Might as well continue in drill sergeant mode for this one. (And why not? I find that I rather like writing in drill sergeant mode, for "mysterious" reasons I'll let you use your own fucking noggin to figure out.)
So, I learn about David Wallace-Wells's book, The Unhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (hereafter TUE), after reading Andrew Sullivan's seemingly well-reasoned piece on the toxic-as-fuck radical trans ideology madness. (I say seemingly, because past experience has made me skeptical about Sullivan; his reckless idiocy about Rand stands out too far, and his verbal fellating of Obama in '08 didn't quite pan out in any sort of transformative presidency.) (I have a fresh draft still in the queue about the latest ultra-toxic trans ideology madness, quite possibly the gravity well that ends up sucking in the entire political left in its already-near-batshit-crazy current form; long story short, if the left's goal is to get Trump re-elected, then embracing the madness as the Democrats appear poised to do might be a wonderful idea. It'll help things along nicely if leftists (continue to) foam at the mouth and basically lie that Trumpism is fascism.) Sullivan's comments on TUE appear at the link below the trans-madness piece. His views echo those of the great majority of goodreads reviewers: it paints a picture of a future that is nothing short of frightening.
I have no expertise on the subject of climate change. Whenever I hear about the latest in climate alarmism I am reminded of Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb from half a century ago; suffice it to say that its alarmist predictions did not come to pass. He lost that resource-scarcity bet with Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource, HINT HINT). But my well-developed (I think) "ring of truth" detector says that the climate change problem is for real, based on a comprehensive body of data which is best explained by man-made CO2 emissions. The observed increase in temperatures appears to be happening at a pace well out of the usual range for such things over geologic time. (Anyway, what do we do if we're still around when that Yellowstone supervolcano blows? I don't know shit.) My "ring of truth" detector also tells me that the American Right in particular has been epistemically reckless about this subject. It's not just that the very stable genius Trump might somehow happen to be right that "climate change is a hoax" (etc.), but rather it's his dogmatic, unaccountable and therefore credibility-shitting way of speaking on the subject, the fucking dickhead. If he has some kind of argument, I haven't seen it. The piece of shit. Speaking of that Ehrlich-Simon bet, Trump should put some of that money where his big loud mouth is and place a bet on climate change outcomes. Also, the fat scumbag could stand to lose some weight.
The wikipedia page for TUE indicates a reception that's more mixed - as in, less ready than the goodreads reviewers to buy into Wallace-Wells' alarmism.
But I'm here to address issues surrounding the climate change debate - e.g., the nature of the debate itself. I'm also addressing it as someone who regularly beats the drum for philosophical education as a comprehensive means of solving a vast range of human problems/challenges; the aim is to facilitate better living by making humans better problem-solvers. And I have certain recommendations for living that make abundant sense in their own right, regardless of whether the lifestyle changes involved are necessary to combat climate change.
First off, the likes of Naomi Klein bring their own (leftist) baggage to this issue. The left has hated capitalism well before climate change ever became a major concern. All the shitty arguments these disgusting creatures made against capitalism has destroyed their credibility. The overall credibility of the left today is in shambles. Just as they are the boy who cried racism, they are the boy who cry that capitalism is inhumane and unjust, and they also happen to be the boy who's been crying climate catastrophe. This is to say that the more we can leave discreditable and toxic leftist politics out of this, the better, and we'd better look for the most credible people we can find who are not affiliated with the political left (especially the far left). AOC's credibility is in that toilet she claims the migrants were told to drink from. Flush her and her ilk down so that we can get serious.
(Besides, anyone who knows about libertarianism/capitalism in steelmanned version knows that there is no such thing in such a version as a right to impose negative externalities. Private property rights so constrained are consistent with ecological health. So this is consistent with stiff penalties for the sorts of lifestyle decisions I prescribe against below. [An issue I am no expert on is how the legal system rationally goes about relying on science to estimate the extent of externalities damages.])
Nuclear energy strikes me as a serious measure to reduce carbon footprint. I don't know if the nuke facilities can be made redundant in their security measures well enough to avoid Fukashima-like fuck-ups.
But the real solutions lies in basic lifestyle changes (and these are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give the general flavor/mindset):
Don't have kids. You don't need them. (Not as a pressing need, anyhow. [Edit: Okay, so it's context-dependent, I guess; context-dependent needs...? I shall think through this more thoroughly, I might be wrong, maybe have fewer kids, etc....] Existing humans are in abundance and a great many of those could use some Aristotelian-eudaimonic social capital to help get their acts together. How about prioritizing things in that direction if legacy-traces is the motivation here.) Easy way to reduce your carbon footprint. Your biology has programmed and perhaps fooled you into thinking it is an imperative within the framework of a reflective sapient creature's meaning-fulfillment. Wake the fuck up. Chances are non-zero that having kids these days will consign them to that uninhabitable-earth scenario. Don't be a fucking moron.
Stop eating so fucking much, you fat fucking pigs, especially you sedentary and slovenly American pigs.
You don't need that big car, and the big house, with that big yard that you wastefully water and manicture. Instead of spending all your time and money on that shit, buy some books and read some more. E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful may not be a bad choice.
Unplug from your devices and screen-time once in a goddamn while at least. (If you must have screen time, why not use it to be a film buff, and fucking listen and learn any and all necessary film references/quotes.) You are dopamine addicts seeking your next momentary fix, you fucking pathetic pieces of shit. Shut 'em off cold turkey if you have to, go outside and exercise (which will require energy but then again your not having kids should offset problems there). Get off your twitter feed, stop caring about getting the "likes." Nobody was ever great by virtue of being liked. No monument has been erected to honor a critic.
Make wisdom and its pursuit the centerpiece of your existence. Learn to learn better. If you're going to be online (2 hrs a day is about the healthy limit), seek out and read philosophy blogs rather than the latest twitter turd-pile. Seek out opposing opinions as much as you can and try to prove your own ones wrong if they haven't been established by exhaustive research. (Have I established by exhaustive research that wisdom(-pursuit) is a really wise idea? Am I reasoning in a vicious circle, or a virtuous one? Is any attempt to refute wisdom-pursuit self-defeating? You tell me, genius; I don't know fuck-all.) You're not entitled to your opinion qua opinion, you entitlement-mentality lazy little shit. Get obsessed with wisdom and character because that's really all that matters, and not all those material consumables. The more wise you are, the better you can meet your ultimate fate (natural death, car crash, inevitable ecosystem collapse, tech-based immortality, whatever it turns out to be).
