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.]

Some obviously scummily unfair process from House Demo-rats

So I'm only a few minutes into Mark Levin's interview with Prof. Alan Dershowitz and he raises the fact that House Judicary Committee had 3 pro-impeachment law professors testifying and the Republicans were given one anti-impeachment professor.  Now, just think about that for a moment.  I mean, really give it a bit of careful thought if you have to.

Let's say that on the committee there are roughly 12 Democrats and 10 Republicans.  Shouldn't the number of for- and against-witnesses be as close to representative of the composition of the committee, as someone motivated to (within reason) bend over backwards to demonstrate fairness and accountability might very well call for?  Wouldn't it be simply a matter of basic, commonsense fairness that the Republicans be invited to call at least 2 if not 3 witnesses?  Dershowitz suggests equality.  Some Demo-rat-like apologist might rationalize this little bit of cutting of corners in the fairness department with some version or other of "elections have consequences, we run the show."  But is that the attitude of someone with dual motivations probably in conflict with one another: getting to the truth from as broad a range of credible adversarial input as one can bend over backwards to consider; and then the motivation to damage Trump and empower Demo-rats politically.  And this scummy little 3-to-1 witness ratio shows their biased and partisan hand right on its face; how could it not?

Philosopher's question: if this doesn't fall into the "at least somewhat scummy, beyond any reasonable doubt" category, then how much more biased does it have to be before it does?  A 10-to-1 witness ratio?  Let's get some non-disingenuous specifics about where to draw the line.  All I know is, the Demo-rats crossed that line here, in at least this instance.

It's obvious that they're being at least a little scummy here and that they should bend over backwards and remove any doubt about act-cleaning commitments.  If you can't accept that obvious truth, what other obvious truths won't you accept?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of contemporary Demo-rat (and fellow leftist social-circle travelers') scummery and intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  Hopefully the Republicans in the Senate can brings themselves to support at the very least some overwhelming bipartisan denunciation of Trump's Ukraine policies as they were done (and for the reasons that they raised alarms among so many ambassadors; does Trump have a corrupting dual motivation there very akin to the one described just above and about which he failed, Swamp-like, to bend over backwards to avoid? Gee, ya think?), and put him on notice.  I've heard the word "censure" in the context of what sort of compromise the Senate may come to, short of a very-high 2/3 threshold for removing the president.

Maybe a fair Senate trial might involve the GOP inviting the Democratic law professor and Clinton donor Alan Dershowitz to testify, with plenty of rigorous cross-examination from fellow Democrats?  (Philosopher's question: Why wasn't Dershowitz among the 4 professors last week?  Or at least the 5 [with 2 for the minority] that would have met a grudgingly minimal fairness threshold?)

[Addendum: House Republicans said that they were promised a minority-run hearing day.  One day.  Whether or not they were indeed promised that, why didn't they get one?  Part of the answer is that the Demo-rats were in such a big fucking hurry to "conclude its inquiry" before a full House vote before Christmas.  I guess they also figured that the GOP-led Senate would be sufficient obstacle to their aims that one day for House GOP-led hearings wouldn't be necessary.  But we're only left to guess here, given our knowledge of how corruptly partisan things are nowadays.]

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?

Congress: chock full of partisan scumbags?

It seems as appropriate to begin this posting with the following point as any: Nearly all the leading candidates for the '2020 Democrat presidential nomination called for the impeachment of Brett Kavanaugh on a basis of exactly zero evidentiary merit.  (Those who find Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Kavanaugh remotely credible are either stupid or dishonest, or both.  You have to ignorantly or willfully disregard the sworn testimony of Ford's friend Leland Keyser, and you have to believe that it's even remotely likely that Ford and Kavanaugh would ever be at a gathering together.  The Democrats insisted that Ford be given a national hearing for her not-believable story.)  These include: Mayor Pete, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren.  Warren is even on record for saying that other, even more ridiculous accusation against Kavanaugh (namely Swetnick's serial-drugged-gang-rape story which crumbled the moment she was interviewed on TV about it), were "credible."  Democrat operatives calling themselves journalists fanned the flames of hysteria surrounding these accusations.

