Democrats support sex discrimination

Groping for a running mate? (Imagine the Democrat reaction if Trump did this.)

One nice thing about philosophy is how it exposes bad ideas for what they are, irrespective of their popularity or trendiness.

At last night's Democratic debate, front-runner Joe Biden made explicit that he will only consider a woman for a running mate.  His opponent, Bernie Sanders, wouldn't commit outright to that position, but he's leaning heavily in that direction.

Proposition: The person most qualified for the job is the one who should get that job.

Democrats, the people who supposedly represent the progressive and enlightened mindset in America, now deny this Proposition.  (Or at least some trendily large majority now denies it.  How much stink are they raising about Biden denying the VP opportunity to any men?)

Now, common sense and justice say that to deny the Proposition, one should come up with a really compelling overriding reason, because otherwise the Proposition is eminently plausible, so much so that it should serve as a basis for social policy - the reason being that common sense and justice find (in application to employment policies) discrimination against people on the basis of characteristics other than their qualifications for the job, to be repugnant, the sort of thing that a country such as ours (the United States) is supposed to have gotten away from.  Only reactionaries or some such deplorables would favor non-merit-based employment discrimination.  Right?

Well, apparently, it is now the reactionary position (if you listen to Joe Biden and his supporters and enablers and fellow-travelers) to oppose the kind of sex discrimination that Biden & co. now explicitly support!  Apparently the default view is that opposing sex discrimination is now a sexist position itself, and that perhaps intellectual resources need to be marshaled to use misrepresentation and shaming tactics against such opposition.  I wish I weren't exaggerating the nature of the moral absurdity going on here.

You don't have to ask what I think about this.  Just ask what an established, high-reputation sage like Socrates or Aristotle would say about this.  At the very least they would (I think) say that there had damn well be really good reasons why employment discrimination on the basis of sex should be reintroduced after supposedly having been widely repudiated in the USA and other nations.

So what would those really compelling reasons be?

I can't think of a single one.

I can think of reasons that would weigh in the consideration of candidates for employment - the standard 'diversity'-based reasons pertaining to what can be gained from differences in perspectives and background or life experience.  But I can't think of any reason whatsoever that should be categorically overriding.  Biden has said that being a woman is, in itself, a categorically overriding reason.

He has categorically ruled out considering a man as a running mate.  This is equivalent to an employer saying "men need not apply."  (I was going to say, it's the equivalent of an employer tossing the applications from men into the trash bin immediately, but by the principle of interpretive charity we cannot assume that Biden is being that dishonest, deceptive, and dastardly.  He's openly advertising his sex discrimination so that no men need waste their time presenting their credentials to him for consideration.)  Does that seem reasonable, something possibly endorsed by justice and common sense?

Why on earth should anyone even have to spend their time asking these questions?  Philosopher's question: how much more of a departure from common sense and justice does this stuff have to be, before Democrats & co. raise a stink?  (As Dennett would say, better pump those intuitions, turn the intuition knobs up to 11 if you have to.  The Democrats/Biden are at a 10, it looks like.)

But again, don't consider what this here blogger has to say, because what the hell do I know.  Just imagine instead an Aristotle bringing all his analytical weight to bear on this kind of question, and/or use your conscience (which should come to the same thing).  I don't know what language an Aristotle would use, but I think it's fucking ridiculous, what the Demo-rats have become after decades of intellectual atrophy and hubris.  'Philosophers' in the academy should be all over this kind of thing, but I'm not expecting that to happen because they're mostly 'politically correct' Democrats and politics tends to compromise intellectual integrity (hence the boldfaced hypocrisy of the 'academic freedom' rationale for tenure).

[Addendum 3/17/20: Turley appears to be among the few within the commentariat with the integrity/honesty to call out Biden's blatantly discriminatory pledge for what it is.  Has the pandemic news been distracting the rest of them, or something?  Not likely.  Biden's moral offense here is red-flag obvious to anyone who pays attention to politics.  If this isn't a no-brainer, then what is?  How is this possibly anything other than Biden being caught dead to rights?  (Note that the most upvoted anti-Turley comments below his article offer nothing of substance.  So much for the credibility of "likes"/upvotes as a gauge of quality or honesty.)  I think intellectual dishonesty can take various forms.  I don't think it's rampant, but I don't think it's rare, either.  In politics especially, lots of people quite lazily (i.e., dishonestly) if not recklessly caricature and smear adversaries' positions (contrary to Mill's advice about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form), and they give their own side a pass for bad things, quite a lot.  (So, well, yeah, in politics, dishonesty is kinda rampant.)  And I think those who are readily in a position to call out Biden for his pledge, and yet fail to do so, are being dishonest.]

What does Putin want for the USA?

