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.]

A bit of good news on the Electoral College front

Recent net migration numbers to/from U.S. states

Blue States like CA are driving enough people away with "their high cost of living" (read: Demo-rats sucking every little bit they can out of producers who otherwise prefer to live at or near the coast/nice weather, not unlike how vast petroleum reserves prop up retrograde theocratic regimes) that CA is on its way to losing a seat in the House of Representatives and a vote in the electoral college.  Red States are gaining in population.

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

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?)

Why are Trump/GOP assholes re LGBT+ rights?

If there's anything the GOP obviously has a poor track record on, it's LGBT+ rights.  (Another would be too much blindness to real racial injustices, and that includes their hypocritical support for (predictably?) failed big-government "drug-war" policies that have disparate racial impacts.  Not that this vindicates the left all that much; they're the ones hypocritically pointing out the failures of big-government policies in only this one area, immediately crying racism whenever an "unarmed black teenager" is killed by police (e.g.), etc.)

From what reporting I've been seeing, the Trump administration is arguing in front of the Supreme Court against standard Civil Rights protections for LGBT+ people.  Here's something I find revealing in this context: while there's no shortage of Fox News links on any number of Google News topics, there aren't any on this subject, not on the first two pages of results, anyway.  If Fox News isn't reporting on it, chances are good that the activities involved are really too shameful for them to direct its audience's attention that way and to really air the Cultural-Political Right's laundry on this.

The Congress is chock-full of selectively attentive cowards who refuse to do the right thing when it comes to (a) ending federal cannabis prohibition (consider, e.g., the callousness and willful cluelessness involved toward medical cannabis users), and (b) updating the Civil Right act to include the same protections for LGBT+ people.  These are such no-brainer issues that it's not hard to figure out what the "right side of history" position is.  (Although see my tentatively-proposed position as a libertarian below.)  And it's GOP politicians who (on average, of course) are more toxic on these issues than those across the aisle.  (It's just too bad that the Demo rats bring so much credibility-destroying toxicity to just about any issue; see below, for example, on their anti-libertarian attitudes toward Christian bakers.  And good luck getting them to couch their arguments for weed legalization in the language of freedom rather than racial equity or [their perennial addiction] tax revenues.)  While it's believable that a Democrat-controlled Congress would do the right thing on these issues at some point in the not-distant future, I have a hard time believing that a GOP-controlled Congress would ever get around to doing so (unless they faced severe political repercussions for their shameful inaction).  [Edit: on a related note, would states like Texas ever have gotten around to repealing their sodomy laws (which are premised on the patently evil idea that people's lives are the state's and not their own to dispose of) on their own accord, absent SCOTUS intervention?]

If it were merely about the right of a baker to refuse baking a cake for a same-sex wedding, then we have an apparent clash of deep constitutional values.  (I say it's "apparent" because I don't see any warranted presumption that a business "open to the public" must do things that violate the religious convictions of the business-owner.  Also, the libertarian principle involved becomes more clear-cut when "bake my cake, bigot" morphs into "wax my balls, bigot.")  I don't see what clash of deep constitutional values is involved in the right of a business to fire someone on the basis of their sexual preference or gender identity when there are other relevantly-similar protected classes under prevailing law.  (Again as a libertarian, I say the presumption should be in favor of the right of a business to discriminate as long as it openly advertises its bigotry.  But I'm tentatively saying that it's a presumption, and that context matters in reasonably delimiting the scope of property rights.  No doubt some asshole business-owners would abuse this presumption to the maximal extent if given the chance....)

If you don't think anti-intellectualist, anti-liberal strains of religious dogma don't have something to do with this, then I would urge a look into attitudes toward LGBT+ rights in the Bible Belt.  Just because those attitudes aren't as shitty as they were a few decades ago, doesn't mean they still aren't shitty.

Have a look at Trump's shameful, anti-evidence behavior and policies (which go beyond the usual distractions associated with Trumpspeak) in this and some related areas.  Not only isn't he friendly toward LGBT+ rights as advertised, but he's also clearly blanket-Islamophobic. (From what I can tell, you might as well treat his and Pamela Geller's views on Islam as interchangeable).  (And while we might treat his 2016 campaign-season proposal to ban all Muslims entering the country as the usual casual-relationship-to-truth Trumpspeak which had little to zero chance of ever being implemented, along with his quickly-abandoned campaign-season proposals to kill the families of terrorists and bring back torture of terror suspects, the sentiment behind it is unquestionably Islamophobic.)  It isn't just a matter of the usual blustery things he says, but what he has done policy-wise.

And whether or not it affects his policy decision, when Trump contradicts himself from one time period to the next, as he has done most obviously on the cannabis-legalization issue, and doesn't explain himself, then that is evidence of bad faith and/or cynical pandering.  "It's just Trumpspeak" doesn't help when he unaccountably contradicts himself.  (Likewise, "Trump's saving grace is his ridiculous/unhinged/dishonest opposition," while quite arguably true, doesn't transform him into a non-asshole.)  (Likewise, one doesn't have to be one of these toxic-af radical trans activists - too toxic even for many on the "progressive" left - to recognize how transphobic and/or downright ignorant of transgenderism so many on the Cultural Right are; "God created two biological sexes" won't erase the distinction between sex and gender, for example.  How about this: there's plenty of toxicity to go around on this subject, coming from any number of directions.)

