of Duggan's book - that Rand promotes meanness and cruelty and indifference toward others - I don't know how many goddamn times I have to quote this but here it is again, from Galt's speech:
Duggan continues:
Duggan:
(The one piece by Zizek I could stomach to read all the way through was his Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) article, "The Actuality of Ayn Rand," which Duggan cites in her bibliography. Opening up to a few different pages of his Living in the End Times I find the prose of a pretentious twit. Early in his Less Than Nothing: Hegel and... this "leading cultural critic of the left" cited the conversation between Mahler and Sibelius as follows: "Mahler emphasized how a symphony has to encompass the entire world, while Sibelius pleaded for restraint and reserve." His statement about Mahler is accurate but his statement about Sibelius is completely idiotic on its face. (I count Sibelius's 2nd and 7th symphonies among my very favorite, with the 6th not far behind; Tapiola is arguably his greatest work.) Sibelius's actual statement as reported was: "I admire the symphony's style and severity of form, as well as the profound logic creating an inner connection among all of the motives." After encountering this piece of sloppiness from the pretentious and unreliable Zizek, I put down Less Than Nothing and have since sought out Hegel scholarship such as Ferrarin's, Houlgate's, and the Oxford Handbook.)
What's telling about Duggan's intellectual character here is that while she cites Zizek's JARS article, she doesn't show any particular concern to cite or study any other article in that journal. Shouldn't that sort of thing be a red flag on its face? A careful and attentive reader would look at her bibliography would notice that there is this thing she cites from called the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the only article she cites from that journal is from a non-Objectivist leftist - as though there were no other articles of interest in that journal that an academic writing for a university press on the subject of Rand might have discovered. Did she make an effort to go beyond the Zizek article so she isn't just some leftist citing another leftist, all echo-chamber/circlejerk-like as is the standard leftist MO now? When she saw that there was a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was she curious enough to find out whether there were other insights in that publication to draw from, that might have made her work more useful and informative? Clearly not, because Duggan is an intellectually dishonest piece of shit whose aim is not to learn about Rand, but to smear her.
[A follow-up to my earlier post, "How shitty are Rand-bashers?"]
I've already commented on this despicable creature here, primarily on the basis of how she makes a mockery of the very activity of intellectual inquiry. As with other leftist losers/scum, by perverting the very form of intellectual inquiry and thereby undermining its integrity, they produce junk content. The way Duggan replied to me in email when I asked her reasonable pointed questions virtually assures that her "scholarship" is shitty.
Lisa Duggan is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the latest specimen of an author making the (futile) effort to discredit Rand in book form, with Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019). (How this piece of shit got published by a university press is a good question. How low are the standards for the series this is a part of? What clique of leftist scum is involved?) She identifies herself on her twitter as a pinko/commie activist. If Mean Girl is the "best" commentary on Rand the Left can come up with, 62 years after Atlas Shrugged, the left is kaput as a credible intellectual force.
As I pointed out in my commentary linked above, I have not read Duggan's book. All the signs point to it being a waste of time. The usual dishonest/slimy/scummy/lowlife/smear/sneer/strawman leftist tactics appear well on display there, and I've seen the tactics a thousand times. The very title of the book itself is a dishonest smear.
How does Duggan promote her work in excerpt/preview form? Here we go. First off, the premise that Rand is "the spirit of our time" cannot possibly be true, for if it were, Duggan wouldn't be holding a university position (or, preferably, would have her act cleaned way up). (Within the intellectual thug as we know her is an Aristotelian yearning to break out -- but that's up to her.) For another, if it were true, a critical mass of people would have internalized the themes/content of Understanding Objectivism (i.e., become in essence Aristotelian cognizers). But let's get to some specific claims she makes, shall we?
For one thing, Duggan is clueless about the history of Objectivist thought. For instance, she writes:
Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), ad infinitum.Anyone who does their homework on Rand knows that one of these concrete instances as not like hte others. Only one of them ran a 1990s internet forum, Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP) and could cite Rand chapter and verse. Only one of them would have consumed pretty much the entire body of secondary literature on Rand (including Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical [1995], the author of which was a MDOP contributor). Only one of them debated anarcho-capitalism with David Friedman on humanities.philosophy.objectivism. Only one of them is aware of the hierarchical primacy of philosophy and how that is demonstrated by the hierarchical structure of wikipedia.
So why would she lump Jimmy Wales in with the rest of these business people as if they were all more or less alike in their Rand-expertise?
She makes the following claim:
Though Ayn Rand’s popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and 70s.Since when? Reputation for what? Among whom? It was in the '60s that her cultural visibility was on an upward trajectory while it is true that the '70s was a lull period in that regard. Anyone who has followed the history of Objectivism would know this. At minimum this claim is sloppy and deceptive.
She writes:
Rand’s ideas are not the key to her influence. [!] Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism, though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are at the heart of her incalculable impact.So if I understand this correctly, Rand's ideas can be separated from her novels. That would come as news to pretty much anybody. How sloppy a thinker is Duggan, anyway?