By the very epistemic nature of such things, I simply cannot trust such people to carry out some kind of judicial proceeding in good faith, and so the upcoming(?) Senate trial of Trump is tainted by the participation of the likes of Sanders and Warren (and also Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Mazie Hirono, Chuck Schumer, and I'm sure numerous others who either said Ford should be believed that Kavanaugh should be impeached).  [Edit: such people seem to be either not very bright because of how oblivious they are to how bad this makes them look, or they do know how outrageous their behavior and rhetoric are and yet they still think they can get away with it.  We already know how Demorats behave when one of their own is accused of sexual misconduct and where they stand to lose power if the accusations are pursued with the same zeal they pursued Ford's et al.  The evidence of their having squandered all intellectual and moral credibility just keeps on piling up without end, doesn't it.]

And it's most likely going to be tainted coming from both sides of the aisle, if the House Judiciary hearings are any indication.  Here's basically what happened in that hearing: Democrats and their witnesses presented an abundance of evidence that Trump acted improperly in Ukraine, notwithstanding that Ambassador Sondland says Trump wanted "no quid pro quo" (apparently as it relates to military aid, but not in connection with a White House meeting for the Ukrainian president).  Republicans were mostly reduced to repeating 4 talking points (which a Democrat witness, the majority counsel for the House Intel committee, would rebut repeatedly but which didn't stop Republicans from continuing to raise them), and complaining about process.  (One thing that doesn't look good for Trump is the timing of the release of Ukraine aid funds.  The GOP keeps saying that the aid was released without the "quo" of announced investigations by Ukraine.  They typically don't mention that it was released once the whistleblower complaint (or, shall we say, metadata about that complaint) become known to the President.  If you think the timing of the aid release is irrelevant, your cognition may be poisoned by partisanship.)

Those process complaints are also legitimate.  House Intel chair Adam Schiff, for one, is a scumbag who has, among other things to date, released metadata on journalist John Solomon's phone calls, for no good reason and evidently for the sake of punishing a political opponent - the very same kind of abuse of power he's accusing Trump of.  Anyone who thinks Schiff is something other than an obviously partisan scumbag may also be a partisan scumbag.

And now comes the Horowitz IG report about the FBI's clear-cut misconduct in its process for securing a FISA warrant on Trump associate Carter Page.  (This is before the DOJ's John Durham, who has more investigative capability than Horowitz, comes back with whatever additional dirt he finds....)  All of a sudden, it's Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who appear very incurious about this FISA abuse.  PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: If, e.g., ommitting 17 key facts from the FISA application (the inclusion of which probably would have meant denial of the application) doesn't constitute FISA abuse, THEN WHAT WOULD?  The philosopher's job is to differentiate between and integrate among instances, so that unlike instances aren't improperly grouped together and like instances are properly grouped together.  Hence that philosopher's question.  And another PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION:

Turn the tables, and it's Republican operatives misleading the FISA court about a Democrat presidential campaign, or a Democrat president applying levers of power to get a foreign government to investigate a prominent Republican.  QUESTION: Do we have any reasonable expectations that the two sides would be operating as they do?  Would the Republicans want to drill all the way down to the suspect if not clearly abusive practices of the Republican operatives?  Would Democrats be repeating the same already-rebutted talking points and making every effort to explain away a political motivation for what the Democrat president was doing?

No, there is no such reasonable expectation of such un-partisan honesty.

It appears that the Democrats aren't really curious or concerned about what the Comey FBI was up to.  They don't care that, from the beginning, the FBI operation in question (Crossfire Hurricane) apparently met the lowest threshold they could possibly meet to justify such an operation.  That there are 17 "errors" of omission in their first (successful) FISA application -- all of the errors somehow magically going against Trump -- doesn't appear to cause even suspicion among the Democrats.  (But remember, Ford's accusations against Kavanaugh are to be considered credible enough to hold up his confirmation so that she could be heard, and Leland Keyser is to be disregarded.)