I'd just like to know, what these GOP people think is the upside to upholding (whether actively or by omission) the putative right of businesses to fire people for being gay, given their not upholding the right to do so in the case of biological sex, race, or religion.  And the philosopher's question: just how far, exactly, are they willing to go on this, before even they get ashamed and disgusted with themselves?  (My first philosopher's question for leftists would be: just how egregious, exactly, does a distortion or smear of Ayn Rand have to be, before even the leftists start calling foul?  They've been real lowlifes on this subject, as it is....)  Something specific, please.

[Addendum: An extension of the philosopher's questions: for those who aren't outright assholes, just how far, exactly, do their colleagues on their own side of the aisle have to go in being assholes, before the non-assholes start calling the assholes out?  (Or: how far, exactly, does the non-called-out asshole behavior have to go, before those failing to call out the assholes start becoming assholes themselves?  Something specific, goddammit.)]

[Addendum 10/12: Some common sense reasoning requiring little to no mental gymnastics in either (left/right) direction: Sexual orientation and gender identity are in the same category of 'immutable characteristics' that make sex, race, and religion protected classes under the Civil Rights Act.  How much, exactly, ahem does one need to read into the Civil Rights Act to see that it is about protected classes based on immutable characteristics and not only about those classes concretely enumerated in the Act?  Congress refuses to do the right thing here, after all....]

So, what if CA emigrants turn TX blue?

The electoral college is one safeguard the wise American Founders put in place to protect minorities from the stupidity and malice of a majority.  So, what happens when stupid and malicious Demo rats of today (I am coming perilously close to redundancy here) from Blue States migrate in big numbers to the Red ones, thereby turning those Red states Blue?

That seems to be something of a concern as many CA residents appear to be moving into TX.

We should ask, though, whether those fleeing the cesspit of leftist ideology that CA is fast becoming are the non-leftists getting sick of the cesspit (meaning that the remaining ever-more-leftist residents can engage in ever more ideological inbreeding free from any input or check from the Deplorables), thereby not really affecting the left/right composition in TX.

And if we have a large influx of people from high-tax Blue states into lower-tax Red ones, that could well spark a more robust national conversation than there has been so far, as to what about Blue states is driving so many people into the Red ones.  How would the Blue ones come out looking good after such a discussion?  Perhaps what the non-Blue folks would notice more than ever from such a discussion is how utterly pathetic the Dems/leftists are at giving explanations for anything that anyone besides the leftist Kool-Aid drinkers would find credible.

But say that these CA-to-TX people are Dems who turn TX blue.  Well, then, the electoral college becomes that much less of a defense against Demo rat malice an idiocy being imposed on everyone else.  And that would be unfortunate.  Perhaps by some 'dialectical' movement of ideas, new defenses against the pestilence will mutate into existence, but I can't envision what those new defenses would be.

But at least it would still be quite the task for Dems to go about destroying the Senate.

The intellectual quality of 'Right' and 'Left' today

[The broad category of individuals listed here would be something like "public intellectual figures influential on contemporary mainstream American cultural and political thought."]

For the time being, I'll just drop this list of names and then explain later how the collected efforts of the 'Right' figures can easily wipe the floor with the collection of 'Left' figures listed.  I mean, isn't it obvious to anyone who's done his homework?  (Hint: which side has more overall aggregate wisdom?  [For instance, only one side has authors of books titled: The Book of Virtues; The Road to Character.]  It's a no-brainer, much like how a Golden State Warriors team with a healthy Curry and Durant wipes the floor with otherwise pretty skilled teams.  I'm sorry to say that I don't think that the "left" side rises to the level of the 2017-2018 Houston Rockets in this analogy, because it really isn't close.  The left side is more like a .500 team pretending it's an .800 [66-win] team.  The .900+ [74-8] team on the merits would be Aristotelians-Randians.)  And we're not even listing the not-so-influential but some vastly superior libertarian and Objectivist thinkers.

(I am more closely familiar with the 'Right' stream of American thought and so there are more of them listed; I list only living people with one exception; I leave out those currently working in prominent government positions.)

