Better living through philosophy, in broad outline

In which Ultimate Philosopher addresses the question, "Is there definitive evidence, man, that better living and philosophy go together?" and then such related questions as "What if we encounter one miserable philosopher, doesn't that falsify a better-living-through-philosophy hypothesis" and then "Isn't part of wisdom learning not to be miserable (as distinct from, say, 'in physical pain'), like, ever, and isn't philosophy after all the pursuit or search for wisdom which is distinct from the having of wisdom or sagacity itself" and then such related questions about the meaning of life, etc.

So, let's begin.  What is better living?  In short, whatever it is that the ancients (Aristotle first and foremost, of course . . .) were getting at with the concept of eudaimonia.  Happiness, flourishing, comprehensive well-being, . . . a modern rendition of the concept is found in self-actualization psychology associated with Maslow and others.

Next question: are there real-world examples of self-actualized or eudaimonic philosophers, not merely philosophers who seek these things but also attain these things?  It is helpful to have real-world examples to go by.  How do we go about identifying who a philosopher is, anyway?  And surely we need to be able to distinguish between a mere philosopher and a sage, so getting the definition of 'philosopher' correct is important (for purposes of this discussion, etc.).  To best answer that question is to get into the topic of 'metaphilosophy' or philosophy (asking questions about, thinking through thoroughly, more to follow below) about philosophy.  Just what are the necessary and sufficient conditions, etc., for someone to be engaging in what we correctly identify as philosophic activity?

Philosophy is something something love or pursuit or seeking after wisdom, with the goal or telos of such activity being an actual sage.  A sage is one who has attained wisdom, and so what is wisdom you might ask?  Ah, what is wisdom.  How do we know when we have found it if we do not yet possess it?  We could say numerous things about wisdom and hopefully identify fundamental features in common to those things to form a working definition of wisdom.  Okay, so I'll cheat and see what google says.  "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
synonyms: sagacity, intelligence, sense, common sense, shrewdness, astuteness, smartness, judiciousness, judgment, prudence, circumspection

So, like I hear about these wiseguys, you know, goodfellas?  Michael Corleone, did he possess these features?  He had to be pretty good at what he was doing to run an empire like that.  Keep your friends close and enemies closer, etc.  Or, how about when the "Meth Milf" Lydia Rodarte-Quayle from Breaking Bad discusses whether it would be, you know, wise to have Mike's good men bumped off.  That's not the wisdom the likes of Socrates, Plato and of course (duh) Aristotle spoke about, but it's something called wisdom by some, and we need to have strict guidelines for distinguishing fool's gold from the real.  And what if Corleone or the Meth Milf do possess some of the characteristics provided by the google algorithm?  Are those good characteristics to have no matter the context?  What about smartness, anyway?  Is that ever bad?  Can one be more clever than smart, more smart than wise?

Wisdom has a synonym in the ancient Greek, scientia or some form of systematized or organized knowing.  In this context it is unavoidable for me to recall a portion of historian-of-philosophy Will Durant's summary statement of Kant: "Science is organized knowledge; wisdom is organized life."  Wisdom is organized life, philosophy is the love of wisdom, therefore by ironclad deduction philosophy is love of organized life, QED, shows over, philosophy 1, non-philosophy zero.  (Plato proved this over 2,000 years ago and yet humanity has not taken to Plato in all this time.  Is it a communication problem?  Shit.)

Humans are distinguished from the animals by the faculty of intellect or reason, which enables thought and the ability to express them via language.  Intellect or reason itself is present enough in the activities of nearly all human beings (not in the category of the developmentally disabled, say) that it serves to organize experiences into a systematic-enough whole to get by to varying degrees of success in daily and often routine affairs.  But the light of independent thought and initiative and creativity is still in there, enough for legal (including criminal) responsibilities.  Some element of free will that accounts for about 30% of our life circumstances (the other 70% roughly evenly divided between genetics and environment/upbringing).

Moving on.  It is systematic approaches to reasoning in specialized areas of knowledge we tend to put under the heading of 'the sciences.'  But philosophy is something about organizing our thought processes at a higher level of sorts, of bringing together all our reasoning processes under a higher-order level of systematicity, enough so that it takes on the task of "organized living".  The pursuit of wisdom seems to be, in addition to anything else, the pursuit of better or organized living.  And this seems to happen via a process known as philosophy.

Time out for a moment.  The first google result for 'philosophy' is:

skin care, fragrance, perfume, bath and body, gifts, philosophy

https://www.philosophy.com/

philosophy | skin care | fragrance | bath & body | gifts philosophy.

Skin care explore advanced skin care products from philosophy. as ...

Bestsellers philosophy.

So philosophy as something to do with, like, beauty?  Are there objective teleological standards for beauty?  Is there an organized field of knowledge that deals with this subject?

Now, I have in mind something more like what appears on the right sidebar:

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Philosophy

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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Wikipedia

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So

So somehow there's a connection - I'm not entirely clear on it myself at this point - between "the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" and self-improvement! which is what Better Living Through Philosophy might very well best be marketed as?  Have you seen philosophy journal articles where "fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" are discussed?  A bunch of it almost goes right over my head especially if I'm not reading carefully.  Some of these things just don't interest me that much: I'm more interested in that field known as 'ethics' (link above) than I am in getting it exactly just right whether our conception of substance (this would be in the branch of metaphysics, mysteriously not linked above) is best understood in Aristotelian or Thomistic terms much less Leibnizian or Spinozist terms.  (Is there a difference between Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions, and even if there is one, are these the best two candidates to choose from, vis a vis the likes of Leibniz and Spinoza?  Yeah, I think they may be pretty good candidates.  But like I said, given only so much available time my own personal focus has been more squarely on the topic of ethics.  This is not at all to say that getting a fully systematized understanding of our ethical concepts won't rely on metaphysical ones.  But then they might also have to rely on aesthetic ones as well, and that seems like a rather under-served area in philosophy; only a few of the most canonized philosophers - little overlap with specialists who've made their name in aesthetics (Danto, say?) - delved into that subject matter.  What is there to say about whatever it is that aesthetics studies, anyway, and what relation does it have to better living / self-help?

