The very premise of "the 1619 project"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve

I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.

The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.

This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits.  (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.)  It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it.  The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it).  It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities.  What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?

Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research.  For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA?  Is the DNA defined by the Constitution?  Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good?  Of course not.  There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land.  What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."

This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness.  It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding.  Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly).  It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day.  (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative).  Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap.  It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied.  And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap.  And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan.   (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory."  CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue.  If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments.  How is all this not obvious ffs?)

Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery?  Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant?  What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment?  Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy.  What's more or truly fundamental?

Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery?  That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different.  But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element.  But again, how does one avoid triviality here?

After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed.  No one disputes this.

But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim?  If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form.  But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century).  That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what?  In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended.  (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years.  Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)

Maybe I've missed something here.  As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so.  But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.)  And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists).  (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond .  How can capitalism as such be brutal?  What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital?  Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition?  If so, I must have missed them doing so.  Are markets inherently brutal?  If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?)  They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected).  Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.

That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system.  Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.

In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.

Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children?  Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process.  And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources?  From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there.  They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?

And where does the NYT go from here?  Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next?  Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model?  (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)

What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters.  It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually.  That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.

I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist.  But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright.  That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again."  It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville.  (How could they not deliberately omit the context?  The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all.  Fucking liars, plain and simple.)  And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars.  And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors?  How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?

More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes.  (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned.  It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]).  It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems.  I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.

[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe.  (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.)  In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...).  (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith?  Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.)  As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other.  A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production).  I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving.  Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.'  (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]

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?] ]

Charlottesville fake news, 2+ years later

Scumbag CNN

CONTEXT

The notion that Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, skinheads, the KKK, or any related groups who might have been in Charlottesville in 2017 as "very fine people" is false, thoroughly and easily debunked, as perfect an example of fake news as any.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: if that isn't fake news, then what is?)  Trump's statement about "very fine people on both sides," stripped of context, would appear to be some sort of dog whistle to these racist groups.  The full context includes not just the entirety of the press conference in which he said "very fine people" but also other statements made within days of that in which he explicitly and unambiguously repudiated - by name - neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK, etc.

In other words, there really is no excuse for spreading what is in essence a fucking lie that Trump called Nazis "very fine people."

It's a notion that took hold in the minds of vast swaths of the American left - Democrats, "progressives," academia, and media such as CNN.  And if you have any doubts that this notion went all the way to the top, just see what Obama said: "How hard is it so say Nazis are bad?"  (How the fuck can Obama not know better than this?  How can he not know that Trump explicitly, repeatedly repudiated Nazis?  This makes Obama a fucking liar, plain and simple.)

But what really pisses me and a ton of people off, is the likes of CNN refusing to own up to their de-contextualized misreporting - the spreading of fake news and lies.  CNN refuses to accept accountability and responsibility, indicating they think they can spread lies with impunity.  (And, yes, had CNN done the right thing and issued a full and clear correction, it would be headline news impossible not to have heard about.  All we have so far, it appears, is a half-assed admission from one if its anchors.)

It's one thing to spread lies and fake news; it's another to refuse to own up to it.  There's only one logical consequence of this: CNN deserves no credibility as a news outlet - certainly not when it comes to its coverage of politics.  The only logical question to raise at this point is: What else might CNN be lying to our faces about, this very day?

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (for one) has spent lots of time calling CNN to task for its lies, and CNN has chosen to ignore him.  Well, fuck CNN, then.  If they ignore him, who won't they ignore?  Fake-news motherfuckers.

But as I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt throughout many blog postings, this is a problem going well beyond CNN and applies pretty much to the entirety of today's American Left and what, to them, passes for decent and responsible discussion about political matters.  The American Left has become chock full of dishonest motherfuckers who think they can smear their opponents (not just politicians like Trump but intellectual figures like Rand) with impunity, and cry "racism" all the time with no consequence, and generally act like scum who have no business wielding power over others.  What's more, if they're not in on this scummy act directly, they are complicit in it.  If they don't actively take measures to hold the likes of CNN to account for its lies (while still rooting out every mistruth stated by their opponents, and screaming bloody murder when they pretend to have found something for sure), then they're partisan pieces of shit who also have no business pretending to act in the name of truth and goodness.

I hardly bother watching CNN any longer; it's quite predictable how its commentators will one-sidedly distort things (i.e., lie through context-omission), exaggerate the misdeeds of their opponents and downplay/ignore their own, etc.; whatever value it might have to offer I can get on another network, anyway; they offer no-value-added.

And that is part of a wider picture which I have also suggested before: the best (not merely good, or okay) minds in politics today have ended up being on the Right broadly speaking.  (Think about it: if someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies and isn't succeeded in Democratic politics by anyone of remotely comparable stature, then where do you suppose the potential successor-minds have gone instead?  Suppose that the very best minds coming of age in, say, the 1990s make lots of attentive effort to sift through competing political ideas.  Such a mind would be carefully observant of the state of the debate, a meta-level observation as it were.  And what if such a mind is not only disappointed by what Democrats and the Left have to offer, but becomes increasingly disappointed over time to the point of being appalled at the intellectual bankruptcy a quarter century later?  What if the so-called minds of the Left nowadays consistently and unaccountably caricature and smear their opponents on the Right (and pat each other on the back for doing so) rather than engage in serious dialectic?  And what if those so-called minds, with increasing regularity, accompany their smears with hubris and contempt for their (imagined) opponents?  At what point does the best and most attentive mind stop giving these intellectual slobs the benefit of the doubt; how obviously slovenly and slothful does their behavior have to get?)  I'll add: those with the more reputable moral character have also ended up on the Right.  The Left has deluded itself with the notion of intellectual and moral superiority, which is belied the moment you get leftists pretending to debate the merits of opposing political views.  The likes of CNN are employing lesser intellects and more morally defective people than their competition.