Republicans / Right:

Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Richard Epstein
Roger Scruton
Glenn Beck
Bill O'Reilly
Krauthammer (d. 2018)
Kissinger
George Will
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Michael Savage
Ben Shapiro
Mark Levin
Dennis Prager
Tucker Carlson
Greg Gutfeld
Newt Gingrich
Dinesh D'Souza
Bret Stephens
David Brooks
David Horowitz
Jason Riley
Heather Mac Donald
Peggy Noonan
Dana Perino
Jesse Watters
Dennis Miller
Jeanine Pirro
Dan Bongino
Candace Owens
Milo Y
Karl Rove
Brit Hume
Jonah Goldberg
Pat Buchanan
Lou Dobbs
Ann Coulter
James Dobson
Michael Medved
William Bennett
Robert Bork
George Gilder
Charles Murray
Andrew Napolitano
John Stossel
Victor Davis Hanson
Rod Dreher
Ross Douthat


Democrats / Left:

Jon Stewart
Stephen Colbert
Chris Cuomo
Rachel Maddow
Cenk Uygur
Chris Matthews
Matthew Yglesias
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz
Alan Blinder
William Galston
Austan Goolsbee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michael Eric Dyson
Cornel West
Noam Chomsky
Jurgen Habermas
Naomi Klein
Slavoj Zizek
Robert Reich
Juan Williams
Michael Moore
Thom Hartmann
Jesse Jackson
Al Sharpton
Al Franken
Bill Moyers
Matt Taibbi
David Brock
Nathan J. Robinson
Nicholas Kristof
Al Gore


Independent/Other:

Jordan Peterson
Andrew Sullivan
Glenn Greenwald
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman
Fareed Zakaria
The Economist (no bylines)
Steven Pinker
Joe Rogan
Bill Maher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
Amartya Sen
Judith Butler

What is an impeachable offense?

President Clinton lied under oath when asked if he was ever alone with 'Miss' Lewinsky: "I don't recall."  Demon Rat congress critters gave him a pass for that.  They gave him a pass on witness-tampering charges in connection with his conversations with his secretary Betty Currie and others.

So why are Demon Rats not willing to give Trump a pass for less than what they gave Clinton a pass for?

The question answers itself; we are not in the realm of logic, intellectual honesty or wisdom-loving here.  We are in the realm of politics without philosophy.  And the only thing Nancy Peloser is considering in whether or not to impeach Trump is how it will affect her party in the next election, and not whether it's the right thing to do.  It's the only thing Demon Rats in 1999 cared about when it came to the subject of impeaching Clinton.

This should be blazingly obvious to anyone who paid attention both times around.

We can turn the tables and ask why Republicans are willing to give Trump a pass when they didn't give Clinton one.  Well, for one thing, Trump didn't lie under oath.  (Note I said "less than what [Demon Rats] gave Clinton a pass for.")  For another, Democrats are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior, as they imply with any number of things they say about themselves (including labeling themselves "progressive") and about Republicans ("basket of deplorables/irredeemables," etc.).

It's not exactly like the GOP is hot shit (remember when they drank the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid? how they condone evolution-denial? how they treat cannabis users like children?  how they dogmatically cling to "rights begin at conception"? etc.), but something about the Demon Rats today says: intellectual account overdrawn.

At least one nice thing about Democrats

(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.)

Unlike leftist nitwits like AOC who seems to know only about what was bad and nothing about what went right during the Reagan years - i.e., knowing only one side of a case, like she apparently does in regard to the workings of capitalism among other things - I make an effort to know both sides of a case before issuing a verdict (and short of having done that homework I refrain from issuing a verdict and admit to lack of relevant expertise).  By doing so, I open myself up to acknowledging where an opponent gets it right even if they get it wrong about (most) other things.

I am a staunch libertarian, which (probably for reasons largely shared by Rand) puts me more in alignment with Republican ideas/policies on the whole than Democrat ones, especially the Democrats after about 2010 when they made a marked shift to the left.  (See the "swing left" graph by Prof. Adam Bonica here.)  My basic view about government is that it's there to be a protector of liberty-rights and not to contravene that role by (e.g.) assuming the role of provider of goods funded by compulsory taxation.  This leads me to oppose the big-government fiscal agenda typically favored by Democrats.  I also tend to share an affinity for culturally "bourgeois" values espoused by conservatives.

These are only general tendencies.  But, as noted, given the shift of the Dems toward the far left, along with an intellectually infantile Dem/left shrillness about the Trump presidency, capitalism, and other topics, along with a hubris that leads them ever more to eschew dialogue with opponents, it makes it a lot easier for me to tend toward the GOP these days.  I'd much rather have a Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, John Kasich or (even) Chris Christie (or even a Donald Trump!) in elected office than a Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Kirsten Gillibrand.  (See here for one reason why I gladly refer to this crop of Democrats as Demon Rats.)

As a consequence of my libertarian principles, I advocate for the legalization of cannabis.

On this issue, I side with the Democrats over the Republicans.  It's an issue on which I think the Republicans in particular have gotten it dreadfully wrong for far too long now.  Recreational drug prohibition means a big-government program aimed at social improvement that has been a monumental (dare I say catastrophic?) failure, just as any so-described big government program could be predicted to be.  What's more, prohibition violates the basic "your life is own and not the state's to dispose of" libertarian political norm, and is immoral on that basis alone.  Even when it comes to the more addictive and harmful drugs (including even fentanyl, ffs), placing trust in the state to prevent these harmful and addictive substances from reaching the citizenry has proven a failure; there are almost surely any number of better ways to combat the problem here than supply-focused enforcement.

But with cannabis, it's really a no-brainer.  (I say "even" Chris Christie above, because on this issue he's been a complete dickhead.)