So there's something about the activity of philosophy - which encompasses not just (science-like) knowing or wisdom accumulation but also the activity of putting whatever wisdom obtained so far to use in organizing or systematizing the art of living better, but also an activity distinctive to philosophy per se: thought.  It is, ultimately, the activity of thought that itself aspires toward a systematic unity or completeness or wholeness, and so atop the hierarchy of the human sciences is philosophy, basically a science of what it is to live functionally or well as a human being.

This is basically the essential idea of what I think "better living through philosophy" is aiming toward, the rest being application, examples, a treatise-length fleshing-out.

Now, let's say that there are better modes of doing philosophy itself than others.  There are plenty of great philosophers in history but what crucial features account for some philosophers being more influential than others?  (Why isn't a pessimist like Schopenhauer a lot more influential than someone who's more optimistic like Aristotle who believes humans - well, Athenian citizens at least - are in principle equipped for eudaimonia?  If pessimism is true, shouldn't it sell?  And why hasn't the full range of wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, at minimum, rubbed off on all school children all of 2,000 years later?  Communication barriers?  Really?  Surely I could get polemical about the "progressive"-run schools but I'll keep it clean here.  I'll just say that a truly progressive mindset gets you to Aristotelian wisdom-pursuit and I wish I were seeing a lot more of that explicitly and systematically instilled in schools.)

So there are better and worse ways of doing philosophy, let's assume.  We should then have some way of ordering the different approaches and styles and methods (METHODS!!!) according to their value (teleological ranking).  Through to their (methods') fruits ye shall know them.  Aristotle knew a ton of shit - founded biology as a science that was authoritative for 2,000 years until Darwin in the 1800s; systematized the science of logic to such an extent that (quoting historian of philosophy Anthony Kenny in Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition) "his work was subsumed, rather than superseded, by the developments of mathematical logic at the end of the nineteenth century by Frege and his contemporaries; developed a physical science that stood authoritative until the Renaissance, systematized philosophy itself with treatises on metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychology, aesthetics, philosophical procedures and methods.  Aristotle's work (not like this stuff shouldn't be known to everyone by now) exists now only in not-always-accessible, quasi-lecture-note format; he is reputed to have written dialogues that outshone (as gold to silver) those of his master Plato.  He was hailed almost unanimously among the medieval scholars who preserved and studied his work as the ultimate in human intelligence, the philosopher "par excellance," or simply The Philosopher according to the greatest of the medieval minds, Aquinas.  (This despite having numerous erroneous views and often in areas of less specifically philosophical consequence - he didn't think his principles of the good life or eudaimonia applied to slaves or women; numerous of his scientific theories have been superseded or overturned.)

It is my view that an 'Aristotelian' approach to doing philosophy is the best one, or at the very least a suitably strong candidate for one.  I place the likes of Aquinas, Ayn Rand, and Mortimer Adler within that tradition broadly speaking.  When it comes to the "fruits" of whatever his method was, it includes a crucial piece of insight: that the human good, to be most fully or perfectly actualized, requires philosophical contemplation, and a perfecting of one's intellectual activity itself (whether as an aesthetic principle - living to kalon or for the sake of the noble, fine or beautiful - or for the sake of better living overall qua the kind of life-form one is).  I characterize this as an intellectual perfectionism; Aristotle has been variously dubbed an "intellectualist" in his conception of (the fullest realization) of eudaimonia.  The philosophic or contemplative life, and generally the progressive development or perfection of one's intellectual faculty, are in this sense a central and fundamental feature of the good life, the feature that more than any others would best explain all the other facets of a good human life (physical, emotional, social, spiritual, aesthetic,...).  For the Aristotelian, eudaimonia is best or maximally achieved through the perfection of that 'best aspect within' our nature, our nous or intelligence, that a good human life is one led thoughtfully and intelligently, that this perfection of our rational natures is in some sense the same thing as living eudaimonically, as an activity of the rational soul.  (Are living wisely and eudaimonically the same thing?  Must one be a sage to be truly or fully eudaimonic?)

Now this distinctively Aristotelian (or more broadly, Greek) conception of the good life gives us a picture of the human good in terms of both the end and the means by which it is exercised (which are in some sense united and instantiated in rational activity, or: the human good is rational activity), which places it in interesting contrast to other ethical traditions which aren't so homed in on the rational element of our soul as the central defining potentiality to be actualized in a good human life.  (This subsumes even the 'Kantian' rational-willing characteristic of distinctively moral cognition.)  The Aristotelian ethical tradition is big on the concept of virtue (or excellence, arete in Greek): what makes for an excellent human being/life?  Something something the utmost excellence of the rational or intellectual faculty.  Now, the task of figuring out general principles for the best exercise of our rational faculty?  That's for epistemology, the science of knowing as such.  And if we exercise the proper epistemic discipline, the science of knowing becomes a unity with the science of living, with practical concerns.  To live best is (inter alia) to know best, i.e., the latter is a precondition for the former.  So what do the wiseguys, the made men, know exactly, anyway?