There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand’s novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present—from Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.So Duggan can rattle off lists of Rand fans from this or that sector of the culture. So why doesn't she rattle off the list of philosophy professors and other intellectuals influenced by Rand? By not doing so she conveys the impression that those influenced by her don't include intellectuals and philosophers. This is prima facie dishonest. How can someone with the research tools at Duggan's disposal fail to notice the body of secondary literature from philosophers on Rand? She cites Sciabarra's Russian Radical in the bibliography to Mean Girl (yes, I checked out the bibliography to see how selective it is . . . which it is, very much so . . . and it's heavily titled toward the biography-related, gossipy-level, intellectual-lightweight-level resources), so she can't but be aware of the very serious and comprehensive treatment Rand's ideas receive there. (She says she consulted it for the biographical info therein.)
Let's say that a philosopher influences a bunch of scumbags who go on to wreak destruction on the world. Karl Marx is one such philosopher. But leftists counter that with "oh, but that's not Marxism proper and those are bad people, how about you pay attention instead to Luxemburg, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm [whose Man for Himself is excellent, BTW], Cohen, Harvey, et al." Good luck getting these same folks to acknowledge Hospers, Gotthelf, Miller, Den Uyl, Rasmussen, Sciabarra, Salmieri, Tara Smith, et al. For leftists, their readings of Rand reign supreme and to hell with how other readers (who must not be very bright/reflective/critical) receive Rand's writings; but turn the tables on Marx/Marxism and they scream foul.
Duggan continues:
But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement.This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.” Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” Rand’s sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight. Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal conditions “cruel optimism”—the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses. Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.This is not a serious analysis but a mere pretense of one. "Contempt and indifference toward social inferiors" is not Rand's position but Duggan's (and all Rand-bashers') fevered imagining of Rand's position. Here's how that fevered phenomenon goes: Rand denies there is some duty to serve others irrespective of one's own interests; she speaks of "the virtue of selfishness" (which she explains the meaning of throughout her book of that title); she advocates laissez-faire capitalism as premised upon and packaged together with her-idea-of-selfishness; leftists view capitalism as an inhuman system premised on their-idea-of-selfishness; and so it must be the case that Rand is a defender of an inhuman system because that's the expression of "selfishness." That's it. That's the entire extent of how leftists "grasp" what's going on in Rand's writings. And they have zero grasp of her wider philosophical principles beyond the political or ethical. About the only thing they get right about Rand is: she advocates laissez-faire capitalism. But they have zero in-context grasp of her reasons for supporting it.
One of Rand's wider philosophical principles -- well, in a sense the fundamental one uniting all the rest -- is the necessity of integrating one's mental contents properly, placing them within their proper context and hierarchy, perhaps using the likes of Aristotle as a guide/inspiration for how it's done (most perfectionist-like). By doing so, one should - with enough practice and input - be able to more readily identify phenomena by their essence, which is to say, in Randian terms, the most explanatorily fundamental to the phenomena. And if you're going to get into the topic of sense of life, you might as well get into Rand's view of the subconscious and its relation to the conscious level, a topic for psycho-epistemology (covered most indepth explicitly in such places as Binswanger's lectures).
Here's part of an explanation for how someone like Rand - or Marx, or Aristotle, or other big-impact thinkers - have the influence that they do: the power of mental integration. Taking Atlas Shrugged (or Das Kapital) as an example: the author integrates a vast sum of material that no other authors integrated to nearly such an extent. There's nothing nearly like Atlas Shrugged in existence; perhaps the most comparable case would be Mises' Human Action, itself an integration of vast material. (Let's not forget the work of the sole longtime student of both Mises and Rand, Reisman's mammoth Capitalism.) She covers a vast range of subject matter, tightly hierarchically ordered, with application to a vast range of avenues of human activity. And it isn't just the Galt speech that is the product of an integration or organizing of vast sums of material; it's the integration of plot, characterization, theme, and style into a unity (the theme of Atlas Shrugged being "the role of the mind in man's existence" and all the applications of this all-encompassing theme).
Integrating vast sums of material into a compact/condensed/essentialized form is the aim of my own work, as evidenced in my existing book (see "About Me" above) and in the scope and ambition of my current 'Better Living Through Philosophy' project. (The principle of integration is at work just from the unit-condensation function of all the documenting links I provide in my blog posts.) If ever there is a legitimate product of Rand's influence it's in my own work and/or the sensibility that drives its formation (to whatever degree of perfection in result). I have an eagle-eye out for the principle of integration at work in whatever phenomena where it might be identified. I find Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle, which covers fundamentally important subject matter as treated by two of history's most searching minds, necessarily must be integrated with the Randian project (although tons of promising leads are already there in Sciabarra, which integrates vast sums of material as reflected in his bibliographies).
I could go on. Point being, this is the sort of project someone like Duggan is too intellectually lazy to undertake. Aristotle and Hegel would rightly be disgusted at her intellectually small MO - a case to learn from in the how-to-avoid-intellectual-bankruptcy sense.
As to the key and central claim of Duggan's book - that Rand promotes meanness and cruelty and indifference toward others - I don't know how many goddamn times I have to quote this but here it is again, from Galt's speech:
"Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his right to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. Be to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values."And what is virtue, the basis upon which such help is warranted? It is - in essence - putting forth the effort to use one's mind to the fullest:
Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.So how much thinking and use of Duggan's mind went into writing Mean Girl?