If I had to guess, Putin wants to sow internal division, discord, and distrust.  If I had to say, Putin is a grandmaster of misinformation and misdirection.  See his non-answer answers to Chris Wallace's probing interview questions.  So, he sees how Trump's presidency sows discord, and Trump's opposition plays right along, probably much to his delight.  (This includes their obsessing for years about Trump/Putin-collusion conspiracy theories.)  He most likely seeded the claims made in the so-called Steele dossier (actually the Clinton/PerkinsCoie/FusionGPS/Simpson/Steele dossier), and the anti-Trump-biased intelligence (sic) community played right along, further sowing distrust of its honor and capabilities.

Now we hear that he might also like to see Sanders be president (consider the ring to that phrase - "President Sanders" - and in light of this) if he can't have Trump; for that, too, would sow much division for obvious reasons.  He sees Sanders' quasi-rabid supporters, and parallels to Trump's True Believers, and figures they'll be adequate to the division-sowing job.  Then again, maybe it's just another piece of misinformation from him that he wants Sanders elected, maybe just to see how Americans react to that notion.

We just don't really know for sure what's a trial balloon from him, and what's for real.  'Reality' for Vladimir Putin seems like a rather fluid notion, in a political context anyway, since the norms of rationality touted (and practiced to varying degrees of imperfection) by philosophers and scientists are not the norms (if they can even be called that) of political discourse (warring by less violent means).  His state-TV apparatus is self-serving propaganda/lies, after all.  He learned it at the KGB, ffs.

Knowing all this, why on earth should anyone pay serious attention to who Putin supposedly wants to win in the USA, or whether he even thinks discord and distrust in the USA serves his own political interests or not, and focus instead on the merits of each candidacy?  It's just a distraction, which for all we know is what he wants.  I mean, does he want more attention/scrutiny focused on him and his fundamentally dishonest and gangsterish nature, or not?

But what should really humble Trump's opponents is the thought that they may very well be willing if not eager dupes of Putin's puppet-mastery.  But I don't expect such a level of thoughtfulness from them, at this point, they are that pathetic and dishonest themselves.  Also, Trump as a matter of basic honesty and accountability/transparency should make clear to Putin that he wants him to stay away from election-meddling efforts.  But Trump likes to troll his domestic opponents too much (and they're pathetic enough to go right along with that, as well), so I don't expect that from him, either.

Did I mention there's an antidote to this shitshow?

Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Intellectual bankruptcy and climate change

Some blog-context: How is a layperson to assess climate change? and Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps) and the intellectual bankruptcy tag

My original idea for this post's title was something along the lines of, "Willfully blind climate change deniers," or perhaps even "Willfully blind climate change denying motherfuckers," either of which followed by an introduction of the following image with something like, "For instance, this motherfucker right here":

But I'm gonna try my best to write this without a bunch of expletives - I've been told it puts off potential readers, as though they couldn't handle expletives, or they look for whatever piss-poor excuse not to read well-argued points, or whatever, I just about don't gaf at this point; the fact that the intellectually-bankrupt twitter gets tons of attention while philosophy blogs in general (irrespective of expletive-to-reasoning ratios) do not, speaks plenty of volumes already (about the intellectual bankruptcy about which I will be speaking here).

I'm gonna try to write this without expletives even though the topic of intellectual bankruptcy generally makes me hopping mad.  And I use the image of the current President because the very fact that he ever became president is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy.  The Framers of the country weren't intellectually bankrupt, but their legacy has been squandered.  If the country weren't so intellectually bankrupt (and as a dialectician/context-keeper one has to imagine the not just the implications of this conditional but also the presuppositions, which I'll get to as well), we'd have had good enough elected leaders (actual leaders, not the fake kind) that no one would feel the need to turn to a Donald Trump in desperation.

Despite a recent about-face (of the Trump kind, which we have every reason to discount), Trump has a long, exhaustively documented history of intellectually-reckless climate change denial.

The number of man-hours of time and attention wasted on shit garbage like "it's cold here in January, so much for climate change" is probably so off-the-charts as to disgust any decent person.  (Meanwhile, it's summertime in the southern hemisphere/Australia.)

Or how about: "the climate has always been changing, how is this any different?"  Just about as low as it gets by any respectable standards of belief-formation.

Anyone with belief-formation processes so screwed-up as to produce the gobs of Trumpian climate-denial tweets, cannot be trusted to form any credible beliefs (outside of their area of expertise, that is; I'm sure Trump had to have some pretty decent belief-formation processes when it comes to which real estate deal is worthwhile, although even there I "somehow" manage to have some doubt).

Here's a big, probably the biggest part of the problem: climate change being an unavoidably political subject, people from all over the political spectrum have every good reason to distrust the belief-formation processes of those they disagree with.  Political discussion is especially intellectually-bankrupt given that it involves decisions about how to coerce other people (irrespective of or against their considered independent judgment, etc.).  So naturally that's going to encourage a lot of bad-faith arguments for one's policy preferences (a nice euphemism for coercion).