Democrat-majority states have been on the side of progress on this issue.  The Red States, or at least a good number of them, might never get around to legalizing it, much like a good number of them might never have gotten around to doing the right thing in legally recognizing same-sex unions.  Republicans seem to be trapped in an ideological rut on this issue (the ever-venerated Reagan being such a staunch drug warrior and whatnot).  Exacerbating this problem is a cognitive bias that assigns credence to almost invariably shoddy use of statistics to "establish" that cannabis leads to this or that social problem.  (See the commentary on the latest prominent example of anti-pot scaremongering.)  Perhaps the most idiotic rationale for prohibition commonly peddled by the prohibitionists is "drugs are bad for kids, mmkay" . . . and therefore adults shouldn't be allowed to consume them, either.  (The state thereby assumes the role of parent for all adults.  Great.)

This is not to say that Democrats have carried out legalization the way libertarians would.  In the People's Republic of California, the Dems seem to have decided to tax and regulate the shit out of the cannabis industry so much that black markets are still flourishing there.

And besides, libertarians have been in favor of cannabis legalization for as long as libertarians have been around (and the big-L Libertarian Party has been around nearly half a century now).  Why are Democrat presidential candidates only now getting around to doing the same?  What changed between then and now, exactly?  Why weren't they promoting doing the right thing, when it was unpopular?  Why did only their well-connected Hollywood-elite allies/supporters and the like get access to weed with impunity while poor minorities get victimized by drug-war policies?

Nonetheless, enough common sense has gotten through to Dems and Blue States, and not enough of it has gotten through to the GOP and Red States, on this particular issue.  And so, for simply exercising some common sense, the Dems deserve some credit, while the GOP deserves ridicule (both for selective lack of common sense and for being so two-faced about their views on failed big-government policies).

Now, how long does it have to take for both parties to come around to the superior libertarian option on all political issues?

Notes on the orange man (Season 1, Ep. 3)

(1) There are times when the orange man's negligent if not reckless imbecility is beyond question, and this is one of them.

(2) In the necessary and unavoidable "but have you seen his opposition?" department: Say that Trump is found to have obstructed justice and/or committed perjury.  The Democrats gave President Clinton a pass for that.  Why are they so concerned about such things now?  They've blown their credibility on this.  (Many of these nitwits, including Ocasio-Cortez, hold that Trump ought to be impeached for being a lousy president, rather than by the standard clearly set forth in the Constitution.) They have themselves to blame for nominating a key enabler of President Clinton's criminality, Crooked Hillary, who for her own part set up a private server on which to conduct government business without seeking State Dept. approval -- while fellow Democrats looked the other way and/or made a serious effort to miss the point.  HRC is the arrogant and cynical D.C. Swamp personified, as wikileaks helped further to illustrate, and it best explains how "the most qualified candidate in recent memory" went down to defeat.  (Her subsequent book and public appearances where she "explains" her defeat -- e.g., blaming sexism, just as a fucking loser would do -- have only served to remind us why she was defeated.)

To address the whole Trump phenomenon in its proper and full context, and hence to make duly thorough notes on the orange man, you have to understand what an intellectual and moral failure the D.C.-Big Government-Democrat complex is.  If D.C. weren't such an intellectually and morally dysfunctional swampy arena made possible in great part by Democrat/Big-Govt, grab-others'-wealth policies and mentality over the decades, we'd have had better presidential candidates than the stream of mediocrities we have nowadays.  Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were presidents of the American Philosophical Society.  What we are witness to is a debased posterity, the Enlightenment legacy bastardized and squandered.  And the Democrats -- Demon Rats -- can't have it both ways: they can't in justice point to all the evidence of Trump's imbecility and shabbiness, while then turning a blind eye to, or making up all kinds of laughably piss-poor excuses for, all of their own.  (Here's just one very recent, absolutely pathetic performance from a freshman Demon Rat Congress-critter when challenged to support an opinion in a TV interview.  [The big grain of truth in the context of the link: Trump is definitely an Islamophobe, although you would need to possess Demon Rat-level reasoning skills to equate that with racism.])

Trump's imbecility/shabbiness and his opposition's are, in essence, mutually supporting phenomena.  Assuredly this is the best explanation for the current clown show.  Or, more precisely, it's assuredly the best description (in a nutshell) of the current clown show.  The explanation rests on the intellectual state of the nation, and that in turn rests on the quality of its educational institutions -- run mostly by the pseudo-progressive Demon Rats -- which are all too short on the most crucial feature of sound educational practice and cultural progress (as Franklin and Jefferson recognized): philosophy.  Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Adams.  The recent crop of political "leaders" pales in comparison; if they know more than jackshit about philosophy, you couldn't tell from the way they operate.  "Sad!"

[Addendum: Okay, okay, one notable promising exception on this, but it ain't no Demon Rat.  What say Little Donny about that?]