(MSDNC is even more of a fucking joke; I haven't wasted a second of my time on that pitiful excuse for a news/opinion network in well over a month now; its commentators are obviously of a lesser intellectual and moral caliber, and the only point of its "news" is to propagate DNC talking points.  Or maybe it's just that CNN does a better job of disguising itself doing essentially the same thing; in that they would happen to be only more clever, but hardly wise.)

Even if you still wanted or hoped to trust CNN, to give it the benefit of the doubt, how can you?  If what they've done so far isn't enough to have squandered the benefit of the doubt, then what would be?

If "liberal centrist" Jonathan Haidt and his now-4-years-old Heterodox Academy project, with all its commonsense recommendations for how the Academy (and especially the Academic Left) might restore a reputation for honest inquiry, is pretty much ignored by the Academy (and especially the Academic Left), then what more do you need to convict the Academy/Left of peddling the equivalent of fake news and elevating one-sided propaganda over genuine dialogue, and squandering any remaining benefit of the doubt?

One thing the likes of CNN could do to restore at least a shred of credibility is to hire Republican fact-checkers on stories they publish that might so much as remotely suggest President Trump is saying something racist.  (The Academy and Academic Left could take similar measures in relevantly similar contexts, if credibility, contrition and honor are their concern.)  At this point the likes of CNN should want to bend over backwards to remove doubts about their honor and credibility, or else they deserve every negative tweet the president and others direct their way.  At this point, anything less from them suggests ongoing scumminess.

Trump vs. fake news, in a nutshell

"That is a lot of fake news back there."

Trump: "Fake news is the enemy of the American people."

Fake news: "Trump says a free press is the enemy of the American people."

Either you get what's going on here, or you might just be clueless/a Democrat.

Demo rats and impeachment: much worse than partisan hypocrisy

I wrote a post on the general topic of Demo rats and impeachment just yesterday, but I want to focus in on one essential point I raised there to highlight how monstrous these creatures have become these days:

This is the group of creatures, remember, whose standards for impeachment (of their political opponents, that is) is such that they were rushing to call for impeachment of Kavanaugh on no good evidence whatsoever (all the while letting a Demo rat president get away with obvious perjury - how intellectually and morally perverted is that?).  They can't be trusted.

The Demo rats' treatment of Kavanaugh was beyond the pale, clearly so, enough to disgust even some Dems who apparently didn't speak out loud enough against the obvious perversity.  If ever the 'rats destroyed their intellectual and moral credibility, it is because of their reckless attempt to destroy Kavanaugh.

What the current crop of filthy, disgusting, toxic slime known as the Democratic leadership in Congress and their enablers in the media and elsewhere consider to be justified, is the following:

Impeach and/or destroy someone without any credible evidence
and
Let someone else get away with obvious perjury

In other words, knowingly and deliberately punish the (presumed) innocent and let the (clearly) guilty go unpunished.

This isn't comparing like with like and then pointing to a partisan double standard.  This is more sick and twisted than that.  It's one thing to be a partisan hypocrite; it's another to uphold utterly opposed standards of evidence and punishment on purely partisan grounds.  That makes the destroy-Kavanaugh crowd unqualified evil-doers, people who have no business having power in a sane and civil polity.  Morally speaking they are criminals operating under the pretense of doing hardball politics.  They are beyond the pale.  They are sick and twisted fucks.  They are not owed respect, deference, the presumption of good faith, the presumption that they are decent human beings.  The proper attitude to take to the sort of people who adhere to the even-worse-than-double-standard above is one of distrust and enmity.  They are enemies of the good and decency.  They contravene the spirit if not letter of the Constitution they swore to uphold, when they so extremely pervert law and justice (whether for partisan ends or anything else).  They are thugs and should be regarded as such.

Sen. Graham put it in less harsh tones:

If this is the sort of outright perversity that is being normalized, enabled, abetted, excused, not spoken out against, etc., on today's American left, then that speaks even worse about them than everything else I've been criticizing them for up to now.  This puts them into a different category of evil.  There is no good reason whatsoever to concede intellectual and moral credibility to any of the left/Dems/"progressives" who failed to do the right thing during or after the Kavanaugh episode.