Here's something for both parties to (honestly) consider and/or (dishonestly) evade:  Both Biden and Trump failed to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interests.  Biden's answers (so far) about his son's involvement in a Ukraine energy company (despite apparent lack of any relevant qualifications - a point I haven't seen Biden & allies push back on) are to the effect of: "My son didn't so anything wrong."  Uh, it's about whether Joe Biden did anything wrong with this apparent conflict of interests (Joe being the Obama administration's point man on Ukraine).

Likewise with Trump: He can point to an apparently legitimate motive on his part - to root out corruption in places like Ukraine, including or especially if it involves abuses of power by American officials - but his opposition is pointing plausibly to dual motivations: Fighting corruption and going after a political opponent.  If Trump's corruption-fighting motivation is the guiding one here, then by the same token he should want to avoid the appearance of corruption on his own part since the target of his putative corruption-fighting is a leading political opponent.  Maybe both motivations are involved, but, well, there's the appearance of a conflict of a kind between them.  Maybe both motivations are involved, but it's the Dems who focus on only one of them, and the GOP who focus on only the other of them.  Again, partisan scumbaggery by both sides.

What an intellectually unserious circus, huh?

Here's another loser of an argument, coming from the GOP side: Impeachment and/or removal would be divisive without overwhelming bipartisan support.  The whole point of the impeachment inquiry (which should be an honest one, based on a curiosity to know all the relevant facts and credible explanations) is to find out whether bipartisan support is warranted.  Are they in effect saying they wouldn't be moved by the evidence?

(Is it any wonder that philosophy and philosophers are basically absent from our politics?  The questions they ask are too effective at exposing partisan hypocrisy, selective (in)curiosity, and the all-too-shitty arguments they employ on a whole range of subjects.)

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Presumably, the GOP would be willing in principle to impeach and/or remove a GOP president if the actions involved were bad enough.  QUESTION: What is their threshold for "bad enough"?  We already have some idea of the Democrats' threshold, in the case of Kavanaugh (which means they are willing to get pretty scummy for the sake of a partisan smear job).  This is a useful question to ask of many a rank-and-file Trump supporter whose belief system in this area may be akin to that of a cult (where Trump is the savior fighting for them against the Swamp - which is indeed part of the truth).

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: This time for the Dems:  What makes Trump's behavior "bad enough" but not President Clinton's, for which he (Clinton) was determined unfit to practice law?

Can any of these folks answer these questions without looking like they're doing bad-faith mental gymnastics?

PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: Is there any notable or prominent politician right now who isn't obviously tainted by partisan cognition?  (I.e., does the philosopher have any serious opportunity available to differentiate among today's politicians along these lines?  Or does all the available integration/induction go in the "they're partisan scumbags" direction?)

President Clinton's perjury, 2020 betting odds unchanged, Demorats, etc.

(saganized :) )

1. Watching professors of law testifying that President Trump has committed (at the minimum) obstruction of justice is quite interesting to me, as it should be to the rest of the American people.  But is(n't) there a greater context to all this than just that?  One of the contexts is past behaviors of Presidents in an impeachment and/or removal context.  And so President Clinton's perjury - outright perjury on such questions as whether he had ever been alone in the Oval Office with Lewinsky - becomes rather relevant to this.  A Democrat-run senate at the time let Clinton off the hook for such behavior, impeachment-wise, so doesn't that provide some kind of guidance, intellectual-honor-wise, as to how to Democrats should treat Trump?  Likewise, doesn't a similar obligation of intellectual honor apply equally as strongly to Republicans?  Given the logic they used in Clinton's case in 1998, should they impeach and/or remove Trump?  Clinton's misdeeds were enough to get him stripped of his law license.  One legal analysis I've already linked a few days ago argues that the most significant offense from an impeachment standpoint was Clinton's attempts to influence assistant Bettie Currie's testimony about his Lewinsky-related activities.  How does that compare to / contrast with Trump apparently trying to get White House counsel Don McGhan to issue a false denial?  One legal expert today testified this clearly constitutes obstruction of justice.