[Addendum #2: The imbecility of the Demon Rats notwithstanding, Republicans shoulder the responsibility for having nominated the orange man to begin with.  On the merits, his debate performances sucked; there were at least half a dozen other candidates who talked more sense, with more policy knowledge, etc.  His main qualification seems to have been, "He's the only one who can defeat Clinton in the general."  I guess you can't fault his supporters for inaccuracy there.  But it comes at a cost: a philistine in the White House.  The party had already embarrassed itself when it added an obvious philistine to its '08 presidential ticket.  The one main advantage of having the orange man as president is the one that Sen. Cruz mentioned as reason to support him over HRC: restoring judicial balance after 8 years of Obama appointments.  So the balance is at least partly restored; does he have to remain the party's nominee in '20?  Or is the philistine faction of the party base -- the 'dialectical' counterweight to the Demon Rat shit-for-brains faction -- too strong for a viable alternative?]

The Maverick Philosopher vs. Ayn Rand

The Maverick Philosopher, who elects to identify himself at his blog under real-nym Bill Vallicella, doesn't think all that highly of Ayn Rand.

That is unfortunate, but understandable, given his context.

What's more, when he bashes Rand as being a "hack" and whatnot, he goes through the trouble of presenting evidence and argument.  So he presents something of a formidable foe to those who would take Rand seriously as a philosopher.  (He does allow that she is a philosopher, but just not a good one.)  As one could quite readily discern from his blog, he is an honorable fucking adversary, even if mistaken in his general assessment of Rand.  (Plus he has a better (more perfect) overall command of the written word than I.)  He provides a very refreshing alternative to the anti-philosophizing attitude represented by the ignoble Leiters.  Perhaps one day I should have the pleasure of meeting him and collaborating, as all mutual philosophizing should be about.  Here I want to take issue with his overall assessment while acknowledging, in the spirit of dialectic, what he gets right.

First, the "bad stuff" about Rand (and Peikoff) . . .

Maverick pretty much nails Rand on the issues he has decided to cover when discussing her.  Pretty much, though not all the way.  Rand's very simple approach to metaphysics on neo-Aristotelian lines either hardly adds to what Aristotle already accomplished, or gets things wrong when applying understanding of the axioms to various substantive issues, including perhaps The Most Substantive Issue of Metaphysics: Does God Exist?  Going back to Nathaniel Branden's "intellectual ammunition department" response to the God-as-First-Cause question in The Objectivist Newsletter, the official Objectivist position is, in essence, that God cannot exist because, as Branden put it, the universe is the totality of that which exists.  God is not part of the universe, therefore, God does not exist.  Q.E.D.  It's pretty much that bad, and Maverick will fill you in on the details.  It also makes Peikoff's own position very muddled in light of his statement that "existence exists" does not specify that a physical world exists (and how could it, given its trivially-true character?).

The Objectivist rendering of the law of causality as a corollary of the law of identity (stated as "A is A" although expanded upon by direct quotation from Aristotle in the last pages of Atlas) is at best a simplistic restatement of Aristotelian ideas about causes, while Peikoff's treatment of the issue in light of what he subsequently says about free will is muddled.  The standard Rand/Peikoff/(Binswanger?) claim is that since under a given set of circumstances, only one "action" (behavior?) is available to a given entity, this rules out  (as "irrational" or something) indeterministic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.  The Objectivist interpretation  of causality as (correctly!) applied to free will is that the "only" action open to a volitional being is that which follows from its nature: to act freely, to choose.  The problem for the orthodox Objectivist is that this, in turn, allows for indeterministic causation (yes, you read that right) not just in the subatomic realm studied by QM, but universally.  What we are left with is the inductive epistemological task of discovering which phenomena are (mechanistically) determined and which are not.  (Indeterminism must not be equated with volition; if subatomic particles don't behave as classical mechanics would dictate, that hardly at all implies their exhibiting volition, as you might hear many an amateur student of Objectivism claim.)

Rand/Peikoff's "refutations" of idealism and materialism are similarly, and hopelessly, muddled.  The Objectivist axiom of consciousness dictates most reasonably that a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms; that in order for it to be conscious, it had to be conscious of something (which exists).  The problem is, this doesn't do anything to refute idealism, since standard idealisms hold that, in Berkeley's formulation, "to be is to be perceived."  Consciousness still remains the faculty of perceiving that which exists, in such a formulation.  This cannot be rejected on the basis of "the primacy of existence" (if that is read as implied by the [I hate to put it this way, but I have to] trivially-true axioms).  This would amount to metaphysics-by-fiat, that "existence exists" means something substantive to the effect that Berkeley's formulation is automatically ruled out.  I think had Rand been surrounded by expert metaphysicians during her intellectual career, she'd have done a much better job at this sort of thing; however, had the mainstream of academic analytic philosophy at the time not been bogged down in anti-metaphysical practices while Aristotle was going relatively neglected, she might have found such experts where they around.  This gives rise to the question: Why did she not integrate/dialecticize with Henry Veatch, or him with her?  What we have here is a failure to integrate.