One should probably expect about as much intellectual bankruptcy in a politics-related discussion as just about anything else, save perhaps for religion-related discussions where the canons of logic and evidence espoused by philosophers and/or scientists are routinely flouted.

(People tend to seek meaning in a silent universe, see - and that gives rise to an excrement-ton of wishful thinking.  You'd probably have to consult the philosophy of religion literature for the least-toxic treatments of the subject, and there you are likely to find a whole lot of uncertainty at best, a lot of maybe-not-successful attempts at conceptual clarification, a lot of speculation, etc.  In my personal context the most advanced treatment is the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, where my pretty-reliable ring-of-truth heuristics have told me that it ultimately most likely comes down to a matter of faith that a trio-omni god would create a world like this one containing an excrement-ton of morally-pointless animal suffering in addition to this or that facet of what is now being termed the human predicament [about which I'll have more to say in another post], all of which a trio-omni god would have sufficient reason for creating but which reasons are mysterious and inaccessible to us.  I thought the treatment of the problem of suffering in the Oxford Handbook was close to deplorable, BTW, particularly in its taking seriously the notion that human corruption would be a reason even for animal suffering.  But you should read it for yourself to see if I'm off-base.)

Getting back to the main problem: many people have good reasons to distrust the values and epistemic practices of a great many of their political (and/or religious) Others.

And the main cause for people having such good reasons is that all too few people habitually internalize the canons of reason and evidence espoused by philosophers and scientists.

I've written about all the deplorable practices (leading, not surprisingly, to a wide range of deplorable beliefs) of political leftists who squander whatever credibility they might have had on climate change and other issues with their approach to the subject of capitalism.  (If you want my hunch about this, it has basically to do with rationalization for envy of those with superior talents; when capitalism led to a ballooning both of population and of living standards across the board, what really ticked off the enemies of capitalism is that all the abundance wasn't "shared" more equally.  Nozick also offers pointers in the direction of a psychologically-based diagnosis of anticapitalist pathology.)  The worst offenders in this anticapitalism bunch would be the Rand-bashers, those who willfully refuse to have a fair dialogue about Rand's philosophy.  (See the excremental "scholarship" of Scumbag Duggan for the "state of the art" in this loser genre.)

So when you have rabidly, dishonestly anti-capitalist folks crying wolf about (how capitalism is causing) climate change, many others have abundant reason to discount or ignore their latest wolf-crying.  And as the crying-wolf fable shows, it's kind of a goddamn shame that the boy is ignored when a real wolf is around.

As for the Climate Change Issue, it's one I've followed as a layperson for close to 30 years now; it became something of considerable interest when Rush Limbaugh in his early books would say how it's, well, a hoax, along with the ozone hole (now not really an issue - once governments implemented policies opposed by Rush & Co.).  I still listen to Rush semi-frequently, and he's still pushing the it's-a-hoax line, mixed in (unfortunately and toxically) with other useful insights he has about the bias and corruption of the "drive-by media" to name a major example of what he actually does build his credibility profile upon.  (See, as one glaringly obvious instance of the bias/corruption, the context-erasing "fine people on both sides" hoax that CNN et al peddled to its audience and for which CNN has refused to demonstrate any accountability.  Or how about the New York Times' ill-fated 1619 Project.  Or how these peddlers of fake news twisted Trump's criticism of fake news into a criticism of a free press. And people are now supposed to trust these media sources when it comes to climate change or anything else?)

(Also, Rush has built what credibility he has upon his championing of the American (and capitalist) values such as "rugged individualism," family values, limited government, etc., that the left, with its march through the institutions, is making every effort to pervert or destroy.  As with pretty much anything political, media figures such as Rush get a lot more mileage out of the values they espouse than about what factual or scientific claims they make.)

The left is selective about which experts to consult on which topics.  Like clockwork they'll cite the "97 percent of climate scientists agree" line, but then (also like clockwork) when it comes to minimum wages or rent control they ignore or discount the expert reasoning of economists, also often along with smears of free-market advocates along values-lines.  (If a libertarian says that it really isn't the business of the state to coerce people in their economic decisions, or that there is a principle of subsidiarity that directs people toward non-state remedies to social ills before turning to the force-wielding state only as a very last resort, the left translates that as being heartless, sociopathic - probably an admirer of Ayn Rand's fictional heroes.)

Now, as I've said, I've followed the climate-change issue as much as a layperson could, for nearly 3 decades, or pretty much the time that it's been a big political topic.  And I've heard every which argumentative fallacy coming from what for simplicity's sake I'll term the Right.  (After hearing Rush and consulting 'Conservative Book Club'-type recommended books on climate change and ozone depletion, it wasn't long before I figured out that unless I were to make these subjects a full-time study requiring PhD-level learning in the relevant science(s), this stuff was going to be well above my pay grade.  Cue STEM-lord chest-beating....)  For a great long while the main tactic of the political Right was to be "skeptical" about the climate prediction models.  Another tactic, after time went on, was to highlight the overreaching and alarmism of those who were saying that the polar ice caps could melt by the year 2000.  Another tactic was to be "skeptical" that humans are the primary contributors to present-day climate change.  ("The climate's always been changing....")  Then the tactic was to say that it wasn't warming as much as the 'scientific consensus' (really, a range of opinion widely accepted by the experts) was saying.  Then there was the so-called warming pause that lasted for all of maybe 2 decades (but which had a precedent some half a century earlier, amid an overall warming trend).  Then the tactic was the smear the "hockey stick" authors in what was termed the Climategate controversy.