The American people rightly expect intellectual honor from their political representatives.  Will they get it here?  On that point, their expectations aren't so high, now are they.  (They would get better political representation through philosophy, btw; a shit-ton of promising leads on that point are throughout this here blog.)

2. betting odds are prima facie evidence that there has to be a greater context to this, than having legal experts testifying that, e.g., Trump obstructed justice.

3.  Demorat politicians have some nerve appealing to expertise - legal expertise in this case - given their support for things like rent controls and minimum wages and other market distortions that a supermajority of professional economists - experts in their field - say will counteract the supposedly good intentions of the rodent-like politicians inflicting these policies on a supposedly free people.  The phrase "fuck 'em" comes to mind, but let me also add substantively that selective appeal to expertise doesn't turn one-sided/partisan, bad-faith propagandists into truth-seekers.  They clearly refuse to be consistent in their thought/actions about which actions to punish how, and about which experts to consult on which subjects.  We've already established in this blog with exhaustive/overwhelming evidence and state of the art analysis the principle of what the Demorat politicians/their allies and enablers are (culminating more or less in their patently dishonest attempts to destroy Brett Kavanaugh); the only question is the precise measurement of their depravity.  Also, once again: fuck 'em, they've already shit away their credibility.  Perhaps the Republicans can prove that they're significantly less-worse?

Dem & GOP impeachment hypocrisy to be revealed next week?

Or: intellectual honesty vs. political partisanship

(Context: 1, 2)

I don't know whether Trump's actions with respect to Ukraine and investigating Joe and Hunter Biden's Burisma-related dealings (qua point man on Ukraine for the Obama Admin, and not just qua potential 2020 political rival as the dishonest anti-Trump fake news would have you believe) amounts to an impeachable offense.  This is why I eagerly look forward to next week's progression of "the House impeachment inquiry" to the Judiciary Committee, where apparently constitutional experts will give the American People some testimony on what is a high crime or misdemeanor.  We can then find out whether the two major political parties are being consistent in their application of the rules.  A bonus feature of the next week's hearings will be committee Republicans grilling the witnesses about cases such as Clinton, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, et al.  Some questions these experts should help us to answer:

• How are Trump's actions similar to or different from those of Presidents Clinton (who was impeached by the House but not removed by the Senate) and Nixon (who avoided impeachment by resigning...)?  How does this scandal differ from a non-impeachment-level scandal such as, say, Iran-Contra?

• How are Trump's actions qua "using the levers of power to gain an electoral political advantage" different from the following by Obama: (1) Having his IRS make it a lot more difficult for "tea party" groups to gain tax exempt status like any other such advocacy groups; (Obama said there was not a "smidgen of corruption" there, a claim belied by then- IRS director Lois Lerner invoking the Fifth in front of Congress.) (2) Telling Vlad Putin's aides (caught on a hot mic) that he would have more flexibility for whatever Russia-related dealings after the 2012 election; (3) Overseeing an intelligence investigation into a Trump campaign aide apparently on the basis of spotty information.  (The Dems are convinced, after all, that any action whereby a lever of power is used to gain an electoral advantage is impeachable, in Trump's case.  Are they consistent?)