The Objectivist "refutation" of materialism is little better, since it amounts to a strawman equation of materialism with a vulgar, uber-reductive materialism.  In OPAR, Peikoff mentions four supposedly paradigmatic materialists in his sense: Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, and Skinner.  In one indication that Peikoff was behind the times at the time of OPAR's 1991 publication, he appears unaware that Skinner had long been a non-issue by then, particularly in wake of Chomsky's demolition job some two decades before.  Not only that, he hadn't been influential in mainstream philosophy.  Skinner might plausibly be an example of vulgar reductive materialism but since mainstream philosophers didn't take him seriously, what's the idea of bringing him into a discussion of what allegedly went wrong in metaphysics at the hands of philosophers?  The case of Marx doesn't work well here, either, because Marx as a vulgar reductionist reeks of a strawman.  But the real kicker here is: how does Objectivism escape charges of materialism when (contrary to Peikoff's earlier admission that the existence axiom doesn't specify the existence of a physical world) it rules out the existence of God on the grounds that only the physical universe exists?  Objectivism turns out to be a substantive naturalism, which isn't (as John W. Robbins's incompetent critique of Objectivism would have it) synonymous with materialism, at least not as Peikoff describes it (the vulgar-reductive kind which denies the reality of consciousness), but that leaves the question: who of significance in the history of philosophy does hold that latter view?  I won't hold my breath for an answer.

So, getting back to the Maverick, when he's bashing the substantive Rand/Peikoff arguments in metaphysics, he's shooting fish in a barrel.  It's no surprise to me that inasmuch as Rand scholars write on metaphysics they go back to Aristotle and sometimes Aquinas for beefing-up.  (For instance, Chapter 1 of Den Uyl and Rasmussen's The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand seems to contain more discussion about the Aristotelian tradition than about Rand in particular.)

When Maverick attacks Rand's views on abortion, he rightly points out where her views are sorely lacking, although I would not consider her views obviously stupid considering the time at which she wrote them, a time when Judith Thomson's flawed article defending abortion was not so obviously flawed according to the understanding of many readers then.  (The violinist example . . . whoo boy!  I mean, if a fetus could be easily transferred from the mother's body to some other nutritive environment - just as the violinist could be hooked up to someone else - then the violinist example is a great, knock-down defense of a woman's unlimited "right to choose what happens to and in her body."  Not to mention that whole thing about volitional activity bringing about the (special) relation of fetal dependence, in marked contrast to the involuntary hooking-up to the violinist.  And why a violinist, anyway?)  I would also take issue with one subtle but significant point.  When Rand wrote, "The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)," Maverick interprets this as follows: "Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living."  The "or" here might suggest a logical equivalence, but the rhetorical context does not make that at all clear and, being accustomed as I am to Rand's writing style, I read it as the different kind of "or," as in presenting two distinct cases.  In any case, I think needless to  say, the abortion debate has gotten more sophisticated in the nearly-forty years since, with Don Marquis's anti-abortion argument making a most potent case for how abortion is, at minimum, extremely morally problematic; the standard "woman's right over her body" arguments advanced by so many intellectually-lazy defenders of abortion rights have to fully confront Marquis's argument.

Maverick's coverage of Rand's intellectual relationship with John Hospers sorely mischaracterizes the reasons for their parting of ways.  It was not over Hospers having "dared criticize" Rand, but the style in which he did so.  Binswanger has the scoop on what precipitated their break, and if that is an accurate portrayal, then Hospers's behavior cries out for a reasoned explanation, which (due to Hospers's passing) we may never get.

Speaking of Binswanger, Maverick is to be commended for his respectful interchange with Binswanger at his blog.  It's too bad all these one-sided cheap-shot artists around the online world don't have the guts or the decency to do likewise.

Before continuing, I do want to mention that I'm lukewarm about Maverick's seemingly blanket characterizations of "liberals" as decadent libertines on moral and cultural matters and freedom-stomping statists on political and economic ones.  (Maverick self-identifies as a conservative.)  If one were to pin him down to specifics, I'm fairly sure he would distinguish the thoughtful liberals from the not-so-thoughtful ones, in which case the former aren't the ones giving liberalism such a bad name.  But doesn't that go for pretty much any "school" of thought, be it liberalism, libertarianism, Objectivism, or . . . conservatism?  If we're going to criticize "the liberals" for their faults, then "the conservatives" are fair game . . . and have you seen how "the conservatives" have done a piss-poor job, since roughly around the time of their adoption of the Southern Strategy, at presenting an intellectually-fortified defense of conservative ideals?  There was Barry Goldwater back in the '60s penning The Conscience of a Conservative, and then later coming to identify as a libertarian and to decry the religious fundamentalism taking over the GOP.  There was William F. Buckley (by the way, did he get calmly and methodically destroyed by Chomsky on his "Firing Line" show, or what?) who came to identify as a libertarian as well as conservative.  (I read somewhere that, to his credit, Buckley smoked a little bud; also, he proved in his eloquent style how the Drug War is a moral and practical disaster.) You had Reagan playing up to the il(classical)liberal Moral Majority, and things continued downhill from there: the Dan Quayle VP nod, the illiberal declaration of "culture war" at the '92 GOP convention, Clinton Derangement Syndrome, the Bush torture regime, FOX's credibility-destroying partisanship, Limbaugh's descent into intellectual dementia, Hannity's blatant partisanship and anti-intellectualism, Savage's paranoid hysteria, O'Reilly's anti-intellectual streak, the ridiculous '08 Dingbat VP nod, "refudiate," Obama Derangement Syndrome, demise-is-always-around-the-corner paranoia, End Times-ism, many Tea Partiers' selective attention/memory/knowledge, seeming GOP indifference to the healthcare affordability crisis, Moneybags as the lone credible (sic) '12 candidate, birtherism, intellectually vacant opposition to marriage equality, evolution denial, climate change denial (coupled by projections onto scientists as allegedly politicizing the issue), and, now, out-and-out morons running the House Science (sic) Committee.  If "the conservatives" would address these problems as much as "the liberals" should address theirs (starting perhaps with their pathological inability or unwillingness to seriously and honestly confront what they imagine to be impossible: a formidable Aristotelian-individualist-capitalist intellectual juggernaut spearheaded by a fiery novelist), we might well have neo-Aristotelian/perfectivist nirvana, would we not.