The worst of this bunch of right-wingers might be the religious fundamentalists who deny that the tri-omni god would facilitate humans making the planet uninhabitable.  (They also have a cognitive bias about a wished-for afterlife, or even an End of Days, that would lead them to discount the importance of planet habitability.)  There is also an unequivocally terrible epistemic practice on the Right when it comes to the science of evolution, to the extent that some 2 out of 5 rightists will affirm that humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.  (Actually, it's roughly 2 in 5 Americans.  The numbers on the Right/GOP are even worse.)  The politicians of the Right enable and coddle this blatant epistemic malpractice, sometimes by directly engaging in it themselves.

So the way I'd put it is that there are plenty of huge trust and credibility deficits in politics to go around.  After all the lies and smears promoted by those on the left, why should those on the right believe them when it comes to climate change?  And after the lies and smears peddled by the Right (an obvious recent one being Obama-birtherism - also peddled by one Donald Trump in the early 2010s), what reason do leftists have for believing them on climate change or anything else?

I've already pointed out the solution to this whole trust-problem, which is philosophical education (i.e., education in the canons of logic and evidence traditionally espoused by philosophers, particularly standards of dialectic exemplified by the likes of the Rapoport/Dennett Rules, ffs already).  It doesn't mean the leftist take on doing philosophy, such as smearing Rand by claiming she's not taken seriously by the community of philosophers.  (The relevant criterion here would be what those who are actually experts in Rand's thought have to contribute to the philosophical discussion going forward, seeing as how Rand isn't around to speak for herself.  Anyway, the case of Hospers just on its own gives lie to the standard leftist smear, even before we take a look at the philosophy professors involved with the Ayn Rand Society.)  It doesn't mean a toxic take on philosophy and science that is widespread on the Right, which is to discount academics and experts in these fields.  (I do share their opinion when it comes to the systemic/structural dishonesty of the academic left, but it's a mistake to regard that crowd of losers as defining the academy as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against] - just as it is a mistake to regard the epistemic criminals of the Right as defining the Right as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against].)

Is it possible for the public comprised mostly of laypersons to gave a serious, honest, informed, high-signal-to-noise-ratio discussion of climate change?  Perhaps it is - it would be greatly enhanced by the aforementioned suggested program of philosophical education (along with minimal scientific, historical and economic literacy) - but here's something that might really (ahem) light a fire under everyone's asses as it hits home more and more:

The concern, of course, is that the point at which these infernos hit closer and closer to more and more people's homes, it will be too late to do anything about it.  (If there's anything in your episteme that suggests that the billions of animals perishing horribly in these infernos is Divine Providence, chances are you are a culpable contributor to the problem.)  As the ignored-by-Trump-&-Co. scientists have been saying, some amount of future climate change is already locked in by the rising atmospheric CO2 levels, so chances are the infernos will get worse before we find any ways to make it better.  (And that warming pause that the deniers were touting?  The scientists have an explanation for that: the oceans as heat sinks - and the oceans can only absorb so much, and even if they do, the effects on ocean life are probably not good.)  Just how patient shall we be about AI and/or alternative energy sources for mitigating this problem?

A lot (but far from all) of the disagreements about climate change and other issues is attributable to human fallibility and uncertainty.  See for instance the comments section of that "Trump about-face" link at the top of this post.  (Here it is again.)  Aside from the standard deplorable and gutter-level stuff you might expect to find in a typical politically-charged comments section, you have "advocates" and "skeptics" alike pointing to sites with domain names like realclimatescience.org and realclimatechangescience.org, domain names which are of no use when they take opposite positions on the topic, whatever abundance of links and data appear at either.  Again, how is a layperson to sift through all that, to be able to distinguish the real science from the junk?  So many people on both sides are not only not equipped to deal with the subjects at the pay-grade level required, but they come to the discussion with their usual left- or right- biases that have them treating their own experts as definitive and the opposing ones as discount-able.