Duggan continues:
Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest.Pathetic. Since the theme of her largest novel is the role of the mind in man's existence, her novel is meant to illustrate that in myriad applications. And she has many examples to go on in the history of business. Today she would point to the examples of companies such as Amazon, as being guided by the integrating/organizing vision of Bezos. (Today's business titans may be ideologically mixed or indifferent, which is beside the point: no one else qua businessman seems to integrate quite at Bezos' level today. [More here.])
Duggan:
[Rand's novels'] logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on racialized beauty and physical capacity—perceived ugliness or disability are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.Quite the chutzpah to use the phrase "hierarchy of value" in connection with Rand and then completely bastardize how Rand applied that concept, huh? The dishonesty of injecting race into this should go without saying. And it gets lower still (hold your noses; we're descending from the intellectual gutter into the sewer):
Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Nation through the lens of industrial capitalism. They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels’ fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes.Identification with dominant historical forces? What the fuck is she talking about?
Where are we now? Is the long career of optimistic cruelty, of contempt and indifference to human inequality, at its height? Or is the culture of greed surrounding zombie neoliberalism so pronounced now that it is effectively exposed and may finally be displaced as an acceptable political feeling? Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has argued that Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism, her excessive overidentification with it, only serves to make its inherent ridiculousness clearly perceptible.
What's telling about Duggan's intellectual character here is that while she cites Zizek's JARS article, she doesn't show any particular concern to cite or study any other article in that journal. Shouldn't that sort of thing be a red flag on its face? A careful and attentive reader would look at her bibliography would notice that there is this thing she cites from called the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the only article she cites from that journal is from a non-Objectivist leftist - as though there were no other articles of interest in that journal that an academic writing for a university press on the subject of Rand might have discovered. Did she make an effort to go beyond the Zizek article so she isn't just some leftist citing another leftist, all echo-chamber/circlejerk-like as is the standard leftist MO now? When she saw that there was a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was she curious enough to find out whether there were other insights in that publication to draw from, that might have made her work more useful and informative? Clearly not, because Duggan is an intellectually dishonest piece of shit whose aim is not to learn about Rand, but to smear her.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
What is an impeachable offense?
President Clinton lied under oath when asked if he was ever alone with 'Miss' Lewinsky: "I don't recall." Demon Rat congress critters gave him a pass for that. They gave him a pass on witness-tampering charges in connection with his conversations with his secretary Betty Currie and others.
So why are Demon Rats not willing to give Trump a pass for less than what they gave Clinton a pass for?
The question answers itself; we are not in the realm of logic, intellectual honesty or wisdom-loving here. We are in the realm of politics without philosophy. And the only thing Nancy Peloser is considering in whether or not to impeach Trump is how it will affect her party in the next election, and not whether it's the right thing to do. It's the only thing Demon Rats in 1999 cared about when it came to the subject of impeaching Clinton.
This should be blazingly obvious to anyone who paid attention both times around.
We can turn the tables and ask why Republicans are willing to give Trump a pass when they didn't give Clinton one. Well, for one thing, Trump didn't lie under oath. (Note I said "less than what [Demon Rats] gave Clinton a pass for.") For another, Democrats are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior, as they imply with any number of things they say about themselves (including labeling themselves "progressive") and about Republicans ("basket of deplorables/irredeemables," etc.).
It's not exactly like the GOP is hot shit (remember when they drank the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid? how they condone evolution-denial? how they treat cannabis users like children? how they dogmatically cling to "rights begin at conception"? etc.), but something about the Demon Rats today says: intellectual account overdrawn.
So why are Demon Rats not willing to give Trump a pass for less than what they gave Clinton a pass for?
The question answers itself; we are not in the realm of logic, intellectual honesty or wisdom-loving here. We are in the realm of politics without philosophy. And the only thing Nancy Peloser is considering in whether or not to impeach Trump is how it will affect her party in the next election, and not whether it's the right thing to do. It's the only thing Demon Rats in 1999 cared about when it came to the subject of impeaching Clinton.
This should be blazingly obvious to anyone who paid attention both times around.
We can turn the tables and ask why Republicans are willing to give Trump a pass when they didn't give Clinton one. Well, for one thing, Trump didn't lie under oath. (Note I said "less than what [Demon Rats] gave Clinton a pass for.") For another, Democrats are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior, as they imply with any number of things they say about themselves (including labeling themselves "progressive") and about Republicans ("basket of deplorables/irredeemables," etc.).
It's not exactly like the GOP is hot shit (remember when they drank the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid? how they condone evolution-denial? how they treat cannabis users like children? how they dogmatically cling to "rights begin at conception"? etc.), but something about the Demon Rats today says: intellectual account overdrawn.
How shitty are Rand-bashers?
I've fucking had it with Rand-bashers. (Note: I distinguish bashers from responsible critics who make an effort to know what's what.) Not one of the Rand-bashers operates in good faith; out of countless instances I've never seen it happen.
What do I mean by operating in good faith?