Learn some aesthetic appreciation if you haven't yet. That'll tune you in better to the beauty of nature and cause you to respect it more. Stop subsidizing factory farming with your thoughtless, inhumane cakehole-stuffing. You'll also develop an appreciation for having an aesthetically pleasing figure rather than that tub of lard you're probably dragging around.
If you're having trouble finding guidance, ask yourself what Aristotle, Jesus, Einstein, Ghandi, MLK, the Buddha might do. Even if you know next to jackshit about these figures, certain shall we say archetypical behaviors and attitudes may pop into mind. Then adapt for your own personality and circumstances as necessary, since in fact only Aristotle is (was) eligible to do what Aristotle would do. What if you draw inspiration from both Aristotle and Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the senior drill instructor (and/or the Snake Diet Wizard, the Fat Shaming King)? Then incorporate both inspirations into your act. Don't stop there. Dialectically synthesize the fuck out of all your positive influences and add your own unique touch, for shit's sake.
When in doubt, try being kind instead of being an asshole. Try not going out of your way to misconstrue someone's statements on the internet, as insecure strawman-mongering pieces of shit do. If you do have to be an "asshole," have a good reason, like motivating some weak-ass limp-dick fools into becoming the versions of themselves they can and should be.
Become more acutely aware that human flourishing is a social activity involving a congeniality of diverse and complementary excellences, and act accordingly. Strive for excellence and nobility and encourage it in others (which is part of striving for excellence and nobility).
===
Is it really hard to believe that if humanity adopts the spirit of these recommendations/guidelines that problem-solving abilities can and will go through the roof? I mean, after all, how much is the problem-solving potential of AI constrained by the quality of those AI is meant to assist?
Here I'm trying to finally get around to delving into Hurley's Natural Reasons (written at the age of 35 by someone with clearly more raw talent than I possess) presumably in preparation for my own treatise, and I keep getting distracted by this other shit? Goddammit!
[Possibly in the queue if/when priorities permit: tying together common strands in Ayn Rand and The Big Lebowski. I am quite possibly the only person on the planet who is very well-versed in both, which should make for some kind of potent combination that manifests itself somewhere/somehow if one makes the effort to look around. They both have had the word "cult" attached to them in some way or other. Let's just say I'm an enthusiast for both, and Rand-bashers are a bunch of fucking amateurs; the dipshits don't have the goods they represent themselves as having. They are high in the running for intellectually laziest worldwide. Their weakness is vanity. Rand went out, overcame obstacles, and achieved while they're just looking for a credibility-handout, pretending that it was she who micturated upon their own credibility. Leftist losers, indeed. I can't solve their problems, only they can. As for Rand herself: wonderful woman, I'm all very fond of her. But as some wiser fella than myself once said, . . . aw hell, I've lost my train of thought here.]
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Re: those always-crying-racism leftist losers
The image above says a bunch but here's another image that also comes to mind:
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| There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers; here you are all equally worthless! |
America needs to get rid of its racism, structural and otherwise, but more than that the American left in need of getting its philosophical act together. And that is why I intend to trigger these fucking losers as much as needed to get the point across. They are in desperate need of the boot-camp treatment because as disappointing, dysfunctional and occasionally disgusting the racial situation in this country is, it hardly even begins to compare to the absolutely and utterly loathsome, shitty, grabasstically unorganized intellectual state of the American Left. They have reduced themselves to subhuman scum (qua leftists; they might be functional people in other respects). But inside every one of those filthy maggots is a lover of wisdom trying to get out.
I've written about the main fundamental problems with leftism before. To recap the basics plus whatever else new comes to mind: Leftists are obsessed with the political because it's their religion-substitute, their source of meaning in "something greater than themselves." They're full of hubris and conceit about their supposed intellectual and moral superiority. They refuse to listen in good faith to the strongest, steelmanned version of their opponents' thinkers/arguments. Their anti-capitalism is for losers, at root a rationalization of envy and resentment. They have their own lives together no more than anyone else and yet they think they have the wisdom (although they don't think in terms of wisdom, or else they'd be full-on dialectically advanced steelmanning-as-fuck philosophers) to direct the lives of everyone else, and all by force no less (given their politics-as-meaning mindset). As an expert on Ayn Rand's thought I know with a 100% certainty that they haven't the faintest how to steelman Rand's philosophy and insist on attacking a strawman version, every time. They're oblivious to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, anyway, else they'd demonstrate having a single fucking clue about the virtue-ethics tradition over and above their own ethically narrow fairness-and-harm set of criteria (the steelman version of which are found in the Kantian and utilitarian traditions, especially). I think I have developed over time some pretty well-attuned (not infallible, mind you) "ring of truth" sensibilities, and Dennis Prager's claim that there is no wisdom on the left rings true as a general diagnosis of the left's present potentiality-squandering condition.
When it comes to the subject of race or racism in particular, they come across as even more appallingly pathetic than usual (qua leftists). Their ever-expanding racism-narrative is borne of one basic flaw in their worldview: they refuse to face up to the fact that their preferred social policies have failed to the situation of blacks and minorities, and so instead of responding to the intrusion of reality in this regard they double down and insist that this failure is attributable instead to structural and other racism. But the reality is that their essential failure here is one of hubris and lack of wisdom.