One of the few things an epistemically virtuous layperson can do, is to look at metadata about the state of the discussion or debate.  I take it that there is real debate among real experts about climate change, but that this debate bears little if any resemblance to the public/political "debates" (represented by the now-twice-linked comment thread, the basic form of which you probably have seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, so you may not really need the refresher since there really isn't anything to learn or observe in the comment thread other than about human cognitive behavior/biases).  From my experience, your typical leftist uses shitty lousy argumentation tactics because the ideas/positions they're defending are typically lousy, but that may not be an infallible heuristic.  (There are plenty of folks offering lousy arguments for libertarianism, capitalism, Objectivism/Randism, all of which I take seriously.  [Are there lousy arguments for a basically Aristotelian episteme or dialectic?  I'm not used to seeing such things, and not even clear on what they would look like.  The first thing that pops to mind is arguments by Thomists employing - well, probably abusing - Aristotelian concepts to rationalize dubious sexuality-related positions in Christianity.  Tossing off is contrary to your telos, you see.])

[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters.  In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist).  I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell.  (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before.  This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty.  It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.)  So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters).  This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests....  I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]

"The climate's always been changing" is either a mechanism for shutting down honest inquiry in someone's mind, or a good-faith invitation in someone's mind to inquire into how it might be different this time.  (While you can't rule out the latter, usually it's the former.  After all, any reputable climate scientist already accepts that the climate's always been changing, so that can't be what's in contention.  The rate of change is actually relevant.)  That the warming theory adopted by the IPCC is probably the best explanation for a vast web of data should probably be taken by a layperson as the default position departures from which require a really good argument that takes into account all the data (i.e., not evading the whole of the context) as well any actual and anticipated objections/counter-arguments.

As I pointed out in my Jan. '19 blog post ("How is a layperson..."), it would really be nice if there were a highly-publicized debate between (say) Michael Mann and (say) Richard Lindzen, for the benefit of laypeople and policymakers.  Why hasn't this happened?  If the debate on its merits really is over - if the IPCC report is pretty much the most definitive context-keeping picture we have right now of the climate situation - then how hard could it possibly be to get the uncoerced agreement of advocates and "skeptics" alike?  While I've personally experienced on many occasions dishonest leftists closing off the possibility of fair debate about Rand or capitalism, how pray tell does this dynamic play out when it comes to climate discussions, exactly?  The Right/"skeptics" accuse the Left/warmers of using various tactics to shut down debate, but my ring-of-truth heuristics tell me that this doesn't ring true about the climate debate because the central claims being made aren't made by those in the social sciences and humanities - people who can be expected to be promoting a political agenda - but by those in the STEM disciplines (which are then seized upon and amplified by the leftists in their usual dishonest ways in order to promote the anti-capitalism policy framework/mentality they were dishonestly promoting already).  Fine, don't pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore - he's a messenger one might have any number of reasons to shoot - but how about a Michael Mann?  Is there something the "skeptics" have to employ against him other than dishonest/ context-disregarding smears?

So, to wrap up:  Yawning trust deficits.  Intellectual bankruptcy.  Philosophical literacy.

Trump impeachment thoughts/questions

I wasn't around for the impeachment inquiry into President Nixon, but from all I've seen/heard about it, there was clear an overwhelming evidence that Nixon displayed what might be called a blatant disregard for the rule of law (and there were some 18 minutes of recordings which put him dead to rights on that), enough so that the effort to remove him from office was bipartisan and Nixon saw no alternative but to resign.  I'm not seeing that in President Trump's case.

A couple thoughts/questions re: "Treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors" and the specifics of Trump's case:

Assume you're not a partisan piece of shit; reverse the party affiliations if necessary and see if you come out with the same answer in either case:

Are treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors sufficient grounds for impeachment, or or only necessary or potential grounds?  Of course, the Framers sought to have some mechanism by which a sitting President could be removed.

In the case of President Clinton, he committed perjury in a deposition and perhaps before a grand jury as well.  He tried to influence the testimony of his assistant Betty Currie.  For such actions this national chief law-enforcement official was deemed by the Arkansas State Bar unfit to practice law.  Is this sufficient to warrant impeachment and/or removal?  Does it make a difference if these actions fall under the heading of "high crimes and misdemeanors"?  Was Clinton displaying a blatant disregard for the rule of law?  (Should blatant disregard for the rule of law suffice as an impeachable/removable offense?  I would think so; if that doesn't suffice, then what does?)

As for the specifics of Trump's case: Some reasoning I've heard for why his payoffs to Stormy Daniels weren't a violation of campaign finance laws is that he could have other, legitimate reasons for such a payoff (e.g., to avoid personal embarrassment).  So we might call this a dual-motivation excuse.  Does such a dual motivation exist in the case of Trump's pressuring Ukraine to announce  investigations of the Bidens?  Supposedly Ukraine announcing/initiating investigations would benefit Trump and hurt Biden politically, but Trump has said that his concern isn't political but is about corruption (particularly if there is probable cause to think corruption might have taken place).

Was there probable cause to suspect corruption by either of the Bidens?  Trump told Zelensky that Biden using monetary pressure against Ukraine to get a prosecutor not to investigate Burisma "sounds terrible to me [Trump]."  What now?