Well, let's start with Rapoport's Rules, recently popularized by Daniel Dennett. (An aside about Dennett. He brought up Rapoport's Rules in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, which is 6 years ago now. There may be no more well-known philosopher in the USA than Dennett. And yet here we are, 6 years later, and no one seems to have picked up on Rapoport's Rules, not by the philosophically-impoverished "discourse" that's going on in the American lamestream. Exactly how long should we expect to wait before Rapoport's Rules become a mainstream norm of discourse, i.e., before a critical mass of people have learned about the Rules? 50 years? 250? 5000? Never? For this no-brainer?)
Here's the first Rapoport Rule as formulated by Dennett:
1: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way."
This principle is also expressed in Bryan Caplan's proposed Ideological Turing Test (ITT), modeled on the original Turing Test idea which had to do with whether one could tell a computer apart from a person. The ITT has to do with whether one can "state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents," so that one wouldn't be able to tell the critic of view X from the holder of view X.
Another way of expressing the principle involved is: dialectic. To make any progress in dialectic we have to be sure that we've established a common ground as to the ideas being proposed by the multiple parties involved. If one side says that the other side is caricaturing its views, then dialectic cannot proceed or get off the ground.
By the standards expressed here - Rapoport Rules, ITT, dialectic - Rand-bashers have failed abysmally and will always fail abysmally. This isn't just because Rand's ideas are a lot more plausible and well-supported than the bashers claim; it is because their approach to attacking contrary ideas is so shitty, so ignorant, so lazy, so discreditable, etc.
(I should note, as I have on many an occasion in many a venue, that I find Rand's polemics against such philosophers as Kant to fail by the standards expressed above. As a result I have been slammed online by the shittier "Objectivists" who basically take the same approach to Kant that Rand-bashers take toward Rand, with as little genuine fruit to show for it. Hell would freeze over before Kant scholars would consider Rand's characterizations of Kant true, helpful, insightful, etc. - just as hell would freeze over before Rand scholars take Rand-bashers seriously. Suffice it to say that I think Rand does a much better job formulating her own ideas than characterizing those she despised [or thought she despised, given what she thought those ideas contained].)
Here we are, it's 2019, and a steady stream of professional philosophical literature on Rand - duly compiled in the bibliography at the SEP entry on Rand - has been emerging for well over a decade now. You would never know it by listening to the Rand-bashers. Not only do they not know about this body of literature but all indications I've seen is that they refuse to know. (I consider intellectual laziness a form of such refusal to know; I distinguish between intellectual laziness - not making an effort to know - from the more extreme form of evasion or intellectual dishonesty, which is making an effort not to know.) They would rather stick with their ignorant caricature than to learn from those who'd put in the study/effort.
Among the materials with which the highest-caliber professional philosophical literature on Rand would have to demonstrate familiarity is Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses or at the very minimum the themes addressed and highlighted therein. They're usually methodological themes, having to do with how to conduct one's mind in acts of cognition. Among the key Peikoff courses is the one titled Understanding Objectivism. (This one has been in book form for seven years now.) Whenever I have brought up this course, Rand-bashers have evaded. They don't think they need to "waste any more time on that crap." I suppose they would have an excuse for such an attitude if they ever got Rand's ideas right in the first place, or were so much as aware of the importance Rand and Peikoff placed on methodological issues (the core focus of Sciabarra's thoroughly-researched 1995 book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical). Rand herself has said that she is not primarily an advocate of capitalism or even of egoism but of reason, and that her conception of reason is contained in works on epistemology she wrote or endorsed (including the full presentation in Peikoff's 1976 Rand-endorsed.
Assuredly, Rand-bashers are in essence ignorant of all this material, hence their main focus on what they think Rand's ethical views are. (They think they know what Rand's views on capitalism are, but if they couldn't tell you about the themes in Rand's "What is Capitalism?" essay - namely its focus on Rand's whole "role of the mind in man's existence" theme - then they haven't really done their homework.) And when they get around to talking about her ethics, they're usually terrible at it (according to Rapoport/ITT/dialectical standards).
With that background...
Here's a recent reddit thread on /r/philosophy (sic), in which a bunch of ignorant/lazy/vicious Rand-bashers come out in large numbers. The thread itself is linked to this piece of shit from the managing editor of the American Philosophical Association's blog. If it had ever even so much as occurred to that author to run her stuff by Rand's defenders for the sake of accuracy and context, there's no indication of that in the essay. It is nothing more than the standard hit-piece that Rand fans have seen over and over for decades on end. (What the fuck is the excuse for this decades-long pattern of shitty behavior?) The Ayn Rand Society's (ARS) Greg Salmieri wrote a response to that piece at the ARS blog. If there is a shred of evidence that this made the author rethink her view of Rand, I don't know of it. No retraction, no contrition, no accountability that I can see. I think Salmieri is, as a matter of professional necessity and maybe some kind of Aristotelian sensibility as he understands it, is far more cordial than his targets deserve; Rand herself would not be nearly so mild-tempered toward those who basically act like slime when bashing her.
Now, as to that reddit thread. It's a fucking trainwreck, a testament to "the intellectual bankruptcy of our age," as Rand would have put it. Next to none of the negative things said about Rand in the thread are true. I reiterate: this is not even so much about whether Rand's ideas are correct or well-supported, but rather about the method of approach toward ideas/viewpoints displayed in that thread.