Case in point:
When University of Pennsylvania Law Prof. Amy Wax said - quite eminently reasonably and in obvious good faith - that the black community could benefit from an infusion of bourgeois values, the reaction of the campus left at Penn (faculty as well as students) was to melt down in epic fashion. This bunch of ill-educated Ivy League fuckheads reacted by pulling out every little dirty trick in the current leftist playbook to try to discredit and smear Prof. Wax. Much as they do with Donald Trump, they seized upon mainly one statement she made about the success of European whites (probably in response to a question for the article in which her statement appeared, so we don't have the full context for that statement, now, do we), amplified the racial element of that statement, and made it the only story - going out of their way to miss whatever legitimate point was contained therein. Likewise, when Wax referenced the era in which she saw bourgeois values flourishing - roughly, the 1950s - the leftist Ivy League fucks decided to focus only on the pre-Civil-Rights racial discrimination that existed then, as if that were the thing Wax was talking about. So instead of it being about bourgeois values the leftist Ivy League shit-for-brainses went out of their way to make it about "white supremacism" instead. Go look at the link for yourself and read in detail what this bunch of loathsome lowlife leftist losers did in response to Wax's reasonable argument.
Now, where on earth, pray tell, would an entire mass of Ivy League students and faculty have ever gotten the idea that this was a normal and acceptable approach to conversation about difficult and contentious subject matter? Is it possible that the mentality that led to such an easily-triggered meltdown when the chips were down is pervasive in the academy? And what measures, exactly, have the academic Left taken to remedy this problem after it's been made abundantly evident by Jonathan Haidt and other researchers? I ask because, as far as I can tell, they haven't done jack shit to remedy the problem.
So I submit that the ugly incident at Penn is, roughly speaking, the "best" that the American left is able to come up with when confronted with a reasonable argument from the other side that triggers them in just the right way. Yes, their response to a law professor's reasonable argument about bourgeois values was to cry racism, and that's the best we can expect from the crowd of lunatics that is the American Left today. Fucking pathetic. Fucking worms!
[Edit: New shit has come to light. Reportedly Prof. Wax said something directly and unambiguously racist, although Wax is saying her comments have been distorted. And guess what: the left has so badly shit away its credibility that when I see reports such as this I cannot believe them on their face any longer, without full access to the original materials. That's what these fucking losers get for their established pattern of intellectual malpractice. They blew it. Further, none of this affects the facts about the 2017 bourgeois-values episode linked and discussed above, nor absolves the Penn leftists of their intellectual malpractice then. They're every bit as much the losers even if there happens to be a racist around when they cry "racist!" Tough shit, huh? [Update: and guess what, it's the same ol' caricature/smear tactics, quite obviously so to anyone exercising decency and restraint. Racism-crying leftists being scum again, not surprising in the least. Fuck 'em!]]
Unless/until the leftist worms fix their own problems they forfeit all moral right to whine and cry about racism and attribute blame, because I for one am sick and tired of hearing all that from them. I have had it up to here with their shit. No more; putting the foot down. Can you imagine MLK acting like this bunch of divisive, angry, dialogue-avoiding whiners? No, you cannot. He was too constructive-minded, and he also took seriously - something the left no longer does - the ideal that people be judged by the content of their character, and that means that the cultivation of character (so as to make lofty judgment commensurate with lofty character, of course) should be of the highest priority. And it also means some basic intellectual honesty about how much the mentality of leftism (which becomes more unhinged and epistemically reckless by the day) has victimized minorities perhaps more than anything else this past half century.
(And, yes, I've already anticipated the "best" rhetorical chicanery the left might come up with in response to Wax: she's claiming that black people fail to adopt bourgeois values such as hard work and thrift, thereby perpetuating mean stereotypes about blacks. Of course, the same thing coming out of the pen of a Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams elicits crickets from the racism-cryers. But another dialectically appropriate response to the chicanery about mean stereotypes is that what triggers the left about "bourgeois values" is the prescription standing fundamentally at odds with what their worldview dictates, which is that the solution is political/taxpayer-funded. This is not even to touch upon what may be the elephant in the room, which is the percentage of single-parent households in the black community. Blaming, e.g., mass incarceration doesn't really ring true to me, since that demographic trend was already in place before the last half century. And when a leftist like Sen. Cory Booker is pointing to mass incarceration since the early '90s, the natural thing to wonder is whether he looks at the benefit side of the equation as well as the cost: what has happened to the nation's murder rate since that time, and what does that mean in terms of the number of black bodies in prison instead of six feet under? While I don't know all the specific numbers here, I do know that the nation's murder fate has fallen considerably. And what I do know - the Wax episode being Exhibit A - is that leftists have avoided a good-faith dialogue about these difficult and controversial topics. And, to top off this little digression about sociocultural trends and their effects on life opportunities and outcomes, this item which very recently came to my attention points to what may be the one most fundamental causal factor for a given locale: social capital. Well, duh, Aristotle had that figured out long ago. And what better and more comprehensive a way to build that social capital than, you know, philosophy? If leftists weren't so busy misplacing their priorities and obsessing about the narrowly political while pretending to be intellectually superior, they would know this already.)
In short: Someone needs to gouge out leftists' eyeballs and skullfuck them without the courtesy of a reach-around while they drop and give the instructor 20 push-ups, which is another way of saying they need philosophy fucked right into them if that's what it takes to get it in there. This is in no way to deny the role and responsibility of the Right in the nation's intellectual bankruptcy (they'll overcome the presumption of blame here just as soon as they start talking all about philosophy), but neither the Right nor even the Left until recently have been nearly as vile and vicious as the Left has become today. (I'd say the pathology involved became more screamingly obvious in the last 5 years or so. But the roots run deep and the chickens have come home to roost.) Incontrovertible proof of this point is that it wasn't until recently that the Left resorted to crying racism every 5 seconds as reality keeps intruding upon their worldview. Hopefully this not-so-slow-mo trainwreck can serve as a lesson to both Right and Left about how not to go about things, and perhaps even lead them sooner or later to philosophy as (at the very least) the best prophylactic against such degradation.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Rashida Tlaib: rude little intellectual pig
Rep. Tlaib is an intellectual thug. When one sees these loud, rude disrupters at a Trump speech - not a raucous rally, mind you, but an ordinary speech - or at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, one tends to think of them as intellectually small, rank-and-file types who refuse to make better use of their talents, and not as U.S. Congress material. Regrettably, standards have fallen in adult politics.