Supposedly, a foreign country (or whomever!...) announcing an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up.  Well, gee.  What do you think the Demo-rats & allies/enablers were up to when it came to the Mueller investigation that had been hanging over the Trump presidency some two years?  What was their intent other than to go after something that "sounds terrible to [them]" when there was nothing there?  What the fuck else were the likes of Adam Schiff doing those two years other than casting baseless suspicions on the Trump presidency?

On a matter of broader political interest: how much cynicism does it take to assume - as apparently is assumed inside the Beltway - that so much as an announcement of an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up?  Wherever did they get that idea?  How does the Demo-rat complaint about Trump pressuring someone to investigate his political opponent not amount to the ultimate in cynicsm if not blatant hypocrisy?  (Keep in mind that as far as I am concerned, the Demo-rats have squandered all credibility and grounds for good will; a number of their top "leaders" in Congress and on the '20 campaign trail have claimed that there are sufficient grounds to impeach Brett Kavanaugh, for example - not a position an honest and informed person would take.  They've recklessly smeared Trump and his supporters as racists, for another example.  If you're looking for honest and credible arguments for whether Trump should be impeached/removed, the Demo-rats cannot be considered a reliable source.  Any reasonable observer should also note the Demo-rats' years-long effort to run interference and make excuses for Obama/Comey's FISA-abusing FBI.)

As for Trump, if he really thinks he did noting wrong, then I don't see any excuse whatsoever for him to hide behind anyone or anything when it comes to his (presumed) Senate trial.  He should get his fat fucking ass up there to Capitol Hill to testify in person (under oath, etc.) and clear his name.  He should face the adversarial grilling of Senators.  Likewise, Joe Biden should also stop being an evader and explain just what the fuck his unqualified, black-sheep son was doing drawing some $50k a month from a company (for doing what?) that apparently plays a key role in the Ukraine narrative (enough so to draw his intervention as VP and Ukraine point-man...).

For reasons apparent to most any honest and attentive observer, this impeachment process has been and is expected to continue being a blatantly partisan event that probably serves to illustrate Beltway intellectual and moral bankruptcy and cynicism than anything else, with the impeaching party having squandered all credibility/trust on tons of matters.  Trump was elected for, among other things, being as credible a vehicle as anyone - as a take-no-prisoners outsider - to clean up the Beltway swamp.  (If he doesn't do it, who credibly could?  I already know what happened in the case of Obama.  Ironically, his original "clean up Washington" persona was starting to crack when as Senator he voted back in '08 for FISA powers, as the likes of Glenn Greenwald would surely not overlook...)

Well, that's why Trump should testify and clear up just why it was within his constitutional powers to pressure Ukraine as he did, and released the funds when he did (i.e., two days after word of the whistleblower got out).  And since the Demo-rats have no reputation left over to salvage, it's up to the GOP to honorably follow the evidence where it leads, and weigh the input of Dershowitz (e.g.) alongside that of the law professors who testified to the House Judiciary committee.  Such dialectically responsible behavior is a requirement of basic epistemic justice.

The American people (the ones with a clue, that is) are fucking sick and tired of being subjected to much less from their "leaders," and thereby having their intelligence and character routinely insulted.

Greenwald vs. Comey's Crooked FBI (Plus: the scummery of the Left)

Scumbag Comey

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald for doing as Greenwald does for well over a decade now: calling out Swamp corruption for what it is, and those who enable it for what they are.  And it vindicates Trump when it comes to the need to drain the very Swamp that used the very Swamp-like means to try to take him down.

Trump's instincts in firing the non-contrite James Comey turned out to be right: Comey's either an incompetent piece of shit, or a willfully corrupt one.  (And it only further proves Trump's point that Comey's enablers would react to his firing as they did, by launching a bullshit investigation that it appears Mueller's team had good reason to believe back in 2017 would not turn up what it was digging for.)  It doesn't really matter which at this point whether Comey was crooked or incompetent; what matters is how other folks - namely, Demorats and their allies/enablers (including their talking-points outlet, MSDNC) - enabled his behavior and continue to enable it still.

The enablers are on the "best" team the American Left is able to field any longer.  And here's the philosopher's smackdown: without contrition for peddling falsehoods and a good-faith effort to clean up their acts to avoid such fuck-ups in the future, then they are liars retroactively.  They fail to call out their earlier selves for their falsehood-spreading, thereby falsely certifying themselves as reliable truth-tellers.  The likes of Greenwald and myself don't let them get away with it.  (Indeed, what would it make me if I failed to call out their corruption and sliminess and intellectual dishonesty in no uncertain terms?  What if I don't call obvious motherfuckers obvious motherfuckers?  How would I live with myself?)

During the GWB years, the Demorats had an ally in Greenwald because he went after the motherfucking behaviors of GWB officials (& enablers/allies) with all the necessary documentation/links and cold hard logic.  If Greenwald says you're a motherfucker, it's because he's got overwhelming proof that you're a motherfucker.