• Is it really more than Trump being Trump, including his causal relationship with the truth?  Trump was under the impression that Biden used aid funds for Ukraine as leverage to prevent a prosecutor from looking into Burisma (where his son appears quite strongly to have benefited from nepotism).  According to Trump it "sounds terrible to me."  Well, if it sounds terrible to him - whether or not he was misinformed by overexposure to the zealously partisan rantings of Hannity & Co. - then what would be unlawful about wanting it looked into, irrespective of whether the guy may be a political opponent?  (The question, then, is whether he would have brought up Biden if Biden weren't running in 2020.  But then we also have Trump milking his usual obsessions about 2016 in the phone call as well, with the Crowdstrike server thing and supposed or confirmed Ukrainian meddling in 2016.  So if we can't read Trump's mind, what do we conclude here, impeachment-wise?)  And what difference does it make to all this that, plausibly, Trump was looking for evidence that Ukraine would be serious about fighting corruption generally?

• What's the evidence that Biden/Burisma was such a big deal to Trump, over and above his having mentioned it in the 7/25 phone call, that he was pressuring people this way and that, sending Rudy and others to home in on that specifically, and basically trying to recruit other government actors into his corruptly-intended plan?  (Basically, the sort of Watergate-related actions that Nixon was involving or trying to involve others in?)

• Does it make a real difference whether Trump was asking for help from Ukraine on finding serious misdeeds/corruption by Biden, vs. asking Ukraine to manufacture dirt?  If there were real corruption there, wouldn't we all want to know about it, irrespective of who benefits electorally?  (The anti-Trump media which have done themselves no favors by pretty much completely squandering their objectivity and credibility, have used the phrase "dig up dirt".  Like, just make it up, or find something real?  The confusion dishonestly generated here may show up in polls, but I wouldn't expect the House GOP committee members or other reasonably skeptical folks to accept that characterization.) 

• Does the evidence of wrongdoing need to be overwhelming and unambiguous before removing a president from office?  (Was Bill Clinton's wrongdoing, for which there was overwhelming and unambiguous evidence, and for which he was stripped of his law license, still not enough to be impeachable?  [See here for analysis on the latter.])  Is that standard met here?

2/3 of the Senate is needed to convict and remove the president; that would suggest the requirement of overwhelming public support commensurate with such a supermajority.  Clear and convincing answers to questions such as the above are necessary for public support to shift in the direction of conviction/removal, particularly as consistent with traditional constitutional practice.  51 percent of the country "supporting impeachment and removal" as of a couple weeks ago is not evidence of overwhelming public support commensurate with a Senate supermajority.

The Dems and their media enablers have squandered too much credibility at this point, from their behaviors during the Trump years alone (not the least of which were their shameful and reckless attempts to smear Brett Kavanaugh), for their interpretations of things to be taken at anything close to face value.

(Can people who recklessly smeared Kavanaugh be trusted to honestly carry out a judicial proceeding?  Sens. Biden, Harris, Sanders, and Warren believed Blasey Ford's not-believable testimony, hence believed Kavanaugh's guilt, either before all the facts/testimony were in [as in the case of Scumbag Harris, and Scumbags Gillibrand and Hirono], or even after all the testimony and sworn statements were in, including Leland Keyser and others' crucial debunking of Ford's "memory," and, not least of all, the fact that Ford and Kavanaugh were in different social circles and so their being anywhere together was highly improbable.  If you were accused of a crime, would you want the likes of Biden, Harris, Sanders, Warren, Gillibrand and Hirono on your jury?  The question should answer itself.  BTW, when yet another bullshit NYT story about an allegation against Kavanaugh surfaced a couple months ago, almost all of these people immediately tweeted in support of Kavanaugh's impeachment.  Biden, prudently, didn't tweet such support along with Harris, Sanders, Warren and also Mayor Pete and a couple obvious clowns now out of the '20 running.  IOW, with the exception of Biden, all of the poll-leading '20 Dems would impeach an office-holder even on the flimsiest of bases.  The flouting of judicial and epistemic standards here is severe/perverse enough that Biden almost surely emerges as the least-worst option of those named above, pretty much by default.)