So something like philosophic activity itself is central to the Aristotelian conception of the good life.  How much is that notion seared in the consciousness front and center when we consider alternative philosophical schools, whatever extant candidates we might look into for philosophic guidance?

As to such profoundly significant identifications being the fruit of a method, in Aristotle's case it has to do with something called dialectic, or the art of playing opinions against one another to hopefully yield a truth agreeable to all despite their remaining well-scrutinized differences.  And even though Plato is noted for having made The Grand Original Contribution to the philosophical dialogue style via The Republic and other published works, it is dialectic as picked up and applied by Aristotle that may well yield the greatest fruit.  Among other fruits of dialectical method would be what, in the final comparison, differentiated Plato from Aristotle: Aristotle adopted both Plato's 'rationalist' framework for thinking about philosophic questions (homing in on eternal, unchanging Forms or Ideas supposedly grasped by the intellect with the sense experience only providing at best a hint in Their direction), and a thoroughly empirical or experience-based one.  Ideally the Aristotelian approach should be able to provide the very definitional or formal criteria for both living well and specifically philosophical activity, along with empirical examples of such in the real world.  (Shouldn't philosophy be practical and not a lot of idle word-play?)

Dialectic has something to do with taking into account all the essential factors that come to bear on forming an opinion on anything, and ideally applies not just to analyzing and resolving differences of opinion but also in mapping our opinions onto the world itself.  (It is a common sense or classical realist assumption that there is a real world out there independent of our knowing it and that our opinions can at least sometimes match up with or more systematically map onto what our senses provide us.)  And in his inquiries into the nature of existence and our place in it, Aristotle covered a bunch of ground, really thoroughly/completely/wholly/perfectionist-like.  I take him as an example to be emulated, each in our own way (we providing for the individuating features or manifestations of this formal principle of intellectual perfectionism), and perhaps not to be superseded or surpassed.  If we propose to have a superior or more perfect alternative model of thinking/knowing/living on offer, then aren't we just re-affirming a principle of intellectual perfectionism, to the effect that we should adopt the most superior model on offer?  So this becomes like an endpoint of the conversation about the norms of an ideal human society (also known as 'end of history' or perhaps 'utopia').

So as we progress through the stages of development we see that there is the potential for, if not actuality of, better living through philosophy, but then we see that there may be better ways of doing philosophy than others, in which case we should think in terms (eventually) of the best living through the best philosophy.  And getting 'em as young as possible probably wouldn't hurt to speed up the 'end of history' collaborative project, as long as they learn all about things like the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis and are not pumped full of philosophically-less-perfect material instead.

So this should give a taste of the gist of the 'better living through philosophy' Project that I've been consciously mulling these past 15 or so months, atop the previous context of thought already accumulated, and aided by some possibly-performance-enhancing substances.  (Substance. ^_^ )

Epistemic gaslighting from the American Left vs. Kavanaugh

One of the things I hope and intend to do with this blog is to absolutely destroy any pretense of intellectual credibility on the part of leftists - basically, anti-capitalists, 'democratic socialists,' pinkos, left-anarchists, those who are too idiotic (in their political-economic thought processes, they might be fine and loving people otherwise in their private lives) to recognize that the human intellect/mind/reason is the most valuable and powerful natural resource on the planet, it is an attribute of individuals, individuals have a no-brainer right over the sovereignty of their own minds and hence also its external products (property rights), that the mind/intellect is the primary/fundamental means of economic production, that entrepreneurial talent especially at the high end is richly rewarded on the free market by serving up value-added to customers, and that to stifle the mind or expropriate its products or otherwise place the life of the individual human being at the disposal of some collective entity - group, tribe, nation, state, demos, something other than the sovereign individual doing contractual exchange to mutual advantage with others - is to place some measure of ownership over the individual and therefore the mind by the collective, a thoroughly repugnant notion to anyone with some classic commonsense wisdom (something leftism sorely lacks).

But that's what it means to speak of a collective either seizing "the means of production" or placing some democratic veto over the lives of individuals - their time, their minds, their talents and energies, their external material products - who've done nothing to deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property -- the only rational criterion by which to determine whether the use of physical force against offenders against natural justice is justified.  What side are you on, good reader, that of peaceful mutually beneficial exchange, or that of economically and morally ignorant policies of various strains of leftism that view the inherently coercive features of the government or state as desirable means to otherwise commendable ends?  What is the point of political philosophy, anyway?  (Advanced students in this area will notice how Nozick's comprehensive approach in his libertarian treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia begins with that very question, realizing that objections from philosophical anarchists - those who deny that political authority is justified - first have to be overcome, and that is a rather significant burden in and of itself!)

One chief characteristic I've noticed about what I'll semi-loosely term the intellectual culture of leftism is not just the near-imbecilic had habits of thinking about the political (and unidimensionally values-wise, along the lines of "equality and fairness," about which liberal social researcher Jonathan Haidt has them nailed...), but the sorry record of (not) engaging with the strongest arguments/thinkers in the libertarian tradition, as distinct from some intellectually lazy strawman approach or otherwise dialectically-deficient response to some weaker version of the arguments presented by the likes of Rand, Mises, Nozick, Hayek and the rest.  "Rand doesn't care about the poor" is one such strawman wielded almost universally among leftists.  Anyone who's done his homework on Rand knows how idiotic a strawman it is.  (For Rand, moral character is primary, of course, and the moral characters of both heroes and villains in her novels ranged across all income/wealth levels.)