This here post is the very, very last opportunity I am giving today's Demorats/enablers to redeem themselves and own up to their enabling of Comey's FBI's motherfucking behavior.  Slinking away in silence would (of course?) not be good enough; doing so itself is motherfucker behavior reasons that should be clear by now: they are unwilling to acknowledge and condemn their own bad behavior.  And it isn't just some triviality, some white lie or mishap: this is a powerful law enforcement agency running roughshod over citizens' rights.

I would take issue with this statement from Greenwald, although perhaps as an attorney he is more closely familiar with what he's talking about than I am:

Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.
The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.

It does appear easy enough for the NSA and FBI to abuse their surveillance powers as long as they act like crooked motherfuckers, and as Greenwald says earlier in his article:

About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.'”

Apparently Greenwald considers it unrealistic to expect FBI actors to behave scrupulously?  (The measure of scrupulousness should be something like, "Assume that you're the one that the FBI is seeking to surveil."  Like, duh?)  Apparently the supposed safeguards in FBI policy against this kind of abuse just aren't good or reliable enough?  What if heads roll when this sort of abuse happens?  There are fuck-ups and crooked actors, but the key here seems to be accountability.  And it's motherfuckerly to oppose accountability or to run interference for the crooked and the fuck-ups, as Demorats/enablers appear committed to doing.

I have a hypothesis, a hunch, or what have you about the American Left and its Demorat team-on-the-field: They've been rotten and motherfuckerly for a while, that they've been getting increasingly worse over time, but the candidacy and election of Donald Trump sent them over the edge and put their rotten motherfuckerliness way out into the open for all (well, all of those with a clue) to observe and draw their disgusted conclusions from.  I wouldn't have expected an entire political party and its enablers to prove themselves to be such a bunch of pathetic pieces of shit, but a mountain of overwhelming evidence points me to this unavoidable conclusion.  I have to call it out as my inner daimon urges me to.

And, since I already did know what a bunch of pathetic motherfuckerly pieces of shit they are when they've recklessly smeared and belittled even so titanic a figure as Atlas Shrugged's author over the course of decades - showing their true colors when the chips are down - it couldn't exactly come as a surprise to me when they turn the same tactics on a president that triggered them just right.  (Kudos to Trump for the rope-a-dope?)  I guess the main difference is that they didn't devote all their resources to smearing Rand given her limited (so far) influence on the culture and polity; but with Trump they feel the necessity to do so and debase themselves in no uncertain terms in the process.  But they would go all-out on Rand in just the same way if/when they consider it necessary.  They are, after all, behaving just like the intellectually bankrupt pieces of shit responsible for the dystopian conditions in Atlas.  I think I might be able to build an incontrovertible case that they're even worse than the statist scum of Rand's fictional portrayal.

Scumbag so-called philosopher

This brings me to the Academic Left.  I now consider the Academic Left to be the nearest thing to irredeemable deplorables as we have in this country, a bunch of dishonest parasites hell-bent on smearing their opposition and destroying honest dialogue.  (See Rand's comment about the potential of intellectuals to be either the most beneficial or the most parasitic of all social groups.)  It may well be that a fully-documented, dead-to-rights smackdown of the Academic Left and the intellectual culture of Leftism generally has to be part and parcel of a wider 'better living through philosophy' project, since the Academic Left serves as such a glaring contrast case - an example of what happens when those with the letters "PhD" after their names manage (in a concerted, systematic, institutionalized fashion) to bastardize philosophic inquiry, with all sorts of sophisticated rationalizations to boot.  To do philosophy perfectively one has to pursue metaphilosophy perfectively, and part of the latter involves being able to reliably and systematically distinguish real philosophic activity from pseudo-philosophic activity (the pseudo- part involving clever rationalizations for systematic biases).

Pseudo-philosphic activity seems especially devious and toxic when there's a political agenda involved; I mean, were they allowed to run amok, how would today's Academic Left behave differently than Marxist movements of the 20th century that grabbed power and murdered millions, time and time again?  (You should immediately be suspicious when you hear Marxists/enablers protesting that Marx's vision was never truly or properly implemented, i.e., that it was psychopaths - time and time again, somehow - who misappropriated Marxian doctrine for reliably murderous totalitarian ends.  To explain that one away, we'd need a really good, BS-free explanation for how Marx's dismissive attitude toward "bourgeois rights," for instance, wouldn't lead to atrocities committed time and time again - an unmistakable pattern - by avowed Marxists.)  What are the differences between these two groups of ideologues, exactly?  Get someone like a Trump or an Amy Wax to trigger them just right, and out come their true, hard-to-distinguish-from-Red colors, particularly with their eagerness to rush to shut down the Prohibited ideas, or to smear them beyond recognition.  (That the silence/punish/smear-Wax effort occurred at an Ivy League University says it all.)