We get the usual smears about Rand accepting Social Security benefits ("she hypocritically took welfare, probably ending up in government housing and eating pet food to boot"); only one person in the thread pointed to a well-done Snopes piece debunking the smear. The others in the subthread just proceed unaccountably as though they know what they're talking about. Their falsehoods get dozens of upvotes. (How can reddit be taken seriously as an intellectual format?)
We get the usual smears about Rand's egoism being: cold-hearted, indifferent to others, sociopathic, mean, money-grubbing, narcisstic, simple to refute, and on and fucking on it goes. Almost zero direct quotes are provided to support any of this. If any quotes are provided, chances are good they're out of context.
[Note: Numerous comments I made in the thread trying to correct or challenge the smears and strawmen do not show up in the thread, meaning the mods have employed the patently dishonest/malicious shadow-ban technique for which social media mods/admins have earned considerable notoriety. By doing so they have wasted my motherfucking time and for that they have landed squarely on my shit-list. Further, one /r/philosophy (sic) mod in particular who for a while went under the user name /u/drunkentune is an especially bad-faith piece of shit on the topic of Rand - for instance, citing Nozick's critique of Rand as evidence she is easily refuted, but not citing the Dougs' rebuttal even thought the latter had been pointed out to him numerous times before. Another slimy mod, /u/ReallyNicole, was among those wanting to ban Rand threads from /r/philosophy (sic) on the grounds that Rand isn't a philosopher. These two creatures are/were in philosophy (sic) grad school, well on their way to joining the other dishonest anti-Rand academic faculty-creatures. By the way, the systematic Rand-related dishonesty is also in full force at /r/askphilosophy. Indeed, the intellectual culture on any of the "default" subreddits where politics figures heavily is systematically dishonest due to its leftist bias and popularity-contest format.]
The top-voted comment in the entire thread? I'll quote from it:
So instead of being pointed to random internet smears, we are pointed to "ethics textbooks" where Rand is covered in the "egoism" section.
Well guess fucking what: Rand scholars don't accept those textbook treatments as even close to adequate in representing what Rand actually thought. (Link is to Irfan Khawaja's article "Randian Ethics: Time to Get High.") Now, people can differ in their interpretations of texts - it happens all the time in philosophy - and it's pretty safe to say that Rand's critics and Rand's defenders aren't on the same page as to what they're talking about. But the important question then is: how do Rand's critics react to this fact? Are they basically willing to engage, or do they dishonestly evade?
I've studied Rand's egoistic theory enough to have published on it in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. That, along with being able to almost cite chapter and verse from Peikoff's Objectivism courses (I've listened to the biggest ones at least twice each: Understanding Objectivism; Advanced OPAR Seminars; The Art of Thinking; Objectivism Through Induction), is good evidence that I have an expert-level understanding of Rand. The "egoism" being attributed to Rand by the haters in that thread and elsewhere is not the one I recognize in Rand, not even close.
I haven't read the thread far enough yet to see if the usual Hickman smear comes up, but outside of that thread the Rand-bashers have comported themselves like fucking scumbags on this point. Follow the links and discover for yourself how they operate when they think they have Rand nailed on something. It's basically the same story as with the "Rand took welfare" smear - reckless disregard for things like context, or not making an effort to get a different take on the story (from those who probably know a lot more about it than they do; me, I was aware of Rand's journal entries on Hickman over twenty years ago and knew well enough how to assess its relevance to Rand's mature thought, and so you might imagine my disgust when clueless scumbags come along years later, like a child wandering into the middle of a movie, and use them to smear her).
Without exception, from my experience, when Rand-bashers are presented a different take on Rand from theirs, they either slink away without any acknowledgment that they were mistaken, or they double down and get nasty and evasive. Every fucking time. It's what Rand-bashers do, given their natures.
Given that my main focus here is on how Rand-bashers operate, the question arises: wherever would these creatures have gotten the idea that operating that way is normal or acceptable in intellectual discourse? Well, we might have a clue as to that from another reddit thread within the past year (which I found as I was searching for the Khawaja article above) on the /r/AcademicPhilosophy subreddit. Now, the participants in the thread are presumably academic philosophers or closely interested in the subject. (The sub doesn't get much traffic.) Ask yourself whether the Rand-bashers in that thread are proceeding in good faith. Did any of them address the Khawaja article that headlined the thread? Nope. Look at all the downvotes for user Sword_of_Apollo's comments that contain reasonable, documented defenses of Rand. (I don't support Sword's dismissive attitude about Kant; might I recommend any number of these books?) Unaccountable, anonymous downvoting. How is reddit supposed to be taken seriously as an intellectual format, where higher-voted (i.e., more popular) comments get more exposure/attention? How are philosophy subreddits that look this supposed to be taken seriously? (55 upvotes for a comment consisting only in "At least Machiavelli's systems actually make sense and work"? How much more anti-intellectual does it get?) More on social media toxicity here.