And it's not just the intellectually vacuous, undignified screaming and yelling that makes Tlaib a rude, thoughtless little pig. See the linked youtube video starting at 1:08 where she disgraces herself by gratuitously pulling the race card and smearing a fellow member of the committee. Only when she is called out does she walk back her disgraceful commentary, but you can imagine how she conducts herself when she isn't called out.
Here she is explaining why she disrupted Trump's speech. Quoting part of it:
Courteous behavior can’t be reserved for someone who labels hardworking Mexican immigrants who have come to pursue the American Dream as “rapists.”
Correcting this stuff coming from "progressives" has grown tiresome. A basic requirement of intellectual honesty in debate is to put one's opponents' positions and statements in the most favorable light one can, and then attack them. It turns out here that - as in many other cases - one can attack Trump on his casual relationship with the truth. So why degrade oneself by attacking a strawman, crying-racism-yet-again version of Trump's claim? Doing less than steelmanning (opposite of strawmanning) the opponent's position is intellectually lazy, the pursuit of a cheap win. The only thing Tlaib does here is to confirm the suspicion that she is unable to achieve on a level field of intellectual play: that she is a coward, a weakling, a bum. On this count, she throws herself in with almost the entire lot of Democrat pigs these days who could sure use philosophy boot camp to clean up their shameful and easily discreditable act.
So basically what we have here is someone who insists on assuming the worst about her political opponent, and on that basis decides to rudely interrupt that opponent's speech as though that were an acceptable and normal way of doing things. All it shows is intellectual dishonesty and poor judgment.
I'm not sure who's more of an intellectual pig, Tlaib or her "squad" mate AOC. They are both leftist scum, absolutely convinced of their righteousness, who in a more enlightened age would have no business being in the U.S. Congress.
[Addendum: It is after I post the above that I learn that this hubristic, reckless idiot ups the ante on the minimum wage, proposing $18-20 instead of the $15 just passed by the House Democrat majority. As I asked in the other linked post, why stop at $15? But with this rude thoughtless little pig, the question now is: Why stop at $20? The next obvious question is: Will AOC up the ante yet further? The higher the number, the more virtue being signaled, yes? The next question after all this, is: At what minimum wage level do they begin to acknowledge negative employment effects? And then the next obvious question: Is there any such level they would acknowledge? And: How much economic illiteracy and hatred of freedom/capitalism are they willing to openly reveal, exactly? Surely there's some threshold limit? Would they stop anywhere short of Cultural Revolution-level madness if they had the run of the place? (Nope.) And finally: At what point do the left-wing media begin to get concerned enough to hold the "squad" accountable for all this willful ignorance and hate? At what point, exactly, do they begin to seriously entertain the thought that not even Trump is as awful as this? "Calling Mexicans rapists and Nazis very fine people" vs. $20 minimum wage, is what these mediots are now reduced to comparing/contrasting as a sanity check, when those with common sense have figured out the answer some time ago.]
Did Ilhan Omar marry her brother?
There are rumors circulating that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother. Applying the standards (sic) of evidence the Democrats and their media enablers used to assess the credibility of accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, shouldn't we consider these rumors believable?
The Democrats' (et al) treatment of Kavanaugh has reared its ugly head as of late in the wake of (1) the new book, Justice on Trial, by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, and (2) Jane Mayer, who published the clearly dubious Deborah Ramirez accusation against Kavanaugh, going to bat for former Sen. Al Franken (a #MeToo casualty). If there is justice in the world, the Democrats' reckless and malicious smears of Kavanaugh will come back over and over to bite them in the rear; until they learn some decency and restraint (to use Hemingway & Severino's phrasing) they deserve to keep losing SCOTUS seats. How can Mayer publish her Kavanaugh piece, not retract it, go to bat for Franken, and not look like a partisan POS after all that?
I suppose the Dems could reconcile their reckless treatment of Kavanaugh and their lack of curiosity about the Ilhan Omar marriage rumors by pulling the gender card: both Kavanaugh's accusers and Omar's categorical denial of marriage fraud should be believed because they are all women.
I don't know what sounds worse, that sort of rationale or the evident blatant hypocrisy about standards of evidence/credibility. If one of these is the gutter and the other the sewer, which is which?
In that Politifact article in the first link above, the Star-Tribune's politics editor does say this:
The Democrats' (et al) treatment of Kavanaugh has reared its ugly head as of late in the wake of (1) the new book, Justice on Trial, by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, and (2) Jane Mayer, who published the clearly dubious Deborah Ramirez accusation against Kavanaugh, going to bat for former Sen. Al Franken (a #MeToo casualty). If there is justice in the world, the Democrats' reckless and malicious smears of Kavanaugh will come back over and over to bite them in the rear; until they learn some decency and restraint (to use Hemingway & Severino's phrasing) they deserve to keep losing SCOTUS seats. How can Mayer publish her Kavanaugh piece, not retract it, go to bat for Franken, and not look like a partisan POS after all that?
I suppose the Dems could reconcile their reckless treatment of Kavanaugh and their lack of curiosity about the Ilhan Omar marriage rumors by pulling the gender card: both Kavanaugh's accusers and Omar's categorical denial of marriage fraud should be believed because they are all women.
I don't know what sounds worse, that sort of rationale or the evident blatant hypocrisy about standards of evidence/credibility. If one of these is the gutter and the other the sewer, which is which?
In that Politifact article in the first link above, the Star-Tribune's politics editor does say this:
My interest as an editor began with the silence she has maintained about her improper tax filings. That got my attention. She would say only that she had corrected the 2014 and 2015 tax filings and would not divulge anything about why she had filed taxes with a man she was not married to when she was separated but still married to someone else....What’s really made it hard is that she’s been unwilling to address any of these questions. That has fueled the controversy. We quoted her at length to say that these were mere accusations, that they were unfair, and that she shouldn’t have to address them. Be that as may, there was an undisputed instance of her filing her taxes improperly. And if you’re in Congress, you should explain that to your constituents.
This is not some right-wing rumor outlet saying this.
We currently have Democrat-majority House committees issuing subpoenas for Trump's tax returns. What are the chances these partisan so-and-sos and their media allies are curious about Omar's tax returns? I'm guessing about the same as the chances that they were actually interested in getting to the truth with the Kavanaugh accusations.