The likes of AOC (and other manifestly foolish Dems) seem to have wanted to impeach Trump for pretty much anything, including "racism," from the get-go.  (If you still aren't convinced what an obnoxious little nitwit AOC is, check out her vocal fry with the word "racisuuuum" in this excerpt.)  They milked a Trump-Putin collusion narrative for ratings for two years until their time- and attention-wasting charade fell apart after the Mueller findings.  The reasonable presumption here is that they have partisan motivations and hold GOP people to a more unreasonably demanding standard than they hold their own.

The reasonable presumption about the GOP with respect to their political opponents is also the same.  Let's say that a left/Dem SCOTUS justice dies in the next calendar year, a presidential election year.  If Mitch McConnell & Co. decide, contrary to their stance in 2016, to go ahead with a SCOTUS confirmation process denied to Obama nominee Merrick Garland, then they will self-convict as partisan pieces of shit.  The Dems, in their own partisan-POS way, will jump on the partisan GOP POS the split second any such thing happens.  But they were the same people calling for Judge Garland to be given a chance, after having said back in 1992 that SCOTUS nominees should not be given a chance during a presidential election season.  So there.  Perhaps the only serious question at this point is which of the two sides is more of a partisan POS, which side has squandered more intellectual credibility than its opponents, etc.  Philosophy awaits.

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.

The scummy Left

Political partisanship, ain't it corrosive to the soul? :-(

Yesterday, 'Good Guy Glenn' Greenwald highlighted glaring "progressive" hypocrisy with respect to the head of state's executive powers.  One need only integrate those observations with those I've made regarding the political Left's absolutely terrible track record at mounting anything remotely resembling an intellectually credible case against their chief ideological nemesis - instead of resorting to politically-motivated, malicious, or cheap misrepresentations, distortions, and outright smears, that is - in order for an observer to identify a common, corrosive element or pattern.  (Need I point out the common link between the term "integrate" and the term "integrity," as in wholeness, or completeness, or (ahem) perfection)?

That's the basic point of this posting.  Some supplementary stuff probably quite familiar by now to regular readers of this blog:

How is it that Good Guy Glenn - an independent columnist and litigator - is all up in arms about the screaming hypocrisy of the "progressives," while we just don't seem to hear much of an outcry from (supposedly? potentially?) the most intellectually-potent faction of them all out there - the professional educators?  I don't mean scattered voices of ho-hum protest here and there, I'm talking widespread, concerted, robust, impassioned screams of protest (assuming they're not too busy whining about the injustices of capitalism, that is).  Where are they?  What would Jefferson think about all this?

How is it that "progressives" could be so regressive?  Is all their talk of right-wing neanderthals little more than psychological projection, a well-known defense mechanism (the sort of thing of which these smug little shits accuse those very right-wingers)?

(Is it any mistake that Yours Truly, just the other day, pointed to ("right-winger") Glenn Beck as perhaps the most intellectually-challenging figure in today's political mass media?  At least GB extols the virtues of intellectual curiosity and of emulating the country's Framers (notably Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Washington) as a way out of the current cluster-fuck.  Seems to me that if everyone adopted a mentality and attitude in this general vicinity (without all having to agree with GB in particular about everything), this country would shape up in no time.  What does MSNBC offer by comparison?  Hell, is there any effective left-wing counterpart even to columnist Charles Krauthammer these days?  Sure, the Right is still suffering from the disease that has manifested in such symptoms as the Bush presidency and the Palin VP nod (and birtherism and science-denigrating and . . .), but if Paul Krugman (an economist) is the best they can come up with as a mass-media voice, they're done for as well.  Intellectual credibility just doesn't appear to be a highly-valued currency in politics these days.)

Political partisanship, ain't it corrosive to the soul? :-(

Dan Ariely has more.