Now, this being the year 2019, one might have thought that were some Rand-basher to come out with a book right now, it would contain some intellectually-respectable reference to the growing body of academic literature on Rand. One would especially come to expect that from a book on Rand published by a university press. So, what is the best book that Rand-bashers seem to be able to come up with, 62 years after Atlas, etc.?
We have an answer: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. It is published by University of California Press. So naturally there is some expectation of quality given who wrote and published it. On her twitter page, Duggan identifies herself as "pinko commie" - in other words, a leftist embedded within an academic sub-culture of leftists. Is the intellectual culture of leftism today a healthy one? Certainly not, if Duggan is representative of it.
The title of the book, just by itself, is a red flag. Ayn Rand, mean? Either that is a basically correct assessment or a basically clueless one. And no expert in Rand studies would take the "mean girl" thesis seriously. Now, my question is: Did Duggan so much as make an effort to run her book by Rand experts, for the sake of accuracy, context, intellectual integrity, etc. Based on the "exchange" I had with her via email, the safe answer is: Fuck no! I don't think I need to reproduce my goodreads review here, so I'll just link to it; it contains the "exchange" I had with Duggan so you can see for yourself the dishonest/scummy/lowlife way she operates.
And I wouldn't expect much of anything better from the rest of the Rand-bashers. The two main problems for them: (1) The theme they're pushing - that Rand is a mean bitch, not a real philosopher, etc. - is not defensible in the final analysis, not even close; (2) Their intellectual MO is all fucked-up, lacking the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility.
Here's the really big problem. The shitty behavior by those on /r/AcademicPhilosophy speaks for itself, but what about all the shittiness on the main /r/philosophy thread? Many of the participants there have gone to a college or university where they were supposed to learn the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility, but that didn't happen. Why?
Next up: My timeline of key players in the history of Randian thought, which I've had sitting in the queue for months now; it should serve as nice background material to reference on the subject of 'Rand and philosophy.' The Rand-bashers, and capitalism-bashers - clueless little shits - are only falling further behind the curve. I'll start talking more nice about them when they start being intellectually honest.
[Edit: Fortunately, there is some serious/honest/respectable academic dialogue on Rand that's happening recently, in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series, where non-Objectivists give fair critiques of Rand and Rand defenders have the fair opportunity to respond. Elsewhere, especially where Rand-bashers (who are willfully oblivious to the existence of such dialogue) run amok, it's pretty much a shitshow.]
What do I mean by operating in good faith?
Well, let's start with Rapoport's Rules, recently popularized by Daniel Dennett. (An aside about Dennett. He brought up Rapoport's Rules in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, which is 6 years ago now. There may be no more well-known philosopher in the USA than Dennett. And yet here we are, 6 years later, and no one seems to have picked up on Rapoport's Rules, not by the philosophically-impoverished "discourse" that's going on in the American lamestream. Exactly how long should we expect to wait before Rapoport's Rules become a mainstream norm of discourse, i.e., before a critical mass of people have learned about the Rules? 50 years? 250? 5000? Never? For this no-brainer?)
Here's the first Rapoport Rule as formulated by Dennett:
1: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way."
This principle is also expressed in Bryan Caplan's proposed Ideological Turing Test (ITT), modeled on the original Turing Test idea which had to do with whether one could tell a computer apart from a person. The ITT has to do with whether one can "state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents," so that one wouldn't be able to tell the critic of view X from the holder of view X.
Another way of expressing the principle involved is: dialectic. To make any progress in dialectic we have to be sure that we've established a common ground as to the ideas being proposed by the multiple parties involved. If one side says that the other side is caricaturing its views, then dialectic cannot proceed or get off the ground.
By the standards expressed here - Rapoport Rules, ITT, dialectic - Rand-bashers have failed abysmally and will always fail abysmally. This isn't just because Rand's ideas are a lot more plausible and well-supported than the bashers claim; it is because their approach to attacking contrary ideas is so shitty, so ignorant, so lazy, so discreditable, etc.
(I should note, as I have on many an occasion in many a venue, that I find Rand's polemics against such philosophers as Kant to fail by the standards expressed above. As a result I have been slammed online by the shittier "Objectivists" who basically take the same approach to Kant that Rand-bashers take toward Rand, with as little genuine fruit to show for it. Hell would freeze over before Kant scholars would consider Rand's characterizations of Kant true, helpful, insightful, etc. - just as hell would freeze over before Rand scholars take Rand-bashers seriously. Suffice it to say that I think Rand does a much better job formulating her own ideas than characterizing those she despised [or thought she despised, given what she thought those ideas contained].)
Here we are, it's 2019, and a steady stream of professional philosophical literature on Rand - duly compiled in the bibliography at the SEP entry on Rand - has been emerging for well over a decade now. You would never know it by listening to the Rand-bashers. Not only do they not know about this body of literature but all indications I've seen is that they refuse to know. (I consider intellectual laziness a form of such refusal to know; I distinguish between intellectual laziness - not making an effort to know - from the more extreme form of evasion or intellectual dishonesty, which is making an effort not to know.) They would rather stick with their ignorant caricature than to learn from those who'd put in the study/effort.