If anything, it is the likes of Scumbag Kamala Harris who should be impeached, formally censured, or otherwise punished for fraudulently using the judicial process as a weapon of personal and political destruction.  In no uncertain terms is she and her behavior fraudulent: this career prosecutor declared that she believed Kavanaugh's accuser before hearing the defense's side.  Other leading Demo rat politicians (including Warren, Biden and Sanders) are on the record affirming that Kavanaugh's accuser was credible (and Kavanaugh not credible) enough that Kavanaugh's career should be ended.  (Of course, they accuse Kavanaugh of lying under oath to the Judiciary Committee, in which case the mere usual ol' double standard is at play: they let Clinton get away with perjury but found Kavanaugh's "unacceptable."  Actually, it's obvious Clinton lied; is it obvious in any way that Kavanaugh did?  So even there it's not comparing like with like.)  They fed and enabled media and grass roots hysteria about Kavanaugh's "credible accusers."  And they repeated the same vile act, recklessly rushing to raise or renew calls for impeachment within minutes of "new" allegations coming to light just in the past month that turned out to be a dud along with the others.

This is dead-to-rights stuff if ever there was any.  These creatures don't even meet minimal standards of basic decency.  They can't be treated as co-equals in a search for truth because they sabotage the very underpinnings of that.  It is intellectual and moral bankruptcy, if not outright malicious evil, not to recognize and repudiate this sub-decent, beyond-the-pale-even-for-politics perversity for what it is.  And that appears to be the intellectual and moral state of the American left today.  On the merits their intellectual and moral credibility are utterly destroyed.  It doesn't please me to say such things, but it's where the totality of the evidence inexorably leads.

CNN: "Trump's Racist Tweets"

Part of Trump's appeal comes from people's disgust with what he calls Fake News.  He has said things to the effect that "the fake news is the enemy of the people."  What do the fake-news outlets do in response, as if they were on Trump's payroll and going out of their way to prove his point?  They twist his words into: Trump considers the free press his enemy.

I've written before about CNN's outright, undiluted fakery when it came to Trump's "very fine people" comment on the Charlottesville incident, deliberately (how could it not be?) ripped from its context in which he was referring to (supposed) non-white-supremacists who were there to protest the removal of statues.  As far as I'm concerned, this and numerous other incidents lead me by cognitive necessity and sanity to discount, doubt or disbelieve things that I see asserted on a network such as CNN.  CNN has made it rather abundantly clear - especially after Trump's becoming president - that in its political coverage it is in the business of advocacy and not reporting.

Here is perhaps the most obvious case in point to date:

Now, Trump's tweet about the "Squad" of leftist freshman (freshwoman?) Congresswomen contained plenty of inflammatory language but the language the left/Dems/"progressives" and their media allies seized upon to the exclusion of everything else, including Trump's original point about loving one's country, was his "go back to the countries they came from" language.  Now, there's a case to be made that this "go back to where you came from" language is racist in content (whether it is in intention) but here's the thing: there's controversy here.  Trump's point - I assume his own perspective is relevant here as to what his point was - is something about the "squad" not being sufficiently loving of America.  This makes it a matter of controversy, interpretation and opinion whether it is appropriate to refer to the entirety of the tweet as racist.

If you don't see this as a matter of interpretation and opinion, then there's no point in my trying to reason with you further here.  As a matter of indisputable fact, today's leftists/Dems and much of the rest of the country are not in agreement on what constitutes racism, racist speech, hate speech, and the like.  This is precisely why the left's cult-like chants of "Trump's racism" are so ineffective and fall on so many deaf ears.  The un-deaf-ears they fall on tend to react in terms of how idiotic and ill-supported the chants are.  The whole process here feeds into a vicious escalating cycle: The left calls Trump (and a lot of other things/people) racist, that leads the opposition to be increasingly disgusted with the left, which increases the likelihood that the left will react with more charges of racism, and on it goes.  Observers from outside of this vicious cycle might note just what a stupid and indeed vicious cycle this is, just more of the same "politics as usual" (except it really isn't; the political situation in the USA today can be likened to a Red/Blue Cold War, when this hasn't been the case in the past; I'll just refer you to many blog entries of mine under the "leftist losers" tag for which "side" I think is way more at fault for this phenomenon, and I've grown tired of commenting on all the new examples that illustrate my point, the essential trend having been overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly established in any honest and thoughtful reader's mind).  (The only issue here is just how intellectually bankrupt the non-left is, compared to the left.)

Now, it's one thing for activists, pundits, and opposing politicians to call Trump a racist or to claim that he says racist things.  That's all fair game in politics and their arguments and credibility should be assessed on their merits.

It's another thing for a purported news outlet to throw the term "racism/racist" around the way the activists/pundits/politicians.  Given that it's pretty obvious that people in the country don't agree on what persons or statements merit being called racist, a news outlet should be extra-careful about how it respects and reflects such a difference of opinion/interpretation.  The charge of racism is itself toxic enough that a news outlet needs to take cognizance of this.

CNN has determined that it's a matter of fact that Trump's tweet is racist.

How can the producers of CNN hold such an opinion honestly?  And if they don't know well enough to know that such an opinion cannot be held honestly, that points to a different set of problems.  I'm going on the assumption here that CNN's producers know better.  They might try to rationalize their editorial decisions on the grounds that this is a matter of fact, that in the age of Trump matters of opinion need to be treated in some cases as matters of fact, that truth needs to be spoken to power, etc.  But that's a piss-poor rationalization, because of the simple confusion of fact and opinion/interpretation.

Now - and it would sure be nice if this could go without saying, but these days the toxicity levels are too high - there are clear-cut cases of racism and they could be factually reported as such.  But in the case of Trump there is simply too much there that's ambiguous and controversial.  I (for one) am not convinced that Trump is a racist, much less that his anti-Squad tweet was racist.  And no amount of cult-like "if you deny Trump is a racist that makes you a racist" argument from intimidation - basically an attempt to coerce agreement from a mind that hasn't been swayed by the arguments - is going to sway me from that.