Leftists - nowadays calling themselves "progressives" - are really full of themselves, convinced they have superior intellectual and moral compasses, that these compasses get somehow more reliable the greater the proximity to a large coastal metropolis or university campus, that fairness and equality are the supreme moral criteria, that the political is a fundamentally important manifestation of ethical life, that the superiority of leftist over conservative or libertarian viewpoints is some kind of no-brainer instead of a close call at best, that the classical natural-law doctrine of subsidiarity - that as much as possible decisions be decentralized with the State being treated as a very last resort - can be flouted with near-impunity, that libertarians and conservatives who stress individual initiative, family, community, church, and other non-governmental institutions of civil society for promoting human well-being somehow lack compassion if they don't also seek to use the State's income tax code to redistribute property from the rich to the poor.  (Since when is the purpose of any justifiable political authority anything other than the security of individual rights over their lives and estates?  How does that mutate into the State becoming an agent of depriving individuals of their life, liberty, or property or portions thereof?)

The point I'm getting to is that I believe the political left of today in America to be intellectually bankrupt.  I find the op-ed pages of the New York Times almost vapid compared to what can be found in the Wall Street Journal.  For decades on end beginning in the late 1800s and going into the late 1900s socialism (in its original sense - collective ownership of "the means of production," most purely implemented by Mao Tse-Tung ca. 1960 with the resulting loss of human life counted in the tens of millions) was the Opiate of the Intellectuals, all the rage among university faculty in the humanities and social sciences (especially the social sciences, and especially the social sciences below the top social science in terms of various measures of academic aptitude: economics), even though the idea was thoroughly debunked by Mises in the 1920s just in terms of the logistics of political economy.  The basic moral principle involved - the individual's life is at the disposal of the collective - was debunked thoroughly by Rand in Atlas Shrugged (1957) and in subsequent writings throughout the following decade, and debunked again by Nozick in the '70s.

Leftists today scream about "racism" all the time these days.  They do it not just as a form of linguistic revisionism - now, racism can only happen on the part of a 'powerful' group against an oppressed or subordinated group - but they also throw the term around a lot.  Lost in the midst of all that is the exhortation by MLK and any philosopher of good sense to judge individuals by the content of their character, first and foremost.  Instead that stuff is left by the wayside as identitarian grievances are spilled ever more loudly.  Somehow America is getting more racist even in 2018, or something?  Just because the orange man is now the star of the reality-tv drama known as American Politics?  You've gotta be fucking kidding me.  But what really gets me going about the left and racism is that there are black scholars like Thomas Sowell who bring their own 'minority experience' (what's the minority in the realm of character? the individual I guess) to bear on explaining how a conservative-libertarian political economy complete with "bourgeois values" rooted in established wisdom is definitely superior to the leftist redistribute-the-wealth-through-force ethos.  Leftists and "progressives" have their heads so far up their asses as to believe that there isn't a serious challenge to their already-narrowly-political worldview to be found in Sowell.  Is there a sustained response to Sowell coming from the left?  I haven't seen it.  The left seems to basically otherize or even "ghost" or even deny the existence of black conservatives or libertarians, based on how they conduct their discussion (everything is racism whereas the ghosted conservatives/libertarians stress family units and individual responsibility and school choice).

I could go on in much greater detail with shitloads of examples.  But now I want to get to a recent example that bears its intellectual and ethical bankruptcy on its face: the tactics employed by vast swathes of the American Left - honorable exceptions such as Prof. Dershowitz duly noted - to smear and try to derail the candidacy of Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  I want to stress that "the American Left" is not limited to political hacks working within the cynical confines of D.C. politics and party/partisan activism, but that there's an entire nexus of lefty intellectual culture including academia, the public sector itself, the publishing industry (books, journals, periodicals), much of the judiciary, entertainment and the arts.  There's a counterpart nexus on the American Right (lots more churchgoers there, a lot more private-sector actors, Fox New, etc.).  The cable news channels of the 'American Progressive/Democrat Left' - CNN and MSNBC - deliver in the end a filtered-through-the-nexus distillation of opinion and prioritized information coverage representative of the mainstream American-Left mindset.  Democrat Party operatives serve as mouthpieces of this nexus inasmuch as the rest of the nexus-contributors don't push back or veto the talking points.  Consider that there are two basic sides or coalitions in this context, two main "teams" to choose from to express one's basic political values: the "progressive" wing of American thought vs. the GOP "big tent" of ideas.

And what came from the "progressive" side of things in the Kavanaugh confirmation process was not good, not good at all.

Hopefully readers of this blog had already paid enough attention to see just what had gone down during that process, but I want to give an essentialized rundown.  For the first six or so weeks of the confirmation process, the Democrats used a number of their usual "jurisprudence" arguments combined with some usual political scare tactics, not all that different a strategic approach than you'd get from Republicans with the nomination process tables turned and Democrat nominees on the hot seat.

By the end of those six weeks it was evident that Kavanaugh's stellar judicial record and answers to the confirming committee were green-lighting him for confirmation by the full Senate.  And that's when Democrats at the last minute sprung on the American people allegations against Kavanaugh that they had been sitting on for those six weeks in the case that all the other usual nominee-discrediting attempts failed.

This allegation came from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, that at a high-school-days party in 1982 Kavanaugh and a friend had pinned her on a bed and covered her mouth before she was able to escape.  She names a witness, her friend, Leland Keyser.  She can't recall many specifics that would narrow down where and when such a party took place.  What's more, and crucial to all this, is that Keyser provides testimony that she does not recall any such party taking place with both Ford and Kavanaugh present.

