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....