CNN's dishonest editorializing-as-news seems premised on the notion advanced all over the place by leftists nowadays that there isn't controversy here, that it is a matter of established fact that Trump is a a racist, and that those who don't see it as they do are part of the (racism) problem.  This mentality sounds more like that of a cult than of a group of people ready and willing to engage in a good-faith, mutual-understanding dialogue with those they disagree with.  This cult-like mentality becomes more obviously nasty and destructive if it is adopted by a purported news organization.  It not only destroys or diminishes their credibility on this subject, but on everything else (at least when it comes to political coverage).

It's not even so much an issue of what appears on CNN per se, but of the time slots in which the editorializing (masquerading as news) appears.  It's one thing for Don Lemon in his opinion-show time slot to call Trump a racist.  (At that time slot Lemon is opposite Laura Ingraham on Fox.  I don't find myself devoting my valuable time to watching much of either show in that time slot.)  At least Don Lemon's show, or shows during his time slot, are marked clearly enough as opinion programming.   But it's another thing for "Trump's Racist Tweet" to appear in the CNN headline banner during The Lead with Jake Tapper, which represents itself as a harder news program.  (Am I wrong?)  And this is hardly one defining incident; it's just one that came up readily via the usual internet searching after seeing "racist tweet" all over CNN's headlines for days (so it wasn't hard to find a visual example with those very words).

Is it safe to say, then, that the credibility of CNN's political coverage is pretty much as shot as MSDNC's?  I mean, I don't even bother with MSDNC here because their bias is so obvious and the intellectual quality of their punditry so low.  But CNN still touts itself as "the most trusted name in news."  (I don't think so.  This isn't the previous generation's CNN.)  And none of this is to excuse the problems one could readily point to on Fox News (or, what doesn't appear on Fox given its selection of topics and facts to cover/report, a selectivity exercised by the other two as well).

Given all this, it strikes me as reasonable to say that when CNN has a banner saying or implying Trump is a racist, it is engaging in the very sort of Fake News of which the president speaks.  If there's one thing that Trump speaks about with credibility, it's how dishonest and biased the media coverage is.  But the reason Trump speaks about this with credibility, when he speaks about so many other things without so much credibility, is that this is pretty much a no-brainer that anyone can see (anyone, that is, whose cognitive and critical faculties aren't destroyed in a cult-like fashion).  So when a regular CNN-viewer manages selectively to notice all the examples of bias on Fox but then doesn't see the problem with CNN, we're not talking about an honest opposition to Trump here; it's bias and fake news/narrative combined toxically with hubris.  But one naturally expects better from the CNN producers than from the rank-and-file CNN viewers; so what's the CNN producers' excuse?

"Trump's racism" vs. his opposition's dishonesty

[Warning for snowflakes: drill instructor mode below.]

Here's a question that would be asked in a polity governed by reason and wisdom:

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump said that neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017 were "very fine people" - purportedly an implication of his statement that there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017.

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump's statement emboldened and gave succour and comfort to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists, white nationalists, etc.

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, there's nothing that Trump said or did since that time to downplay his giving comfort and succour to white supremacists.

So, the question:

Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?

Isn't that what Trump's haters/opposition would have predicted might ensue?  That non-whites would have to live in fear in Trump's America?

The reason there hasn't been a repeat of Charlottesville is because the narrative Trump's haters have promoted since that time is a lie - the product of willful dishonesty or stupidity.  In short, his haters are almost unbelievably stupid, or fucking liars, or a combination of the two.

And it really isn't difficult to figure this out, with some intellectual honesty and a bit of persistence.

The facts:

Politifact provides the transcript from Trump's Aug. 15, 2017 press conference in which the "very fine people" phrase is used.  (The posting of the transcript at Politifact is dated Apr. 16, 2019.  Question: why the fuck would it take Politifact almost 2 years to post the transcript?  More on that in a bit.)

Now, Politifact has a rating system for the truthfulness of a statement, ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."

Politifact's "rating" or determination at the bottom of the posted transcript is: "full context is needed."

Well, no shit.  But what does that imply about Trump's haters (including those in the press - and you can see how even the reporters questioning Trump in his press conference seem to have comprehension issues [where did they receive their "education"?])?

If Politifact were to do what it really ought to do in addition to posting the transcript, and that is to assess the truth or falsity of the Trump haters' claims that he called neo-Nazis "very fine people," what would be the correct rating for Politifact to give those claims?

The claim that Trump said neo-Nazis were "very fine people" is a pants-on-fire lie.  It indicates such a degree of disregard for truth and context by his haters that they shouldn't be considered credible sources about what their opposition says or thinks.

And what's more, it definitely damns the "news" sources - Trump is exactly right to call this "fake news" - who emboldened Trump's haters and gave them aid and succour in their lie.  The "news" organizations - and this goes definitely for CNN - either knew it was a lie, or failed in their job as news sources to get the full story.  Scott Adams has all the archived evidence of CNN's blatant dishonesty.  Will CNN ever issue a correction, or will it slink away into silence in hopes that they won't be called to account about this again?  Will they admit that they unprofessionally peddled a lie to the American people, or will they unprofessionally avoid all accountability for their peddling the lie?