Applying the Dems' partisan standards (sic) of evidence, it seems quite credible that Omar married her brother. I mean, why not? Applying the point more generally: what wouldn't be credible? Would we have to pull that gender card (or the race card, or . . .) to introduce something at least resembling some standard, however ludicrous it may be?
If the Republicans are guilty of such a degree of viciousness and intellectual bankruptcy, I am unaware of it. The case of their having nominated and voted for Trump for president is too full of complicating factors - e.g., he probably had the best chance to beat HRC and there were judicial nominations up for grabs - whereas the Kavanaugh smears are too clear-cut. (Maybe the party's having drunk the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid back in '08 is reasonably clear-cut evidence of their willingness to do away with standards [of qualifications for POTUS, in that case]. See also the next paragraph.) There's just no way the Dems come out of that very ugly episode not looking like partisan POS willing to undermine plain and simple standards of evidence and destroy someone's career and reputation in the process.
If I were in a position to propose a fair "exchange" of propositions with Democrats, I'd offer up this example of bad faith from the ever-glib Trump spokesman Stephen Miller in reply to eminently reasonable questions/challenges from Fox News' Chris Wallace this past weekend, in exchange for their admission that their treatment of Kavanaugh was beyond the pale. (Same offer applies in reverse, as it were, to Trump-defenders who think Miller's answers are part of a respectable and fair dialogue.)
Given all the intellectual bankruptcy referenced in all of the above, this is as good a time as any to reiterate my no-brainer plea for philosophical education for everyone, including especially for children. (ffs already, etc.) As for applying serious epistemic standards/methods to the initial subject-header question, consult the Politifact link and others in the google search. (Snopes for example calls into question the logic of such a sham-marriage narrative. Can we unaccountably disregard what Snopes has to say, the way Democrats unaccountably disregarded evidence (sworn statements, a calendar, basic logic) that would run counter to accusations against Kavanaugh?)
Monday, July 22, 2019
Minimum wage increases & recessions
One more-or-less obvious crock of shit the Democrats peddle to the American people is that they are morally superior on the subject of the minimum wage. They don't care that most economists think minimum wage increases are not a good idea if employment opportunities for less-skilled workers is the goal. They are more interested in being (seen as) morally correct irrespective of whether they are precisely, factually and semantically correct.
The Dem-majority House just passed a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15/hr. This is not at all surprising given the Dems' antipathy toward the free market and the fact that the economy is in the stage of the business cycle it is in. Given the history of these things, this does not bode well for the economy in the coming years. If Dems want a recession in '20 - surely their best shot of winning back the White House - they would do well to have a minimum wage hike signed into law.
Here is the history of the federal minimum wage (the dark blue is the nominal rate, the light blue the inflation-adjusted one):
[Note: the highest the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage has ever been is just shy of $12 in today's dollars. And the Dems want to jack it up to $15? I don't think they're nearly as intellectually superior as they think they are. While they're at it, why stop at $15 ffs?]
Now, everyone who's been paying attention knows that before ca. 1973 the U.S. and world economy were structurally different enough that the pre-1973 economy could withstand the more "progressive" policies such as marginal tax rates north of 70%. Globalization since the 1970s has put increased pressure on the U.S. labor market, making more sense at the margins for businesses and finance capital to offshore or outsource. (The result has been close to a miracle for the rest of the world (mostly China...), in terms of living standards. See all the relevant numbers at ourworldindata.org.)
And since the 1970s, increases in the minimum wage have usually (with one exception) been associated with recessions. As any economist worth anything will tell you, an increase in wages (ceteris paribus, of course) in recessionary conditions can only make the recession more protracted. Sizable inflation-adjusted increases in the federal minimum wage happened in 1974, 1990-1991, 1996-97, and 2007-09. Except for 1996-97, these increases happened at the peak of the business cycle - when the politicians have the most leeway for doing so - and recessions followed.
Now, this is not to imply that the minimum wage increases were the sole cause of the recessions (it didn't cause a recession in 1996-7, after all; and the main cause of the Great Recession starting in '08 was a financial crisis), but they almost certainly made it harder for the economy to recover from recession. If you doubt this, ask whether the politicians would raise minimum wages during a recession or early in the expansion phase when unemployment is still high. Is this the sort of thing we want to take a chance on, business-cycle-effects-wise?
(Not that anyone cares about, oh, freedom of contract in this context. We're talking vulnerable exploitable workers and greedy predatory businesses, after all. A superior moral compass dictates a govt role here, right? [AOC, exemplar of altruist morality as Rand defines it, declares as an incontestable axiom that the right to things like a $15/hr wage takes precedence over the privilege of earning a profit(, Comrade).] Meanwhile, the most vulnerable workers are indeed the most vulnerable in a recession when the greedy businesses are trying to stay afloat and deal with all the challenges and/or bullshit involved in running a business.)
Now, what is a good sign that we are currently at or near a peak point of the business cycle? The treasury yield curve and/or spread between short and long term rates has historically been a very accurate predictor of recessions (the shaded areas):
An inverted yield curve is a situation where short term rates are higher than long term rates, and recessions have reliably followed such situations. The yield curve at present is U-shaped (which I don't recall seeing before).
So is it any wonder that Democrats are licking their chops at raising the minimum wage in the current state of things? Or maybe their intentions aren't wicked and they're just ignorant of the history and economic logic of these things. It's hard to tell these days.
But one thing's for damn sure: The Dems who cry "racism!" so much that they've lost all credibility even were a legitimate example to arise, are promoting - in action - a policy with racially disparate effects, i.e., the very sort of thing they say is racist. It goes hand in hand with an entire menu of destructive policies the Dems have inflicted upon the black community in the name of helping it. No, the minimum wage doesn't make the targeted worker more productive or increase the worker's earning power. It only makes it more difficult, at the margins, for the worker to be employable.
President Trump is already decrying the Federal Reserve's short-term interest rate policies, and he has data to back him up. If the minimum wage hike somehow makes it to his desk (meaning the Republican-majority Senate would have to pass it), he has as much reason to veto it as he has to oppose an inverted yield curve. But with this president, it's hard to know who he might pander to at a given time on a given issue. His tariff policies can't be helping his reelection chances (just ask any economist how protectionism affects economic growth) even if they might yield a more favorable trade situation long-term.