Okay.  Now.  Where does the Maverick get it wrong about Rand?

First, let me point out that his shooting-fish-in-a-barrel routine is directed almost exclusively at Rand's lousy substantive metaphysical arguments.  What he does not cover is her ethics, her politics, or - most crucially, most fundamentally, most signficantly - her prescribed (neo-Aristotelian) methodology for dealing with ideas.  (Method pertains primarily with epistemology, not metaphysics.)  Outside of what Peikoff, Sciabarra, and a few others have done, this never gets addressed those writing about Rand, her critics most of all.  One might claim that Peikoff's lecture courses, in which this central topic is most extensively worked out, are too inaccessible a format (the complaint about their being too expensive - as in the hundreds of dollars - no longer holds, by any remotely plausible stretch), but that still leaves Sciabarra's Russian Radical, which has been in print for nearly two decades now, and which Rand critics either brazenly evade or remain blazingly ignorant about.  Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course has been in print for almost a year now (and if you aren't deeply familiar, directly or inderectly, with the contents of this course, then your understanding of Rand's philosophy is probably for shit, given the crucial, fundamental, supremely significant role of method in it; this is not even to speak of Peikoff's later courses, such as The Art of Thinking or Objectivism Through Induction) and so far the critics have remained completely silent about the book version of Understanding, through either ignorance/cluelessness or evasion.  (Right on bad-faith cue, the haters did manage, just around the same time Understanding was released, to heap attention upon Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation which, from what I can tell, is as clueless as any of the secondary literature out there.  This disparity of response right here says pretty much all you need to know about the haters' total lack of scruples.)

(I mean, if staunch adherents/admirers of Thinker X's ideas uniformly tell you that such-and-such resource is absolutely essential to grasping Thinker X's ideas properly, the intellectually curious person would very much want to obtain that resource if the person wanted to speak competently and persuasively about the merits of Thinker X's ideas, rather than to run around like a random thug taking pot-shots at Thinker X and the adherents of Thinker X's ideas.  This is only common sense; this only stands to reason.  Oh, did I mention that Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment?  If not, I'll say it again: Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment.  Done deal.  I've never been more certain of anything in my life.  The fuck you think Russian Radical was all about, anyway, fun and games?   You've been spermjacked, Leiter & Co.  Checkmate, assholes.  You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Second, the intellectually responsible thing to do is to see in what areas Rand's ideas have been carefully analyzed and developed by subsequent thinkers, if one wants to know where her strengths were.  I've already touched upon method (Peikoff and Sciabarra).  In ethics, there's Tara Smith's Cambridge-published book on Randian-egoistic normative virtue-ethics, along with the recent Ayn Rand Society volume.  In politics, Rand's "What is Capitalism?" is a hugely important essay with respect to a central theme of hers: the role of the mind in human existence.  The essential substance of her political ideas has reached its latest academic development in Sciabarra's Total Freedom and Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty.  As for her aesthetics: first off, not to understand her aesthetics is not to understand her views about sense of life, which is not to understand Rand's own sense of life, which is not to understand the benevolent universe premise, which is not to understand Rand the person; it is to not understand her views on psycho-epistemology, which is to not understand her theory about method, which is to not understand her philosophy, period.  Second, when a scholar of aesthetics such as John Hospers says that Rand's novels carry much aesthetic importance, the intellectually responsible reaction is to perk up one's ears.  Finally, in regard to epistemology "proper," the forthcoming (2013) Ayn Rand Society volume continues and develops Rand's work on the nature of concepts and their role in knowledge.