Ayn Rand, Intellectuals, and Egg-on-Face

The intellectuals are supposed to be the best and most esteemed repositories of society's wisdom, and so when so many of them are so ignorantly (and therefore basely) opposed to an intellectual figure such as Ayn Rand, they have failed in their task of being the guardians and integrators of human knowledge. (Only those with a clue about Ayn Rand will recognize this last turn of phrase. The ignorant haters won't have a clue, because that's what's in the nature of ignorant haters, A being A and all.) Now, imagine a treatise hitting the American intellectual scene that completely blasts away at the misrepresentations, distortions, and smears of Rand and her ideas that have circulated in the intellectual scene for decades. How do the veteran and entrenched intellectuals react?

First off, the notion that academia as it is today doesn't corrupt the study of philosophy in various insidious ways would be ignorant in its own right, but the results speak for themselves. While Rand essentially delivered a rational eudaemonistic ethics over half a century ago, and provided the American People with a philosophical guide to living, the Intellectual Class has stumbled and staggered to and fro (but with ample logical hairsplitting and footnotes) trying to get at the answers Rand already had reached. The Intellectual Class, in the meantime, became enamored with John Rawls's Theory of Justice because . . . psychologically speaking, it's because it speaks to them so persuasively.

We already saw, in the early 20th century, how socialism spoke so persuasively to the aspirations of the Intellectuals, even though the leading economist of the time, Ludwig von Mises, exploded their myths and aspirations - at least he exploded them logically. He didn't explode them existentially; they plunged ahead in their support for socialism, and the result was widespread death and destruction the more socialistic the ideas that were implemented. This is a dark history that the Left is in denial about. Their dreamy ideas were a fucking disaster in the real world, and it's hard to come to terms with that.

Now, in connection with this observed phenomenon - a friendliness toward socialism and antipathy toward capitalism in the Intellectual Class, most obvious in the Humanities - Robert Nozick provided a thoughtful diagnosis. Combined with an utter fucking ignorance of Rand's ideas among some of these intellectuals, and in some cases an ignorance combined with the most malicious hostility toward Rand or anything capitalistic, the idea that the prevailing academic model produces philosophy, per se, and not a biased cognitive environment, is quite ignorant in itself. As a philosopher, I fucking hate ignorance.

Given the overwhelmingly compelling case for capitalism presented in the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, not to mention the overwhelming, real-world, not-merely-theoretical, demonstrated superiority of capitalism in practice, the opposition to capitalism in the Intellectual Class is nothing short of pathological - quite frighteningly so, in fact. It's hard to expect the Intellectual Class to take Rand seriously when it hardly takes anything pro-capitalism seriously, which in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to take the Intellectual Class seriously.

So here's how certain "types" of intellectual figures are bound to respond to such a bombshell treatise correcting the prevailing misconceptions which they should have been correcting long ago:

(1) The first type, the most intellectually curious and honest type, acknowledges that there was a big un-philosophical fuck-up that happened here, and that corrective measures needed to be adopted post haste.

(2) The second type, a somewhat mixed type, is the one whose context is so foreign to Rand's, that the response is likely to be one of caution and skepticism about new information that challenges one's prevailing opinions. This type would not be so keen on the "post haste" corrective measures, as they would call for the need for time - perhaps a prolongued period of time - to debate the ideas in the fashion that academics debate ideas, which has traditionally carried with it certain insidious tendencies - like those that led to the great degree of academic neglect of Ayn Rand's thought. This second type would be instructive to observe from the perspective of how deeply automatized and integrated a context can be, and how a new and unfamiliar context (but a deeply-integrated context in its own right) intrudes upon their understanding of the world.

(3) The third type would be the social-metaphysical second-hander or social-climber who waits and sees what the prestigious figures in the field say, and react to that. This type is part of the problem to begin with.

(4) The fourth type would be a defensive one - the kind of defensiveness you typically find when someone's long-held conceptions of things are put to severe challenge. Defensiveness can manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways depending on the case. This mentality is not very philosophical, but it can be subtly encouraged when enough like-thinking people (in this case, fellow members of one's trusted community, which is biased against capitalism) behave in like-thinking ways. A mixture of this type and type #3, and with perhaps another character trait added in, leads to the academy's lackluster response to one of their own - Nozick - destroying a great number of their bad non-capitalist views.