(On a related note: commonly cited GDP growth numbers don't adjust for population growth. Since population is growing about 1% per year, a 2% GDP growth rate means about 1% per-capita growth. This means that a 3% GDP growth rate means a doubling of the per-capita growth rate over the 2% commonly-cited growth rate. This means that the economy under Trump so far is growing at roughly twice the rate it was under his predecessor, although he's expanding the deficit to fuel this growth; this fiscal year - at a peak phase of the business cycle no less, when this isn't supposed to occur - the federal deficit is expected to reach 5% of GDP, more or less an unsustainable figure where nominal GDP is growing at any less than than 5%. These would be points the Democrats might capitalize on effectively if they weren't so intellectually bankrupt and credibility-squandering.)
[Addendum: I take it that in addition to such wonderful ideas as open borders combined with a generous welfare state - is it that, and not an Aristotelian ethos (say), that is their conception of the end of history, and if so, how pathetic is that? - the Dems, were they in charge of what AOC termed "all three chambers [sic] of government - the House, the Senate, and the White House," would indeed push through a $15/hr minimum wage as signs of economic slowdown loom? (Keep in mind, using the GDP math I just mentioned, that any GDP growth rate below about 1% means a contraction in per-capita terms, meaning pretty likely an increase in the unemployment rate, the #1 main-street indicator of recession.) Would a president in the new Democrat mold be that fucking stupid when all is said and done? Or is the $15/hr idea more of a virtue-signaling thing? Do we really want to find out? Given the laws of supply and demand, how would that $15/hr interact with that whole open borders plus generous welfare state idea? What happens to the marginal productivity of labor if tons of laborers flood over the border? If it turns out that they can't find work at the otherwise attractive $15/hr, do they go on the dole? Then what? Will the Dems find yet another way to cry racism and demand immediate agreement, and double down with more of the same policies? Again, do we want to find out, given the nature of today's Democrat Party?]
The Dem-majority House just passed a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15/hr. This is not at all surprising given the Dems' antipathy toward the free market and the fact that the economy is in the stage of the business cycle it is in. Given the history of these things, this does not bode well for the economy in the coming years. If Dems want a recession in '20 - surely their best shot of winning back the White House - they would do well to have a minimum wage hike signed into law.
Here is the history of the federal minimum wage (the dark blue is the nominal rate, the light blue the inflation-adjusted one):
[Note: the highest the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage has ever been is just shy of $12 in today's dollars. And the Dems want to jack it up to $15? I don't think they're nearly as intellectually superior as they think they are. While they're at it, why stop at $15 ffs?]
Now, everyone who's been paying attention knows that before ca. 1973 the U.S. and world economy were structurally different enough that the pre-1973 economy could withstand the more "progressive" policies such as marginal tax rates north of 70%. Globalization since the 1970s has put increased pressure on the U.S. labor market, making more sense at the margins for businesses and finance capital to offshore or outsource. (The result has been close to a miracle for the rest of the world (mostly China...), in terms of living standards. See all the relevant numbers at ourworldindata.org.)
And since the 1970s, increases in the minimum wage have usually (with one exception) been associated with recessions. As any economist worth anything will tell you, an increase in wages (ceteris paribus, of course) in recessionary conditions can only make the recession more protracted. Sizable inflation-adjusted increases in the federal minimum wage happened in 1974, 1990-1991, 1996-97, and 2007-09. Except for 1996-97, these increases happened at the peak of the business cycle - when the politicians have the most leeway for doing so - and recessions followed.
Now, this is not to imply that the minimum wage increases were the sole cause of the recessions (it didn't cause a recession in 1996-7, after all; and the main cause of the Great Recession starting in '08 was a financial crisis), but they almost certainly made it harder for the economy to recover from recession. If you doubt this, ask whether the politicians would raise minimum wages during a recession or early in the expansion phase when unemployment is still high. Is this the sort of thing we want to take a chance on, business-cycle-effects-wise?
(Not that anyone cares about, oh, freedom of contract in this context. We're talking vulnerable exploitable workers and greedy predatory businesses, after all. A superior moral compass dictates a govt role here, right? [AOC, exemplar of altruist morality as Rand defines it, declares as an incontestable axiom that the right to things like a $15/hr wage takes precedence over the privilege of earning a profit(, Comrade).] Meanwhile, the most vulnerable workers are indeed the most vulnerable in a recession when the greedy businesses are trying to stay afloat and deal with all the challenges and/or bullshit involved in running a business.)
Now, what is a good sign that we are currently at or near a peak point of the business cycle? The treasury yield curve and/or spread between short and long term rates has historically been a very accurate predictor of recessions (the shaded areas):
An inverted yield curve is a situation where short term rates are higher than long term rates, and recessions have reliably followed such situations. The yield curve at present is U-shaped (which I don't recall seeing before).
So is it any wonder that Democrats are licking their chops at raising the minimum wage in the current state of things? Or maybe their intentions aren't wicked and they're just ignorant of the history and economic logic of these things. It's hard to tell these days.
But one thing's for damn sure: The Dems who cry "racism!" so much that they've lost all credibility even were a legitimate example to arise, are promoting - in action - a policy with racially disparate effects, i.e., the very sort of thing they say is racist. It goes hand in hand with an entire menu of destructive policies the Dems have inflicted upon the black community in the name of helping it. No, the minimum wage doesn't make the targeted worker more productive or increase the worker's earning power. It only makes it more difficult, at the margins, for the worker to be employable.
President Trump is already decrying the Federal Reserve's short-term interest rate policies, and he has data to back him up. If the minimum wage hike somehow makes it to his desk (meaning the Republican-majority Senate would have to pass it), he has as much reason to veto it as he has to oppose an inverted yield curve. But with this president, it's hard to know who he might pander to at a given time on a given issue. His tariff policies can't be helping his reelection chances (just ask any economist how protectionism affects economic growth) even if they might yield a more favorable trade situation long-term.