In other words, Ford both remembers (sic) being at a party with Kavanaugh, and remembers (sic) Keyser being there as well, and cannot provide many other details that could be corroborated by any witnesses.  There are false accusations, they happen sometimes.  There could be true accusations that at the same time are not supported by corroborating evidence.  These are basic epistemic considerations that must be taken into account in order to do something like assess guilt or innocence, or credibility if we use a standard less than beyond-a-reasonable-doubt, such as preponderance-of-evidence.  If Ford remembers being at a party with both Kavanaugh and Keyser and yet no other testimony or evidence substantiates this, then we have a rather shaky case evidentially.  Epistemic discipline would require withholding judgment without solid evidence, or passing the judgment on the state of the evidence itself: it's insufficient to compel reasonable belief.

But that's not how the Democrats spun it.  Most notably, two Democrat Senators in particular from uncompetitive leftist/Blue states where accountability is that much lessened - Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) came to the microphones to declare: "Not only do these women need to be heard, they need to be believed," (Hirono) and "I believe Dr. Blasey Ford because she's telling the truth." (Gillibrand)  This was before we heard anything from the defense, mind you.  Hirono is invoking the ethics of belief here?  The Democrats and CNN and MSNBC let this epistemic gaslighting of the American public proceed without objection, making them accomplices.  They enable and encourage protestors to chant "We Believe Survivors" to Sen. Cruz (R-TX) at a restaurant.  (They're just following the advice of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to "form a crowd" to chant truth to Republican power.  Meanwhile, is it just me or are conservatives morally decent enough not to even so much as bring up the idea of turning Waters' repugnant and imbecilic advice against her?  I mean, why not form a slogan-yelling crowd around Waters at a restaurant, if that's what productive political discourse supposedly involves?)

They encouraged some women to confront Soft Touch, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), in a Senate elevator, demanding loudly and emotionally that he support the FBI looking further into this evidentially shaky story.  I assume that Sen. Graham (whose sentiments I share pretty much exactly) wasn't going to have any of that.  In his own trademark rude and crude way, the orange man said what intimidated-by-PC-police folks wouldn't or couldn't, and a reminder of why so many people prefer him to the clown car on the other side (not the least among whom is the worst loser ever, Crooked Hillary Clinton, who reminds us all of why she lost every time she opens her smug yap).

The Democrat clown-car riders said that Dr. Ford's accusations are "credible."  In the #MeToo era, all accusers are victims to be believed.  They didn't learn a thing from the Duke Lacrosse Team fiasco.  What standard of credibility are they using, anyway?  Why believe Dr. Ford's accusations but not the Julie Swetnick spiked-punch serial-gang-rape allegations?

Two thirds of NY voters just returned the malicious imbecile Gillibrand to the Senate, and other "progressive" NY voters just sent an Obama-endorsed ignoramus to the House.  And they wonder how they could lose key battleground states (FL, MI, OH, PA, WI) to the orange man?

Beating up on the left is verbal gold; to be continued....

Resuming blog, even though weed ain't legal nationwide yet

(but it will be, ohhhh it will be, and it'll be great. ^_^ )

I went 'on strike' from blogging on 4/20/2013, stating 'no-brainer' conditions for returning such as: national weed legalization, marriage equality (this one has come to pass), and various other, more grandiose-seeming no-brainers (such as essentially libertarianism/laissez-faire in political philosophy along the lines of a cluster of thinkers past and present including Rand, Nozick, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Milton and David Friedman, Locke, Spencer, Mack, Den Uyl and Rassmussen, Sciabarra, the list of libertarian dialectical grandmasters could go on and on and on...) that'll truly take a while if I don't have anything to say about it.

Implementing something along the lines of an Aristotelian-Thomistic-Randian synthesis is also most likely a no-brainer, as well; see my book for that, over there on the top right column.  (How does Hegel fit into this?)

Anyway, in good cheer I am resuming this blog for the time being, even though no-brainer weed legalization ain't happened yet, just to kind of get a feel of what might happen next.  I've been hanging on every word of my trains of thought lately, and figured why not let some with-it readers get a look in as well.  I guess I'll start with some really fun polemics against what has become a favorite whipping boy of mine, political leftism. ^_^

Why Trump is probably the less-worse choice

[Nov. 6 addendum below]

From all that I've been able to tell, it boils down to a few basic points, and I will provide a tally of points won as we proceed:

1. Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information, something she has not owned up to in any clear-cut way.  Others similarly situated have faced legal of not career penalties.  What might the Founding Fathers think of a president who was this careless with classified material being promoted to the presidency?
Trump +1

2. SCOTUS nominations.  Ideologues of the left and right might love to see a Court weighted all in one direction.  I've found that as things tend to go in the real world, a mix of right and left on the Court is about the best we can hope for given the kinds of decisions that judges on either side tend to reach.  Or at least I think that's how many swing voters look at this as well.  Under a Clinton presidency, the aging justices - two liberals, one swing vote - are more likely to retire to be replaced by a liberal judge than they would be under a Trump presidency.  The unknown is which of them might die and when.  As it is, the liberals have a 4-3 advantage on the court which would go to 5-3 if the next president is a Democrat.  One factor that is a bit less clear-cut is how significant in the end SCOTUS decisions are, long-run, if they tend to reflect what's already a mainstream trend during their era.  But all else being equal these days, I think balance is preferable to weighting to one side or other. Half a point for Trump.
Trump +1.5