Either alternative puts CNN (and other similar situated "news" organizations) in a very tough spot.   They have been caught dead to rights, promoting a lie.  The best option at this point for CNN would be to admit that it's no longer a news organization - certainly not in its politics coverage - but a selective and biased source plus selective and biased commentary.

So fuck CNN, and fuck all the Democrats/left/"progressives" who peddled this lie.

One thing that these Trump haters do a lot of, is to say how scared immigrants are that Trump's goons will come into their cities and homes and destroy their lives.

But the real, main cause of the immigrants' fear on this count is that they listen so much to dishonest and/or monumentally stupid Democrats who have every partisan political motivation to stir up the fear among their constituents.

So fuck the Democrats/left/"progressives" yet again for their epistemologically criminal fear-mongering.

Anyway, why did it take Politifact so long to post that transcript?  It's because the dishonest partisan Dem/left/"prog" had stonewalled long enough in the face of Scott Adams calling them to task.

Back to the original question: why didn't Trump's remarks about "very fine people" embolden white supremacists?  Because very shortly after that press conference, Trump issued an unequivocal condemnation of white supremacy, calling out such organizations as the KKK by name.  He sent the unequivocal message that he does not support or condone their activities in any way.

That, too, is a fact disregarded by the dishonest left/Dem/"prog" crowd.  (I almost said "stupid/dishonest" but stupidity doesn't explain blatantly disregarding facts.  These are intellectually dishonest pieces of shit.)

Fact is, the scummy Dem/left/"progs" weave an entire false narrative about Trump's supposed racism by going out of their way to assume the worst when Trump says something that might be tied to some ethnic or racial subject.  This race-hustling has become the stock in trade of the entire party, indeed the entire intellectual culture of the Left, including the parasites of subsidized classrooms (who should be swept aside).

By the way, the URL that I just linked contains as its first search result this item from HuffPo.  It's the same basic epistemological criminality, this time applied to Ayn Rand.  And I dare say that this example is typical of leftist Rand-bashing:

Letter from a Galtian

“I am really curios (sic) to know what motivates the mind of a socialist,” you write. “Why do you think its (sic) fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not?”

(Apparently the email software used by producers doesn’t have a spell-check function. Fitting, I guess, for people whose fictional hero described scientists and other educated members of society as “parasites of subsidized classrooms.”)

This hubristic piece of shit apparently either didn't read the Galt speech or did read it but has serious comprehension problems.  After all, what is John Galt but a scientist?  What is Hugh Akston if not an educated member of society?

Given such serious comprehension problems, one has to ask: was he "educated" by parasites of subsidized classrooms?

I dare submit that the entire intellectual culture of the Left has become (if it wasn't always) a dishonest cesspool in which opposition ideas are constantly caricatured so as to be made to look weaker by comparison to the "superior" leftist alternative.  Whenever an opportunity for a serious debate about their caricatures presents itself, they run away like cowards.  I've seen this happen every time when it comes to their caricatures of Rand (their most formidable intellectual adversary).  And in this case it's entirely no accident that the parasites of subsidized classrooms aid and abet them in their smears; if Randian ideas take hold in the culture, they (in their present form, that is) are out of a job and stripped of their power to "educate" the youth.

The way the Dems/left/"progs" treat Trump and Rand falls into a pattern of an intellectually-bankrupt non-approach to examining competing socio-political-economic ideas.  It's just that this corruption comes out most blatantly and obviously in the case of Trump (because, well, he's president) and Rand (because she's their most formidable intellectual adversary, and she's got them running around like decapitated chickens trying to "refute" her).

(The intellectual criminality in the latter case, though, is greater because it goes all the way to the upper echelons of the academic food chain, whereas in the former it's mostly political hacks (including the political "news" generators at CNN) doing the dirty work.  The chief tactic used among the professional rationalizers in order to rationalize not taking Rand seriously is to pay attention only to her real or supposed weaknesses while disregarding her strengths.  That's it; that's all it comes to.  There's no way that any of them could honestly look at the goings-on at the Ayn Rand Society and conclude that professional philosophers couldn't take Rand seriously.  What makes their rationalizations more dangerous and destructive than those of rank-and-file leftists is that they are trained in the art of making their arguments appear the stronger even if their position is the weaker.  (IOW, they're a variety of sophist.  One can observe the mental gymnastics of such anti-Rand sophists here, for instance.  They might try to rationalize how a high-profile Aristotle scholar such as Gotthelf could also be an Objectivist, but they certainly have no answer that fits in with their highly dubious anti-Rand narrative as to why Hospers would take Rand so seriously despite not being an Objectivist himself.  They have no consistent-with-narrative answer as to how this president of the American Society for Aesthetics [1983-4] would praise Atlas Shrugged in such glowing terms.  What, oh what, is a sophist to do?))

The "very fine people" hoax is just one clear-cut, dead-to-rights example of Dem/left/"prog" dishonesty, but it's far from the only such instance.  Just the other day, commenting on the Democrat debate the night before, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ("Morning Joe") said (paraphrasing) that "Trump called Mexicans rapists."  Scarborough doesn't strike me as the dishonest type, so an alternative explanation for this is that he's another victim of the parasites of subsidized classrooms, rendered unfit to think at the higher levels.