(On a related note: commonly cited GDP growth numbers don't adjust for population growth. Since population is growing about 1% per year, a 2% GDP growth rate means about 1% per-capita growth. This means that a 3% GDP growth rate means a doubling of the per-capita growth rate over the 2% commonly-cited growth rate. This means that the economy under Trump so far is growing at roughly twice the rate it was under his predecessor, although he's expanding the deficit to fuel this growth; this fiscal year - at a peak phase of the business cycle no less, when this isn't supposed to occur - the federal deficit is expected to reach 5% of GDP, more or less an unsustainable figure where nominal GDP is growing at any less than than 5%. These would be points the Democrats might capitalize on effectively if they weren't so intellectually bankrupt and credibility-squandering.)
[Addendum: I take it that in addition to such wonderful ideas as open borders combined with a generous welfare state - is it that, and not an Aristotelian ethos (say), that is their conception of the end of history, and if so, how pathetic is that? - the Dems, were they in charge of what AOC termed "all three chambers [sic] of government - the House, the Senate, and the White House," would indeed push through a $15/hr minimum wage as signs of economic slowdown loom? (Keep in mind, using the GDP math I just mentioned, that any GDP growth rate below about 1% means a contraction in per-capita terms, meaning pretty likely an increase in the unemployment rate, the #1 main-street indicator of recession.) Would a president in the new Democrat mold be that fucking stupid when all is said and done? Or is the $15/hr idea more of a virtue-signaling thing? Do we really want to find out? Given the laws of supply and demand, how would that $15/hr interact with that whole open borders plus generous welfare state idea? What happens to the marginal productivity of labor if tons of laborers flood over the border? If it turns out that they can't find work at the otherwise attractive $15/hr, do they go on the dole? Then what? Will the Dems find yet another way to cry racism and demand immediate agreement, and double down with more of the same policies? Again, do we want to find out, given the nature of today's Democrat Party?]
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Civic ignorance & jury nullification
"A man I found guilty of dealing drugs died in prison. I wish I could take that verdict back."
If you poll Americans on whether they know about jury nullification, the numbers would be appallingly, deplorably low.
Obvious question: why the appalling, deplorable ignorance? Levels of knowledge or ignorance of jury nullification should be a knock-down, no-brainer litmus test of the quality of civic education in this country. Someone has really fucked up there, and that someone is probably shifting blame for the problems in this country.
For fuck's sake, already.
If you poll Americans on whether they know about jury nullification, the numbers would be appallingly, deplorably low.
Obvious question: why the appalling, deplorable ignorance? Levels of knowledge or ignorance of jury nullification should be a knock-down, no-brainer litmus test of the quality of civic education in this country. Someone has really fucked up there, and that someone is probably shifting blame for the problems in this country.
For fuck's sake, already.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
A semi-meticulous narrowing down
Philosophers as a rule are excellent researchers; they've figured out how to prioritize their research focus to home in on the foundational meaning-of-life issues confronting all humans. This is confirmed at least in part by the foundational place of philosophy in the wikipedia hierarchy. (Would this have ever become clear before the days of hyperlinking? I remember those days; "woke" millennials don't; they have no frame of reference here.)
So let's consider the population of philosophers. A great many are in academia as full-time professionals, some are independent of that milieu.
Among that population there are those who are big on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle more or less was the first to perfect a research program (not that Plato was chopped liver). Time and time again Aristotle has reappeared on the history-of-philosophy scene to the great benefit of the participants (as inspiration if nothing else). The recent revival of virtue ethics when before only Kantian and utilitarian ethics dominated the scene is one case in point.
As documented extensively in this blog, there is a by-and-large formidable neo-Aristotelian stream of thought inspired by Ayn Rand. (Now things are starting to get pretty narrowed down.) If there's one central and crucial theme uniting the systems of Aristotle and Rand it is a focus on what I term intellectual perfection(ism). (Narrowing things down further....) The gist of this is that we have an ethical imperative to maximize the actualization of our intellectual potentialities; it is the best organizing principle available for better living. And while philosophers almost to a person (I leave out pseudo-philosophers who are more like sophists) value the principle of intellectual perfection or integrity or wholeness, Aristotle and Rand are among the few to make this into an explicit defining principle of living well. It's not just the actualization of just any set of potentials that makes for self-actualization or eudaimonia; at the foundation, center and peak expression, there is intellectual activity tending toward perfection.
Then there are those Aristotelians and Randians who are obsessively into methodological perfection(ism); the term "dialectic" comes up in connection with Aristotle and his comprehensive and sprawling research program; it's about tying together all the strands in an organized unity. In connection with Rand the terms/concepts "context-keeping" and "integration" cover more or less the same methodological territory. So we've more or less narrowed things down to Sciabarra (editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) and his circle of associates as far as "dialectic" goes, and to Peikoff (Rand's hand-picked heir) and his circle as far as integration/context-keeping go. But there's almost no overlap between these two groups; it is as though they exist in a condition of dialectical alienation or tension. (As to why that is, well. Long-ish story.)
As far as self-actualization or eudaimonist ethics goes, there is a subset of Aristotelian-Randians who specialize in ethics and who picked up on the themes of Norton's Personal Destinies. This includes "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen and Tibor Machan, but not all that many others. Norton integrates themes from classical eudaimonism (namely Plato and Aristotle) with modern humanistic psychology (Jung and Maslow). I've only read some of Jung and Maslow; somehow the intellectual-perfectionism theme in Aristotle and Rand covers the widest explanatory range of the content and appeal of eudaimonism in its strongest form. Anyway, Sciabarra - in the circle of associates with the "Dougs" and Machan - cites a massive number of sources informing his Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000), but Norton isn't among them. I guess he isn't the specializer in ethical theory that the "Dougs" and Machan are? So we encounter yet another division of sorts, resulting from a diversification of specialized knowledge. So an avid researcher would have to home in on the most significant sources/figures cited in Total Freedom (hint: Mises, Hayek, Rand) as well as, say, Machan's Individuals and Their Rights (1989) and the "Dougs" Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), to both have promising leads to Norton as well as to conjure up whatever connections Norton might have to Sciabarra's dialectical-libertarian thesis. Along the way, such a researcher will most likely have encountered the libertarian rights theory of Eric Mack and drew meticulous comparisons/contrasts to these others' rights theories. Further along the way, one may have encountered the 1974 volume edited by Machan, The Libertarian Alternative, which contains John Hospers' "What Libertarianism Is," which contains a memorable knock-down formulation of the synoptic libertarian norm: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."