3. General life wisdom/character.  I'll say right off that this comparison doesn't come off well in Clinton's favor, i.e., by the best objective analysis she doesn't gain any grounds/points on Trump in this comparison.  I think one would have to be a rather intellectually bankrupt (or at least corrupt if not bankrupt) partisan to think the edge is clearly in favor of the one or the other.  But in somewhat more subtle ways I think the edge may go to Trump here.  The main legitimate criticism of Trump temperament-wise is that he's "rude and crude," at least by the standards of career politicians who've spent a lot of time finessing their messages to avoid giving gratuitous offense to this or that constituency.  The Democrats seem to have a(n otherwise reasonable) litmus test they're applying to Trump: Do Muslims have a place in Trump's American?  If Trump were to improve in the area of messaging, being less "rude and crude" in that regard, he would of course explain how specifically law-abiding America-loving Muslims would of course have a place in his America.  It is crudeness of political messaging and perhaps general speaking style in some respects (is being blunt being the same as being crude? Trump is I think more often blunt than crude.) that is the simpler and better explanation for his racially- and ethnically-insensitive remarks, than would be racism or ethnocentrism on his part.  I think the Democratic Left has been conditioned over many years of egging-on by various Left-Wing entities (e.g., academia, politicians) to "spot" racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, a lot more hastily - i.e., carelessly - than is warranted.  "That's racist!" seems to have come to be a reflexive retort on the part of "progressives" as code-word for not buying into the "progressive" narrative on race, gender, ethnicity, etc.  That's intellectually lazy and counterproductive, and is often used as cover for PC/SJW agendas gone overboard that wouldn't otherwise be so loudly opposed.  That's the reason that the KKK endorses Trump over Clinton; otherwise, Clinton is simply playing guilt-by-association here, and that's hard to construe as honest on her part.  Likewise hard to construe as honest comment by her is her claim that Trump "demeans women" and "calls women disgusting pigs" when he's on record for having called one woman a disgusting pig.  Why does Clinton abuse the language so when she ought to know better?  Furthermore, it appears that Trump has been an equal-opportunity insulter, demeaner, etc., regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, etc., so there's just no clear-cut gender or race card to be played here.  His (crude) remarks about grabbing women's "pussies" has not been shown objectively to be anything more than locker-room talk.  That a dozen or so women who had truly been assaulted by Trump all waited to come out about that only after a tape emerged (thereby naturally generating all kinds of psychological suggestions and opportunistic motives), defies all belief.  That the Democrats jumped all over these accusations as credible from the get-go - this includes Clinton and her campaign surrogates - is amazing in its own right just considering their history of smearing or downplaying accusations (that didn't all emerge at once just as a shining opportunity arose) against the male President Clinton.

As for the Clintons' character/wisdom, the wikileaks saga exposes plenty.  They are consummate Washington insiders with their network of pull- and power-brokers and schmoozers.  They epitomize that Washington, D.C. gravy train that a President Trump more credibly threatens than any presidential candidate in recent memory.  (Obama blew his credibility on this after having pledged in '08 to change the culture of Washington.)  I won't get into psychological speculations, but the inference to best explanation tells me that the Clintons seem to regard themselves as specially talented at tackling the world's problems (presupposing that their "progressive" mentality is also specially suited to that mission), and if that means having to play that very cynical Establishment game, and bend the rules as much in their favor as they can get away with, then they believe that a Greater Good which they are eminently qualified to serve justifies all that.  It sounds pretty Machiavellian and the people seem to be well aware of this cynical trade-off mentality; the questions now are whether the Clintons are open and transparent with the American people about that cynical trade-off going on (all indications are that they are not), and whether the American people are fed up with that corrupted cynical culture of D.C. enough to send Trump to take that machine on.

Trump has a great family and raised great children.  Even Clinton acknowledged this in the second debate when asked to name a good quality about her opponent.  (Isn't she the nation's foremost political expert on children's issues?  What opening did she leave for Trump with that one?)  He has said some rude and crude thing involving women, but one thing I had deeply ingrained into me over the Obama years is to pay attention to what a political figure does, not to what he or she says.  On the "women front," Trump has hired Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager, and things have been going better for his campaign than before this move.  He is reputed to have many women highly placed in his business ventures.  On the African-American front, he is glad to have Dr. Ben Carson as a chief surrogate.  On the Muslim front, Trump comes off more as ignorant than as mean-spirited; if he learns more about Muslim issues he and the country could make some progress.

Trump has said a number of things that are rather off-the-wall, things that often fail the Politifact test.  An important question here is whether he says these things to deliberately deceive (an ethical and moral failing) or if he merely has a penchant for playing fast and loose with the facts, i.e., an epistemic (intellectual) failing?  Either would be troubling.  To be a liar requires that one know the difference between true and false and to publicly affirm the false; to be a fool would not to know the difference in the first place.  I don't seriously question Trump's ethical motivations the way I do Clinton's, but I do somewhat seriously question his epistemic character.  Perhaps it's crudeness of political character requiring a lot of further development, finesse, honing.  Poor epistemic character in general would not so easily go with his success in non-political areas of his life.  One last example on the crudity of Trump's political messaging: In the last debate (which, due to Chris Wallace's masterful moderation sensibility, objectively nullifies the noticeably weaker Trump performances in the first two debates being egged-on as he was by "media-liberal" moderators), he was asked whether he would accept the outcome of the election, and - again, not having had the chance like Clinton has to finesse his messaging for decades on end - he said that we would have to wait and see.  This caused all the uproar in the "liberal media" and elsewhere, when anyone with a lick of common sense could see that were at least the question phrased a little differently - "If the process were fair and not corrupted/rigged, would you accept the outcome" - then every indication I have seen is that Trump would have answered in the affirmative.  But what do I know.

So far - and I've gone to some lengths as it is just to make the point - I don't see anything here that points to Clinton as being of wiser character on the whole than Trump, and if anything there are factors that would favor Trump.  I was about to award a quarter point to Trump on this one, but then comments earlier in the election season about Carly Fiorina's looks: I just can't get that out of my mind.  He is a bit of a 'lookist' pig, isn't he?  Playing it safe I award neither candidate points here.
Trump +1.5

(At this point it becomes more and more difficult to imagine how Clinton makes up this ground.  But, just to be thorough....)