Among the materials with which the highest-caliber professional philosophical literature on Rand would have to demonstrate familiarity is Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses or at the very minimum the themes addressed and highlighted therein. They're usually methodological themes, having to do with how to conduct one's mind in acts of cognition. Among the key Peikoff courses is the one titled Understanding Objectivism. (This one has been in book form for seven years now.) Whenever I have brought up this course, Rand-bashers have evaded. They don't think they need to "waste any more time on that crap." I suppose they would have an excuse for such an attitude if they ever got Rand's ideas right in the first place, or were so much as aware of the importance Rand and Peikoff placed on methodological issues (the core focus of Sciabarra's thoroughly-researched 1995 book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical). Rand herself has said that she is not primarily an advocate of capitalism or even of egoism but of reason, and that her conception of reason is contained in works on epistemology she wrote or endorsed (including the full presentation in Peikoff's 1976 Rand-endorsed.
Assuredly, Rand-bashers are in essence ignorant of all this material, hence their main focus on what they think Rand's ethical views are. (They think they know what Rand's views on capitalism are, but if they couldn't tell you about the themes in Rand's "What is Capitalism?" essay - namely its focus on Rand's whole "role of the mind in man's existence" theme - then they haven't really done their homework.) And when they get around to talking about her ethics, they're usually terrible at it (according to Rapoport/ITT/dialectical standards).
With that background...
Here's a recent reddit thread on /r/philosophy (sic), in which a bunch of ignorant/lazy/vicious Rand-bashers come out in large numbers. The thread itself is linked to this piece of shit from the managing editor of the American Philosophical Association's blog. If it had ever even so much as occurred to that author to run her stuff by Rand's defenders for the sake of accuracy and context, there's no indication of that in the essay. It is nothing more than the standard hit-piece that Rand fans have seen over and over for decades on end. (What the fuck is the excuse for this decades-long pattern of shitty behavior?) The Ayn Rand Society's (ARS) Greg Salmieri wrote a response to that piece at the ARS blog. If there is a shred of evidence that this made the author rethink her view of Rand, I don't know of it. No retraction, no contrition, no accountability that I can see. I think Salmieri is, as a matter of professional necessity and maybe some kind of Aristotelian sensibility as he understands it, is far more cordial than his targets deserve; Rand herself would not be nearly so mild-tempered toward those who basically act like slime when bashing her.
Now, as to that reddit thread. It's a fucking trainwreck, a testament to "the intellectual bankruptcy of our age," as Rand would have put it. Next to none of the negative things said about Rand in the thread are true. I reiterate: this is not even so much about whether Rand's ideas are correct or well-supported, but rather about the method of approach toward ideas/viewpoints displayed in that thread.
We get the usual smears about Rand accepting Social Security benefits ("she hypocritically took welfare, probably ending up in government housing and eating pet food to boot"); only one person in the thread pointed to a well-done Snopes piece debunking the smear. The others in the subthread just proceed unaccountably as though they know what they're talking about. Their falsehoods get dozens of upvotes. (How can reddit be taken seriously as an intellectual format?)
We get the usual smears about Rand's egoism being: cold-hearted, indifferent to others, sociopathic, mean, money-grubbing, narcisstic, simple to refute, and on and fucking on it goes. Almost zero direct quotes are provided to support any of this. If any quotes are provided, chances are good they're out of context.
[Note: Numerous comments I made in the thread trying to correct or challenge the smears and strawmen do not show up in the thread, meaning the mods have employed the patently dishonest/malicious shadow-ban technique for which social media mods/admins have earned considerable notoriety. By doing so they have wasted my motherfucking time and for that they have landed squarely on my shit-list. Further, one /r/philosophy (sic) mod in particular who for a while went under the user name /u/drunkentune is an especially bad-faith piece of shit on the topic of Rand - for instance, citing Nozick's critique of Rand as evidence she is easily refuted, but not citing the Dougs' rebuttal even thought the latter had been pointed out to him numerous times before. Another slimy mod, /u/ReallyNicole, was among those wanting to ban Rand threads from /r/philosophy (sic) on the grounds that Rand isn't a philosopher. These two creatures are/were in philosophy (sic) grad school, well on their way to joining the other dishonest anti-Rand academic faculty-creatures. By the way, the systematic Rand-related dishonesty is also in full force at /r/askphilosophy. Indeed, the intellectual culture on any of the "default" subreddits where politics figures heavily is systematically dishonest due to its leftist bias and popularity-contest format.]
Every two months, some blowhard makes an article about how Ayn Rand is being "ignored".
She is not being ignored. Every college ethics textbook mentions her by name in the opening chapters. They describe her ethical system with something called Ethical Egoism.They then usually just say the system is unworkable as an ethical system. Then the book moves on to greener pastures. She is sometimes compared to Machiavelli and maybe Clausewitz.
That's it. There is no problem here.
Look -
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/#EthiEgoi
So instead of being pointed to random internet smears, we are pointed to "ethics textbooks" where Rand is covered in the "egoism" section.