So I've fucking had it with the Left in its current incarnation, its systematic bad faith and dishonesty, its totalitarian methods, its refusal to learn from or atone for past errors/misdeeds.  (See Alan Charles Kors on whether we can ever realistically expect the Academic Left to own up to the spectacular and bloody record of failures of efforts to implement socialism, efforts they supported for decades on end.  Failure to do so makes them what else than motherfuckerly apologists for totalitarianism?  This also goes for the "leading" so-called philosophy blogger with a long track record of reckless smears of non-leftists such as Rand.)

(Speaking of this so-called philosophy blogger, a reckless smear of Sesardic that only proves Sesardic's point: "Sesardic is a right-wing crank who has even written a whole book expressing disbelief that philosophers might not all be anti-Marxist zealots like he is.  [UP: Actually, Sesardic's point is that there are provably too many leftist zealots even in the history of "rigorous, analytic" philosophy than is warranted by the quality of the arguments for leftist ideas.  Anyone who's gone through Sesardic's book knows this.]  I even make a brief appearance in the book, based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of a post on this blog.  [UP: Actually, there are without question dozens of posts from which Sesardic draws for his depiction of this so-called philosopher; see here for some further context.]"  For a "Doctor" who chides Sesardic for lack of argumentative rigor, some self-healing is in order.)

My educated hunch is that a mountain of overwhelming, dead-to-rights, no-holes, no-escape case against the Academic Left can successfully be built, if it hasn't been done already.  As I state above, I may have to build such a case myself as part of my project.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: What more would I need to show than what I've peppered this here blog with already, or what any honest reader would reasonably induce from it all?  What more does it take to prove what a sick puppy the Left is?)  Of course, the target audience for such a case won't be the Academic Left, which I suspect has unlimited ability to evade or explain away even mountains of evidence they don't like (and the ones who don't possess that ability would have ditched the Left already); the intended audience will be those, such as mainstream Americans, who have an incentive to fight and remove parasitic destruction of American institutions and traditions.

Perhaps the main challenge remaining, assuming that what I've already peppered the blog with tells any reasonable observer all they need to know about the intellectual and moral character of the Left, is to connect the two things, to demonstrate how one led to the other: the Academic Left's anti-philosophical nature on the one hand, and the Demorat/enablers' enabling of FBI corruption on the other.  Would you be surprised if such a connection could be demonstrated beyond all doubt, or that if any media outlet carries out such a demonstration it would be this here blog?  Do I have to get saganized and see where my saganized inner daimon leads me?  Is that what has to be done here?

I mean, fuck.  The pattern is the same: Demorat-allied media propagating smears against Republicans (e.g.) while excusing and running interference for scummy Demorat behavior, all under the guise of professional journalistic objectivity; and the Academic Left propagating smears against opposing ideas while excusing the bad ideas that appear to lead inexorably to totalitarianism when applied, all under the guise of professional scholarly rigor.  All with the hope and wish for impunity and unaccountability.  And lots of overlap between these two groups.  How could there not be a deep connection between how these groups operate?

[ADDENDUM: How about this little gem I encountered via searchwords "academic left".  When the institutionalized dishonesty and malice overtake the philosophy (sic) profession, what hope for integral academic honesty is there?  It was nothing short of an ultimate litmus test - Leftism vs. Philosophy - and in today's academic environment, Leftism won.  And note - surprise, surprise - that the further left you go, the more malicious, scummy, and Red-like the behavior.  If this isn't dead-to-rights shit that should make every decent person fucking pissed, then what is? [Edit: Of course, given a lot of recent evidence regarding the reliability and reproducibility of social science studies, surveys, methodologies, etc., this study should be approached with as much skepticism as one approaches any study of this sort.  See the more downthread comments here, for instance.  (So I jumped the gun somewhat here, and that's not acceptable to this here intellectual perfectionist, although my inner daimon isn't pointing me toward the assessment that I'm a motherfucking piece of shit for having done so; this has to be weighed against the entirety of this blog - just as it would only be fair to weigh the scummery of contemporary leftist intellectual culture against the widest context of behavior by leftists; while they may routinely be motherfucking pieces of shit when their cognition and behavior are politically-oriented, their non-politically-oriented cognitions and behaviors may have some redeeming value.  But what did I say the other day about acting like a decent person one moment and a scumbag the next?  I'm not quite yet prepared to resolve the tension between propositions here.  Either their duality of cognition/behavior from one moment to the next is itself still fundamentally scummy, or the leftists are only scummy for sure qua contemporary leftists.  I'm really not sure which.  Gee, if that's what any reasonable disagreement comes down to, the assessment of contemporary leftism as an anti-philosophical shitshow stands either way,)  But . . . what if a body of overwhelming anecdotal evidence exists to establish essentially the same basic assessment of the Academic Left's nature as this study (if largely true and accurate) suggests, as I think such body of evidence does?] ]

Politics vs. honesty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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