If you're not a piece of intellectual shit, on the other hand, you can easily make sense of what Trump was saying, which is that there is too much criminal activity in our country due to way too many people of a criminal bent crossing the southern border illegally (and then coddled by Democrats).  (Democrats/leftists/"progs" stupidly/dishonestly conflate illegal immigration and all immigration when they say Trump is anti-immigrant.  They then stir up fear among their immigrant constituencies that Trump is hostile to all of them and has an agenda actually in place to deport all people who are here illegally.)  Then we have Nancy Peloser lying that "Trump's thing is 'Make America White Again' " and that the border barrier addition Trump wants to build - a barrier that by definition would reduce only illegal immigration - is a symbol of racism.

(And what the fuck is Joe Scarborough doing bringing up something Trump "said" four years ago now, at the very outset of his campaign, when he was a political newcomer with no serious experience in political communication?  How the fuck, exactly, was Trump supposed to know about the iron law of politics that if a statement can be construed in its worst possible light it will be and with the aid of complicit "news" outlets no less?)

How can pieces of intellectual shit such as Peloser, CNN, the Democrats, et al, be expected to get it right about anything of fundamental importance in the realm of politics?  I mean, they might get it right when they cite this or that fact and figure they have actually studied, or heck, the natural scientists among them might well get it right about the scientific things they study, but as to what constitutes racism, or what constitutes sound government policy, or what constitutes the American ethos, or what constitutes corporations victimizing people . . . how can these people claim so much as a shred of credibility any longer?  They habitually lie through their teeth, and/or are hubristic fools.

A few months back I made a post titled "Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and their haters."  In that post I said:

Sure Trump says a lot of dumb things, can be quite the dick sometimes.  But have you seen his haters?  They often behave like absolute pieces of shit. 

Sure Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired, but have you seen how her haters polemicize against her?  They often behave like absolute pieces of intellectual shit. 

And I can, if and when I have the time and interest to do so, marshal a mountain of evidence to prove all of this....

Now, I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Trump says a lot of dumb things and can be quite the dick sometimes (do I really need to go through the motions there? Don't his own fans admit this while still preferring him to the even-more-toxic alternative?), and I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired (which would establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rand isn't the expert on everything philosophy-related as quite a number of her devoted followers believe).  (I mean her polemics directed at philosophers, that is; I think at the very least the vast majority of her political polemics are so on-target as to be beyond serious criticism, and her diagnosis for why the political creatures whom she demolishes are the way they are is based on a general fact about our political culture: intellectual bankruptcy.)

But as to the exceedingly shitty nature of Trump-haters as well as the Rand-haters?  Well, since right around the time of the posting excerpted above I have made the following abundantly (if not overwhelmingly) documented posts exposing what these creatures are up to.

Trump's haters:

• Philosophy professor on whether Trump is racist (How would responsible philosophers assess putative evidence of Trump racism presented by his haters?)

The left's MAGA hat meltdown and "Progressive" scummery as the Trump-era norm ("Progressives" recklessly smear Covington High School students)

• Dilbert's Scott Adams vs CNN's fake-news "fine people hoax

• What is an impeachable offense?

• Prediction: Trump (or a Republican) will win in 2020 (how today's Dems/leftists/"progs" generally speaking are shitheads, with dozens of documenting links in just one paragraph; the anti-Kavanaugh smears in particular reveal the nature of the present-day Dem/left/"prog" cesspool, and that includes the current top 3, and top 4 out of 5, front-runners for '20, and that goes especially for current front-runner, Scumbag Kamala Harris)

Rand's haters:

• How shitty are Rand-bashers?
• How shitty is Lisa Duggan, leading Rand-basher du jour?

Now, I don't know whether the totality of the evidence presented in these links qualifies as a mountain, but it sure is a heck of a lot of evidence and the essential nature of the phenomena are captured well enough for me to rest my case with utmost certainty that any plausible, not-self-defeating defense of these creatures' MO is nowhere to be found.  They are a bunch of unphilosophical, caught-dead-to-rights, conceited scumbags who deserve the lion's share of blame for what a shitshow the American political "conversation" has become.  The only question remaining is addressed to the remaining decent Democrats whose voices and input have been (inevitably and irreversibly) drowned out by the ever more strident, ever more statist, ever more anti-Western-civ scumbags (a group now spearheaded by an ignorant, toxic moral exhibitionist) who've taken over the party: And you are still a Democrat?

If the Dems/left/"progressives," in the name of the best within themselves (it's in there, somewhere), ever manage to get their act together, that means having to confront the Randian "menace," discover that their fears are entirely unfounded, and become Aristotelians - in short, jump on the team and come on in for the big win, for fuck's sake already.

[Addendum: The potential/future leftist "recruits" for philosophy boot camp could sure use a drill instructor highly skilled in the art of integration/dialectic.  Where might such possibly be found, I wonder?]

[Addendum #2: In the interests of full dialectical non-one-sided context-keeping, the best piece of evidence that Trump harbors animus toward a minority group is his original proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.  The proper term for this proposal would be Islamophobic, not racist, since Islam isn't a race (a point Trump's haters are too stupid or dishonest to grasp).  Trump's haters might have gotten more mileage out of his apparently unqualified Islamophobia (as well as his early 1970s housing company policies) if they hadn't already blown their credibility on just about everything else, as already demonstrated.]