Well guess fucking what: Rand scholars don't accept those textbook treatments as even close to adequate in representing what Rand actually thought. (Link is to Irfan Khawaja's article "Randian Ethics: Time to Get High.") Now, people can differ in their interpretations of texts - it happens all the time in philosophy - and it's pretty safe to say that Rand's critics and Rand's defenders aren't on the same page as to what they're talking about. But the important question then is: how do Rand's critics react to this fact? Are they basically willing to engage, or do they dishonestly evade?
I've studied Rand's egoistic theory enough to have published on it in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. That, along with being able to almost cite chapter and verse from Peikoff's Objectivism courses (I've listened to the biggest ones at least twice each: Understanding Objectivism; Advanced OPAR Seminars; The Art of Thinking; Objectivism Through Induction), is good evidence that I have an expert-level understanding of Rand. The "egoism" being attributed to Rand by the haters in that thread and elsewhere is not the one I recognize in Rand, not even close.
I haven't read the thread far enough yet to see if the usual Hickman smear comes up, but outside of that thread the Rand-bashers have comported themselves like fucking scumbags on this point. Follow the links and discover for yourself how they operate when they think they have Rand nailed on something. It's basically the same story as with the "Rand took welfare" smear - reckless disregard for things like context, or not making an effort to get a different take on the story (from those who probably know a lot more about it than they do; me, I was aware of Rand's journal entries on Hickman over twenty years ago and knew well enough how to assess its relevance to Rand's mature thought, and so you might imagine my disgust when clueless scumbags come along years later, like a child wandering into the middle of a movie, and use them to smear her).
Without exception, from my experience, when Rand-bashers are presented a different take on Rand from theirs, they either slink away without any acknowledgment that they were mistaken, or they double down and get nasty and evasive. Every fucking time. It's what Rand-bashers do, given their natures.
Given that my main focus here is on how Rand-bashers operate, the question arises: wherever would these creatures have gotten the idea that operating that way is normal or acceptable in intellectual discourse? Well, we might have a clue as to that from another reddit thread within the past year (which I found as I was searching for the Khawaja article above) on the /r/AcademicPhilosophy subreddit. Now, the participants in the thread are presumably academic philosophers or closely interested in the subject. (The sub doesn't get much traffic.) Ask yourself whether the Rand-bashers in that thread are proceeding in good faith. Did any of them address the Khawaja article that headlined the thread? Nope. Look at all the downvotes for user Sword_of_Apollo's comments that contain reasonable, documented defenses of Rand. (I don't support Sword's dismissive attitude about Kant; might I recommend any number of these books?) Unaccountable, anonymous downvoting. How is reddit supposed to be taken seriously as an intellectual format, where higher-voted (i.e., more popular) comments get more exposure/attention? How are philosophy subreddits that look this supposed to be taken seriously? (55 upvotes for a comment consisting only in "At least Machiavelli's systems actually make sense and work"? How much more anti-intellectual does it get?) More on social media toxicity here.
Now, this being the year 2019, one might have thought that were some Rand-basher to come out with a book right now, it would contain some intellectually-respectable reference to the growing body of academic literature on Rand. One would especially come to expect that from a book on Rand published by a university press. So, what is the best book that Rand-bashers seem to be able to come up with, 62 years after Atlas, etc.?
We have an answer: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. It is published by University of California Press. So naturally there is some expectation of quality given who wrote and published it. On her twitter page, Duggan identifies herself as "pinko commie" - in other words, a leftist embedded within an academic sub-culture of leftists. Is the intellectual culture of leftism today a healthy one? Certainly not, if Duggan is representative of it.
The title of the book, just by itself, is a red flag. Ayn Rand, mean? Either that is a basically correct assessment or a basically clueless one. And no expert in Rand studies would take the "mean girl" thesis seriously. Now, my question is: Did Duggan so much as make an effort to run her book by Rand experts, for the sake of accuracy, context, intellectual integrity, etc. Based on the "exchange" I had with her via email, the safe answer is: Fuck no! I don't think I need to reproduce my goodreads review here, so I'll just link to it; it contains the "exchange" I had with Duggan so you can see for yourself the dishonest/scummy/lowlife way she operates.
And I wouldn't expect much of anything better from the rest of the Rand-bashers. The two main problems for them: (1) The theme they're pushing - that Rand is a mean bitch, not a real philosopher, etc. - is not defensible in the final analysis, not even close; (2) Their intellectual MO is all fucked-up, lacking the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility.
Here's the really big problem. The shitty behavior by those on /r/AcademicPhilosophy speaks for itself, but what about all the shittiness on the main /r/philosophy thread? Many of the participants there have gone to a college or university where they were supposed to learn the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility, but that didn't happen. Why?
Next up: My timeline of key players in the history of Randian thought, which I've had sitting in the queue for months now; it should serve as nice background material to reference on the subject of 'Rand and philosophy.' The Rand-bashers, and capitalism-bashers - clueless little shits - are only falling further behind the curve. I'll start talking more nice about them when they start being intellectually honest.
[Edit: Fortunately, there is some serious/honest/respectable academic dialogue on Rand that's happening recently, in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series, where non-Objectivists give fair critiques of Rand and Rand defenders have the fair opportunity to respond. Elsewhere, especially where Rand-bashers (who are willfully oblivious to the existence of such dialogue) run amok, it's pretty much a shitshow.]
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