It is a fascinating psychological and sociological dynamic to observe, how people's views on a thinker or topic can vary so much depending not only on their individual contexts of knowledge, but also on what data points they cull into making their observations and judgments.  If you focus exclusively on things like Rand's terrible polemics and lousy substantive arguments in metaphysics, one is bound to think little or negatively of her.  If one focuses exclusively on (to put it in briefest essence) the perfectivist aspects of Rand's philosophy and personality, one is bound to see her as the second coming of Aristotle.  The perfective dialectical reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate data sets - the act of objectively and comprehensively establishing the full context - involves doing as I do right here and in dozens of other blog entries on Rand.  And to his great credit Maverick, being staunchly anti-intellectual-bigotry and perfectivist in his sensibilities, wrote: "Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed."  A shit-ton better than the closed-minded sneers and ultra-politicized "gatekeeping" of Leiter and his ilk, innit?  (A search on the term "nietzsche" at Maverick's Rand page (which I linked at the outset of today's discussion) is apropos.  Further, I have it on authority of a well-established Nietzsche scholar that Rand was more disciplined a thinker than Nietzsche was.  She did select the Aristotelian route from Alasdair MacIntyre's (dialectically inadequate?) Aristotle/Nietzsche alternative, if that tells you anything.  But what if Nietzsche had been productive another thirty years?...)

The unquestionable fact is, there is a fast-growing academic literature on Rand that didn't exist before.  Combined with the effect of those now-way-inexpensive Peikoff courses, and the publication of Understanding Objectivism, and the neo-Aristotelian resurgence in general gathering steam in the academy, the effect should be exponential: an explosion in interest in Rand among the intellectually curious.  The deniers - inside the academy and out - have two options: (1) keep evading and behaving like thugs, or (2) get a clue.  To wit:

"Checkmate, asshole."

Where did the conservative intellectuals go?

Today I've been researching this question.  The list of "conservative intellectuals, activists, and writers" at the wikipedia page (1st google result) is disappointing to say the least (and neither Rand, Hayek, nor Friedman - the most prominent intellectual figures listed there - were, or considered themselves, conservative; Rand was especially vehement about this whereas today's "conservatives" haven't taken the hint).  Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are well into their retirement-age years.  How about anyone living today under, say, 65 years old who could qualify as a great conservative intellectual?  The field is catastrophically barren here.

Three years ago, Newt Gingrich (one reason the wikipedia list is so disappointing) lauded a 14-year-old Jonathan Krohn as the intellectual future of the Republican Party.  Not only has that not panned out (the intellectually precocious Krohn went on to read some philosophy and to realize how intellectually vacuous his earlier views were), but there's obviously something gone awry about a political party in which a 14-year-old is so highly touted by the adults (or is it "adults"?) in the room.

The second Google result quotes at length from a blog posting by jurist Richard Posner which paints quite the grim picture.  The original, in full - without paragraph break-ups - is here.

There was a time when modern American-style conservatism (or should I say, the package-deal under that label of some good and some not-so-good ideas) had appeal to me - at a couple years older than Jonathan Krohn was as a GOP celebrity.  This was somewhere around twenty years prior to that, a number of years before the GOP had definitively jumped the shark (the younger Bush's presidency).  It was also before I encountered a book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which spelled the end of American-style conservatism as an intellectually viable force in my mind.  Note how Barry Goldwater went on to repudiate the recent incarnation of the GOP.

If you look at the GOP today, it is a party that remains politically viable due in great part to two factors: (1) The super-wealthy support them: call this the financial support network; (2) The grassroots base - call this the electoral support network - is comprised to an astonishing extent (as abundant polling data show) of very ignorant people, geographically tilted toward the South and demographically tilted toward the old.  These two forces meet at the leading media outlet for GOP memes: Fox News.  Much financial and intellectual (or is it anti-intellectual?) capital has been spent largely via this propagation source to oppose such things as climate science, same-sex marriage and healthcare reform, to call into question Obama's "American credentials," and to promote fiscal and foreign policies that have little empirical data in their favor.  I would not be surprised if a poll of registered Republicans, when asked whether Al Jazeera is a political party, media organization or terrorist organization, ended up in a three-way split.  It's that fucking bad.

Very recently, this graph showing the relationship between favorite websites and political affiliation has been making the rounds.  I don't know how statistically reliable it is - it appears to be based on the Trendsetter app's user "likes" - but assuming it's reasonably accurate (and it looks quite accurate for reddit.com's placement), the most telling data point would be the location of the wikipedia logo.  This wouldn't even demonstrate how great Obama and the Dems are, instead of just how bad today's GOP and its candidates are in comparison.  (Keep in mind that book smarts and business smarts aren't the same; also keep in mind that plenty of business people support the Dems.)  If you look at the community of political philosophers, I'd expect the support for present-day American-style conservatism (not to be confused with, say, Hayekianism) to be close to (if not completely) nonexistent.

I will continue researching these Google results and encourage others to do likewise.

(EDIT: Note to self: try to keep the distinction between conservatism (and conservative intellectuals) and the GOP/Fox abundantly clear.)

(EDIT #2: The third Google result, a Wa-Post editorial, mentions Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning as a serious work.  Heck, it even scores 3.9 stars out of 5 at goodreads, way higher than similarly-titled Ann Coulter works score there.  A text search of the book brought up zero results for "Rawls" and one irrelevant result for "Chomsky," however.  So I'm skeptical about what "left" Goldberg is talking about.  Is this like writing a book on the crankery of libertarians by highlighting Ron Paul but not Robert Nozick?)