[Addendum #3: I've been getting some pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post where I've been posting it online, but the pushback hasn't been very good.  One objection I am getting is that I'm really hard on Dems/left/"progs" while not being "fair and balanced" enough to acknowledge all the misdeeds and intellectual bankruptcy among Republicans/right/conservatives (with or without scare-quotes), such that I might appear to come off as some kind of partisan GOP shill.  So let me start by saying, the GOP has a shitty track record on LGBT+ rights, and clearly so.  So while the left want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings (you see, the left got its well-earned victory with gay marriage, but it just couldn't help overstepping into trampling on others' freedoms, now could it), if the GOP had its way there wouldn't even be gay civil unions.  So fuck 'em on that score, they have a lot of rehabilitating to do to regain the moral credibility squandered there. One can find a good amount of commentary (including polemics) on the GOP under my 'republicans' tag.  One extensive listing of GOP intellectual misdeeds is contained in this post in a long paragraph beginning with "Before continuing...".  Another point of pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post has to with data purporting to show a rise in hate crimes, particularly murders by white supremacists, under (and therefore presumably attributable to) Trump.  One such releasing of data, by the Anti-Defamation League, is relayed uncritically by WaPo writers while being torched by someone who looked into the ADL report.  (Further context.)  This, all in connection with my lead question, "Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?"  The Dems/left/"progs" would have the American electorate believe that this sort of thing would be a regular occurrence under Trump because of a culture of hatred he would unleash.  As it turns out, the number of what the ADL calls extremism-related murders (using its methods criticized at the "torched" link) in the year 2018 is all of 50 in a nation of 340M+.  39 of those are murders "by white supremacists," whether ideological or non-ideological in nature, and this figure evidently includes the 17 people gunned down in the Parkland, FL school shooting (2/14/2018), which all on its own would nearly account for the increase from 18 "murders by white supremacists" in 2017 to 39 in 2018.  Be very wary of statistics cited by known-to-be-partisan "news" outlets.  Has the worn-out credibility of the anti-Trump media not been made thoroughly apparent yet? ffs  Anyway, there seem to be a number of readers who just don't like to see it being said that vast swaths of today's Dem/left/"prog" crowd have become basically demonically warped morons in their (political) thinking, or that the intellectual culture of the left is essentially a basket case, but that's what the exhaustively-documented facts say, so tough shit.  Just follow the gobs of links I provide in this and other posts tagged 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' for incontrovertible proof of this seemingly hard-to-swallow truth.  It pains me that it is true.  But I offer an undeniably no-brainer solution, goddammit.]

[Addendum #4, in the interests of dialectical completeness: Well, guess what. Here is an alternate, well-supported take on Trump's remarks about Charlottesville. It is decidedly negative. It hits Trump right where he usually or often deserves to be hit, and for which he has been caught out countless times -- his casual relationship to the truth. But what it is NOT is the line of attack that Trump's haters and opposition media have put forward, because that line is absolutely indefensible given the context, which includes multiple statements across a few days in which he condemns in no uncertain terms: hate; bigotry; racism; white supremacy; white nationalism; neo-Nazis; KKK; and "other" hate groups. The only term he apparently left out was: alt-right. (Is Trump ideologically aware enough to know what the "alt-right" is? How many people can pin down the meaning of "alt-right" so that it isn't used as some fast and loose smear, as though that sort of thing would ever happen in politics?) Nowhere in this piece is it asserted that Trump stated, implied, insinuated, or anything else that he considered white supremacists to be "very fine people." That is as much a lie as ever.
And guess what else. This eminently reasonable takedown of Trump on his handling of Charlottesville is performed by an Objectivist (adherent to basically the entirety of Ayn Rand's philosophy, or at the very least all its fundamental principles [and he was one noteworthy player in the "Peikoff-Kelley schism" literature, siding against Kelley on technical grounds within Objectivist epistemology...]). So how is it that an Objectivist can outperform by a mile a whole army of Dem/left/"prog" people, I wonder?]

[Addendum #5: This contains the most brutal anti-Trump comments section I've encountered, with lots of erudition to boot.  But it's a bunch of conservatives doing the brutalizing, not the left/Dem scum who've squandered all their credibility.  Trump's best critics are not to be found on the intellectually bankrupt/collapsing scum-left.]

Dilbert's Scott Adams vs CNN's fake-news "fine people" hoax

(My oft-repeated disclaimer for newbies about my political-polemical posts: People can be fine people in their non-political lives while being complete nitwits in politics. Or vice versa.)

CNN and other leftward-biased news (sic) networks have fanned the flames of division by quoting Trump - out of context, and assuming the worst - about his "very fine people on both sides" remark in the wake of the Charlottesville episode.  It should be noted that this is rather typical of the way the left-leaning media, pundits, activists, intellectuals, politicians, educators (sic), et al, have portrayed racially-sensitive comments that might be taken in an assuming-the-worst kind of way.  And if they might be taken that way, they will be, and they know someone will do so and run with that.