(5) The fifth type is the flat-out evader. This is the mentality that has been poisoned, and there are some such poisoned mentalities in the Intellectual Class already. These are the people whose evasions lead most directly to damaging real-world results, and who blatantly defy their job description. Some such so-called intellectuals hold tenured positions in the academy so they can't be fired as they should be. This type will just have to die off and be replaced by someone honest.

Now, if you have a range of people, many of whom fall into these "types," you're going to have clashing contexts between Randian or Perfectivist ideas and theirs, and it's this clashing of contexts that makes for any delay between the introduction of an idea and its acceptance. Rand found out this context-gap the hard way, upon publication of Atlas Shrugged: the context of many of those in her audience had been so fucked-up that effective communication between Rand and such unfortunate souls was next to nonexistent. (That's just how dysfunctional the intellectual climate in America was ca. 1957.) You had some idiotic reviewers of For the New Intellectual declaring quite emphatically that Rand's ideas were "near perfect in their immorality." (Not that these idiotic comments were from people who were able to think philosophically, the way a serious philosopher like, say, John Hospers did.) What's ironic is just how imbecilic the fashionable "liberal" reaction to Rand was. When I think "imbecile," I usually think Sarah Palin and her ilk, but how else do you describe the behavior of fashionable liberal intellectuals who don't have a clue?

Rand was incredulous at first at how the reaction to her work could be so fucking imbecilic (and clueless). She just wasn't prepared for the degree to which irrationality had been ingrained in the culture. Well, I think I'm gonna be more well prepared upon the release of my opus than Rand was on the release of hers. The capacity for people to be proudly imbecilic and clueless seemingly knows no bounds, and the myriad ways in which the anti-Rand crowd seemingly goes out of its way to misunderstand, misrepresent, distort and smear her, are all too predictable by now. But as I said in a previous posting, the target audience for my forthcoming book is, first and foremost, the young intellectuals who have the least invested in a faulty (non-perfective) worldview. The behavioral response across demographics will be quite the interesting subject of study.

How does one avoid the embarrassment of being proven manifestly and insanely wrong about a thinker such as Ayn Rand? My best advice is not to get oneself into that sort of pride-threatening pickle to begin with. It helps not to cultivate mental habits leading to anti-capitalist idiocy, as happens to quite an embarrassing degree in the Academy. No wonder the American people despise their Intellectual Class. And I think they'll be none to pleased to find out just how destructive to their interests the Intellectual Class has been. They won't put up with it; they just won't. I think the Comprachicos' days are numbered. Just how numbered they are, remains to be seen; there is free will, after all.

[ADDENDUM: For some idea of how far behind Rand the cultural and intellectual mainstream of 1957 was, keep in mind that this was before Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" article, before the rise of Virtue Ethics as a mainstream alternative to utilitarianism and deontology - a rise that has taken longer to happen due to the amount of attention and study diverted toward Rawls's theories - and before a number of authors - e.g., Henry Veatch, Jonathan Barnes, or, popularly, Mortimer Adler - began writing books on Aristotle for more public consumption, and less than two decades after The Basic Works of Aristotle were published in America. Philosophy was experiencing what Rand referred to as a "post-Kantian disintegration," in which Aristotle was being drowned out by lesser and more destructive thinkers, where Positivism and Existentialism were dominant. Only a clueless non-philosopher oblivious to the wisdom of Aristotle would conclude that Rand's ideas "are nearly perfect in their immorality," despite her well-known advertising of her admiration for Aristotle. The fact of the matter is, Rand was just well ahead of anyone else of her time, and figured out the things that it has been taking decades for the Mainstream to figure out. I see egg-on-face syndrome as quite inevitable here.]