4. Domain-specific expertise.  Here we are looking at expertise at doing a job like the Presidency.  Trump for instance could invoke his chief-executive expertise from his business experience as one reason - all else being equal - to think he has the chops to do the job.  One thing where Clinton has a clear advantage over Trump is in the rather general category of what I'll call "public policy knowledge."  This is to be expected, given her many more years in the public sector and political life.  She has a finessed and nuanced understanding of just about all the issues in public policy, even if not a grasp of the best solutions for those issues (which I will get to in a moment).  I don't think anyone questions this about her.  She does appear indeed to be a leading expert on the national political scene on children's issues.  (Again, how much of an opening did she leave for Trump if she concedes that he raised high-quality children thereby setting a high-quality example?)  By contrast what Trump lacks in this area he makes up for to a considerable extent in an "American can-do attitude," deal-making ability, high energy and charisma, and force of personality.  He would need to rely on a lot of advice from experts in his administration, even if he does set a general tone/agenda about what goals he wants to accomplish and with what standards of excellence he wants to apply.  Does "Under budget and ahead of schedule" sound like a plausible general policy tone coming from Trump?  It sure would have quite an impact on the gravy-train mentality in Washington, I would think.

In the domain-specific expertise arena, a basic political philosophy or ideology necessarily comes into play.  On this I cannot personally credit Ms. Clinton or award her points on the basis of her ideology being a "progressive" one.  I am not a progressive myself; based on my own extensive research into political philosophy and political economy, I would fall squarely into the category of a laissez-faire individualist or libertarian.  Ms. Clinton represents the Democratic Party mindset.  That mindset is very public-sector oriented.  Of the two major parties, the Democrats are more the party of the public sector than the Republicans, and quite clearly so.  (Just ask those in the public sector unions, after all.)  This is not to make a value judgment; it's just a description of the nature of the major parties.  The public-sector and Big Labor interests want to see to it that the influence of corporations or other large private-sector entities is fairly balanced against the interests of labor, the more vulnerable, etc.  At least that is their intentions.  I don't question the intentions of the "progressive" movement on matters of public policy.  I do quite severely question the results.  For example, Ms. Clinton's party declared a "War on Poverty" 50 years ago; they built a sizable civil service staffed by and large by like-minded public-sector Democrats, implemented in concert with mostly Democratic big-city administrations and public schools run almost overwhelmingly by Democrats.  The result, on the other hand, has been disappointing just on its face: the U.S. poverty rate is not much changed from 50 years ago.  The Democrats' version of accountability on this has usually been to shift blame or to massage the numbers so as not to look so disappointing.  What they don't seem to address much, is the epidemic in poorer and minority communities of single-parent families.  (Would the nation's leading political expert on children's issues like to weigh in on that, at some point?)  What the Democratic Party in general doesn't seem to address much is a principle that is likely more integral to the founding doctrines of this country than any other: individual freedom.  I cannot name the last time I heard a Democrat praise the virtues of individual freedom.  They have been more in the business of drawing a contrast between their general moral and economic vision and those of Republicans, and their vision involves bigger government, more wealth redistribution, and so on.  I am far from convinced - indeed, the evidence I've encountered appears to go the other way - that progressives, Democrats, those on the Left, including those in the academy, have done a decently thorough job of exploring the greater-individual-freedom alternative.  (Can they provide clear and convincing counter-arguments to the combinations of moral and economic insights provided by such laissez-faire thinkers as Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Nozick, just for starters?  Did these thinkers somehow fall short themselves of doing a decently thorough job of exploring the non-laissez-faire alternatives?  The evidence I've seen points just the other way.)

Ms. Clinton would imprudently shift the balance of the court left-ward, a point already mentioned but it is part of the "domain-specific expertise" package.  Also included in that package is Ms. Clinton's self-undermining assertions to expertise based on her experience at the State Dept. - self-undermining for how she blatantly mishandled classified material.

Trump has no policy record to go on.  He has no experience in elected office.  These are not things we can go on to assess his domain-specific expertise.  We can look at how he has formulated policy proposals for some amount of insight in that regard.  Earlier on in the campaign season, he was floating ideas such as "take out the terrorists' families" or "bring back waterboarding and a whole lot worse" (or perhaps even more embarrassing, the idea of punishing women who obtain abortions along with punishing the doctors).  Or, indeed, the blanket "ban on Muslim immigration."  In recent months he appears to have done less in the way of floating toxic policy prescriptions, and one should probably credit Kellyanne Conway for that.

I say the expertise issue is close to a wash all things considered, although I do recognize that the crucial swing voters in this election might not share my ideological enthusiasm for laissez-faire policy over Clinton-style policy.  Trump-style policy doesn't seem to be considerably more laissez-faire then hers, nor do I see such policies being on offer by the major parties all that soon.  What voters are looking for is the best person for facing and managing the nation's problems as they exist now.  But does Trump pay more attention and respect to the importance of individual freedom than Clinton does?  I think so.  I'm not saying that he has a well-developed political philosophy to speak of, over and above a patriotic "Americanism" and the sorts of common-sense values that made America great (at the forefront of which is individual freedom).  I am saying that by virtue of not having a deep-seated ideological doctrine he at least doesn't offer the unpalatable (for me) one that Clinton does.  On the other hand, he also has spoken about going a more protectionist route with respect to Chinese imports.  All I know is, Trump wants to have a "winning" attitude and temperament, but protectionism is for losers and chokers.