There are shithole countries, in a loose sense of the term "shithole" -- i.e., quality of life measures are usually low there -- and it also happens that a lot of those countries are in Africa.  To make a reference to shithole countries is to make, by and large, a geographical reference.  To read into that a racial reference is to assume the worst, and to do so in the capacity of a news organization -- by, e.g., characterizing Trump's alleged "shithole countries" reference as follows: "Trump refers to mostly-black nations as shithole countries" -- is to engage in fake news.  To say that "Trump mocked a disabled reporter" when the disability is, by the standard of journalistic fact, tangential or incidental to the mocking, is to be engaged in fake news.  And that's exactly what happened.  Trump used not-so-dissimilar voicing and arm motions to mock others, as numerous videos available at the link demonstrate.

Now, when Trump said that there were fine people on both sides in Charlottesville, what is the journalistically responsible thing to do, or to assume?  Is it to assume the worst?  Is it to assume that Trump meant the neo-Nazis marching there?  Even when he explicitly denounced Nazis, KKK, white supremacists and other racists within days of the event (although after the "fine people" remark)?  Are we to assume that the people to whom Trump was at least probably referring - those opposing the removal of historically-significant monuments - are to be lumped in with the neo-Nazis?

Anyway, Scott Adams (of Dilbert distinction - I for one seek out his cartoon daily; he certainly seems to have a nose for cynical dishonesty) is taking CNN to task for their hoaxy misleading "news" in connection to the "fine people" statement.  And it seems that CNN is making an effort not to be accountable.

Now, I don't expect news organizations to be perfect.  But one naturally expects some basic level of honesty and accountability from those purporting to inform the rest of us as a vocation.  I hold CNN to such a basic expectation just as I hold Fox News.  I think both organizations have enough imperfection and perhaps even dishonesty to be open to the appropriate criticisms.

But what's really galling is when political partisans delude themselves into the notion that CNN is virtuous and reliable by and large, and Fox News is vicious and unreliable by and large.  Or vice versa.  You'd basically have to be a fucking idiot to believe this.  And yet "progressives" who pride themselves on intellectual superiority believe just that; they are in many cases willfully self-enstupidated.  Some of them have woken up from that idiotic delusion and are walking away from the willfully-viciously one-sided narratives of the Left.  (It was via Brandon Straka's recent appearance on Fox's 'Life, Liberty and Levin' that I learned of the hoax about Trump "mocking the disabled reporter."  In fact, it was his exposure to the hoax-debunking here that began his journey away from the left and its fucked-up narratives.)

That's what's so galling about "progressives": they're no more "woke" than conservatives or libertarians but they've deluded themselves into thinking they are.  The least they could do is to drop the "progressive" label, in itself a version of intellectual dishonesty given the vacuousness of the term "progressive."  How do you define "progress"?  I define it by people becoming more philosophical, and that's actually a pretty unassailable definition.  By "progress" the "progressives" mean their big government agenda where freedom and/or philosophy are secondary in priority at best.  Some of these leftists have gotten more honest in their labeling by identifying as democratic socialists, so that we at least have some idea from the labeling what they're really about.  The "progressives" were doing their dishonest labeling previously with the term "liberal" until that stopped working for them (given how clearly enough they're not exactly about the liberal idea of liberty/freedom and where liberty/freedom as such concepts gets used in American discourse tends to resist conceptual bastardization).  (Which only invites the question: why would 'conservatives' for so long buy into the bastardization when referring to 'liberal degeneracy' and the like?  And they still do it today, granting to leftists their concept-stealing "progressive" label.  Ayn Rand, for one, wouldn't concede to leftists a fraction of an inch of such conceptual ground; she was as well aware as anyone how concepts especially in a political context can be bastardized and replaced by misleading words.)

CNN is in a tough spot here.  Its whole shtick in recent years has been about how it isn't like those propagandists over at Faux News - that they aspire to and meet a higher standard of journalistic ethics.  But it's a fucking lie.  But as I've indicated above, the bigger fucking lie in all this is that leftists, Dems, and "progressives" are intellectually and morally superior to conservatives, Republicans, and libertarians, and it's a lie that's believed because so many academic faculty in the humanities and social sciences are leftists, which is further based on the lie that conservative, libertarian or rightists can't hack it in that arena.  But there are better explanations rooted in sociological dynamics.  If the leftist academic establishment could have come up with a remotely decent counter to Rand's case for capitalism (from over half a century ago now) or Mises' refutation of socialism (from nearly a century ago now) they would have done it by now, but they blew their credibility over the course of decades by cozying up to or tolerating socialism and being hostile to capitalism.

Now the left is flailing around in desperation trying to make their anti-freedom/capitalism and pro-degeneracy ideas credible in the face of both common sense and the strongest opposition (and they have latched onto the climate change issue as a last gasp while betting, unwisely, that climate change will outpace the capacity of human technological advance to address the problem).  That the left can't handle the Trump presidency like intellectually honest and responsible adults (I mean, even if he is bad, he's not that bad) is all the more reason to think it's best they be out of power (or serve at the most as counterweight to Trump's faults).  Their response to the failure of their ideas has been to double down and become more ever more shrill and irrational in the process.

The intellectual degeneracy at outlets such as CNN is merely symptomatic of this widespread, pathetic, leftist trend.

Nothing that some philosophy boot camp couldn't fix, though.  Where's the pro-philosophy rhetoric or activism from the "progressive" left?  Philosophy, goddammit.