In terms of specifically-political managerial competence and expertise, my "gut" tells me Clinton, but my rational part tells me that Clinton blatantly screwed up in her handling of classified material, and her ideology favors expansive government over expanded individual freedom.  And her shady and cynical behavior as part of the Clinton Political Machine is somewhat difficult to extricate from questions of her political expertise.

How is one supposed to award points either way on this question?

This means that Trump remains up 1.5 points on Clinton based on the above analyses.

Is there some other major point in addition to these others that it all boils down to, something that might swing the assessment toward Clinton?  I think I have raised a good number of the most important ones that are on the minds of voters, especially the swing voters, and I can't really think of some point that Clinton would make up major ground on.

I'm not a big fan of Trump.  I'm turned off by his crudeness, although he appears willing and able to learn.  My focus here is on a comparison of these two flawed candidates on the basis of the balance of their strengths and weaknesses/shortcomings.  I think the GOP could have put up a better candidate on the whole and such a candidate would have beaten out Clinton by better than 1.5 points.  This is to say that despite all the hype from Democrats (whose penchant for larger government doesn't in any way indicate a superior moral or intellectual compass), about Clinton being the runaway enlightened choice, doesn't hold up under tough and fair scrutiny.

Perhaps Clinton would have some kind of advantage in having a former President as a key informal adviser.  How much of an advantage one thinks this might be, is likely related to how much of a fan of the Clintons and the Clinton Machine, and of Democratic-progressive ideology, one is.

I would also point out how the candidates have been faring down the home stretch of the campaign.  Clinton has studiously avoided serious contact with media for months, while Trump has not.  Trump has greater stamina, does more events, wants it more, has more heart, and Clinton has been trying to run out the clock just as wikileaks and other scandals mount.  Clinton has grown increasingly rhetorically deceptive in characterizing Trump as anti-woman, anti-minority, etc.  I don't find that to be dignified or stateswoman-like.  Clinton seems to think that her paint-by-numbers political career combined with purportedly superior ideology and moral compass entitles her to the position.  She's somewhat complacent in a number of areas, and I don't respect or relate to that mindset.  I think Democrats' fears about Trump are overblown or misplaced, their explanations for this or that Trump behavior being beaten out by better, simpler, less frantically partisan ones.  They raise the fear of Trump, a "rude and crude" guy, having the nuclear codes.  That's their last trump card so to speak.  Why should we be particularly concerned in his case, based on our most objective assessment?  Is he going to start a nuclear war?  Putin and Kim Jung Un have nuclear codes, but haven't started nuclear wars.  Is the fear that throwing Trump into the mix could easily increase the chances?  That he's too easily provoked?  I do see him being rather easily provoked into saying things (in a not-politically-finessed way) in response to insult or attack, but I'm more interested in what he would be provoked into doing, and I don't think Democrats know any more than anyone else does on that count.  That we might not really know much in Trump's case is itself concerning.  On the other hand, we do know for a fact that Clinton blatantly mishandled classified materials, exposing (via her unsecured server) national secrets to some 5 to 7 hostile actors.  Should we trust this individual with the nuclear codes?

Partisans for either candidate tend to focus on a "worst-case scenario" involving the opposing candidate and a "best-case scenario" involving their own.  I don't anticipate either of these in either candidate's case, nor do I play such biased games generally, so the best/worst-case scenario doesn't sway my view here either way.  I do enjoy showing how a lot of these biased/partisan arguments tend to be self-defeating, e.g., with the "nuclear codes" card that the Democrats have been playing.

In closing, I don't claim to have covered all essential bases, or to have tied up all loose strands.  I doubt that doing so would sway my tentative preference (which allows for some "margin of error") in a significant way.  In any case, these sorts of things still stick in my mind: Trump's suggestion that a judge of Mexican heritage might not be objective in Trump's court cases; Hillary's statement in one of her highly-paid speeches that she could be of two minds - one public, one private - on any given issue presented before the American people; Trump up at 3am tweeting about accuser Alicia Machado and his more general pattern of attacking the source of criticism rather than the focusing on the criticism on its merits; the real levels of uncertainty about how Trump would govern; Clinton facing a mostly hostile Congress that would impede her "progressive" agenda; the general and more long-term state of the U.S. polity that led to this unappealing presidential choice (and for which the best medicine generally speaking is: philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, very preferably Aristotelian philosophy, that is, philosophy done best - but that is a topic left to another occasion).

[Addendum Nov. 6: In the interests of dialectical completeness: someone kindly notified me of this discussion between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan.  Now, as bad as these two are at criticizing Ayn Rand's ideas, they - mainly Sullivan - make points that have made me reconsider, points the quality of which far exceed most of what I've been seeing from pundits and others during this election cycle - itself a distressing sign (either about my inability to find all the best arguments - the time constraints involved notwithstanding - or about the quality of the dialogue, or both...?).  I do note, however, that "email scandal" was mentioned only once, in passing, during that entire talk. I think the 110 classified emails HRC routed through her private server is a big deal, certainly a bigger deal than Dem/HRC supporters have acknowledged - and they're certainly drinking a lot of Kool-Aid if they believe that an election victory over that other guy represents some kind of mandate for a Dem agenda. Anyway, yesterday I was leaning in the direction of marking the Trump oval on my ballot but now I'm probably going to leave the whole damn presidential section of the ballot unmarked. Sullivan is correct that electing Trump would be imprudent. The (less-imprudent but still deplorable) alternative is a lady who put her personal political ambitions above national security, which is certainly a good reason to reject any talk of a HRC/Dem mandate.]