The number of people who would have engaged in the research covering these works (which have already integrated a lot of source material themselves, so hopefully nothing big got overlooked in the lines of transmission), is probably quite small. But it is, in terms of foundational importance and tradition worked in, probably the most high-efficiency philosophical research to be done. Does anyone really do better work than the Dougs, explicit and avowed perfectionists? Norton also uses the term "perfectionism" as more or less interchangeably with "edaimonism," "self-actualization ethics," and "normative individualism." But he doesn't get into the more distinctively Aristotelian-Randian-style emphasis on intellectual perfection(ism).
I mention in connection with Aristotle the notion of an organized unity. Nozick, who has a sprawling research program of his own (he probably had a lot more raw smarts than I do), spoke of value in terms of organic unity, and more specifically an organic unity made up of two criteria: (1) the range, scope, or quantity of material being organized, and (2) the "tightness" of the unity or organization. (Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Examined Life (1989).) Somehow Nozick manages (I'm not clear as to how, exactly) to keep this conception of value separate from his idea of "flourishing" which he takes to be inadequate as a unifying theme in ethics. Given what I've been saying so far, I think there is a most-viable way to unify these, uh, strands. Are "organized life," "integrated life," and "flourishing/eudaimonic life" mapping different territories? I don't see how.
So at this point we have the following figures mentioned: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick.
Researchers on Aristotle researchers leads one to Oxford's T.H. Irwin, author of Aristotle's First Principles (1988) and the utterly massive The Development of Ethics (2007). Irwin is a good man, and thorough. If one has only so much time on one's hand to study Aristotle and the history of ethics, respectively, Irwin is a good bet. (Irwin is big on the theme of dialectical method in Aristotle, and is cited in Total Freedom.)
Ferrarin ties together the ridiculously abstruse presentation in Hegel's writings with themes central to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and spirit(/soul?), in Hegel and Aristotle (2001). Comparative studies between Aristotle and other towering figures in the history of philosophy include Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Engstrom and Whiting, eds., 1996) and The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Aufderheide and Bader, 2015). Leading Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard draws comparisons between Kant's conception of acting for the sake of duty and Aristotle's acting for the sake of the noble (to kalon), in a comparative essay in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) (or is that a reprint from the Engstrom and Whiting collection?). [Edit: Also, Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, Method (Sgarbi, 2016), which I was all over like flies on shit almost the moment it was published...] [Edit: Also, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Sherman, 1997).]
The concept of to kalon may not be limited just to the noble, but also the fine or beautiful, suggesting an aesthetic component to goodness. On the subject of the noble, specifically, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 287) speaks of the noble soul having reverence for itself. Not only is this mentioned by Rand in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, but the Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche refers to Aristotle on the great-souled man as a proper lover of self. It's like the strands just keep tying together. I'm aware of (but have not yet read) Alexander Nehamas's well-regarded Nietzsche: Life as Literature from the '80s, but the title suggests an aesthetic conception of a desirable or choiceworthy life (although I'm not really clear at this point on how the concepts of "desirable" and "choiceworthy" fit in with Nietzsche's metaethical scheme). In any case, these points need to be properly integrated and/or differentiated with the aformentioned theme in Nozick about organic unity and how aesthetic value specifically fits into that.
So we have a research program that includes so far: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick, Irwin, Ferrarin, Korsgaard, Nietzsche, Nehamas.
The folks who've gone through the Peikoff courses thoroughly to the point of automatization/habituation of the prescriptions therein, by and large have it together pretty well. But I part ways with that crowd mainly on matters of the proper approach to "philosophical" polemics, such as their Kant-bashing. An effort to keep full context as prescribed in the Peikoff courses leads me to making a full effort to understand those philosophers as well as, . . . well, as well as Rand wanted her own ideas to be understood before critiqued or commented on.
Then there's Alan Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment (1998), a culmination of a long lifetime of ethical thought. I was kind of disappointed that Norton receives such cursory treatment there, but Gewirth is also integrating a ton of other material as well. As is an increasingly common occurrence in ethical theory these days, Gewirth synthesizes 'Aristotelian' teleology and 'Kantian' deontology. Mack was doing this back in the '70s with his 'Egoism and Rights' dissertation/article.
And then there's researcher extraordinaire, Mortimer J. Adler, the main organizer of the Great Books series (millennials know all about that, right?), and author/compiler of two massive books: Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought and Great Treasury of Western Thought (co-edited with Charles van Doren of Quiz Show notoriety, of all people?). I've only gotten through some parts of the Treasury but made it all the way through the Lexicon, which was quite edifying.
A great many of these items/authors seem to me to be essential parts of a top-notch philosophical research program. Other books that strike me as essential (but which I have not yet gotten to) include: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); S.L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (1989); and Parfit's major works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2010 and later). Also on any avid lifelong learner's bookshelf should be volumes of writings by Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. We're talking bare essentials here, now; if you have room for Thomas Paine he should be included.
I have among my "essentials" in hard copy format (in addition to gobs of books in e-format...) a 2001 or so volume titled Moral Knowledge (ed. Miller, Paul and Paul 2001), a collection on metaethics. Metaethics is a difficult genre; I have not yet gotten more than a few pages in that volume.
Back when I was an obsessive/completist/perfectionistic student of Econ before transferring that obsession to philosophy research (mainly due to Rand), I homed in on a particular volume titled A History of Economic Theory and Method (Ekelund and Hebert). I've since supplemented that with Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Karier, 2010). And I still have a nice volume, Austrian Economics: A Reader (Ebeling, ed., 1991-ish) which I must have discovered in a Laissez Faire Books catalog.
The Oxford Handbooks series is also a very useful, state of the art, highest-tier-university-press learning resource. (There's even an Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning. How soon do I get to it? Before or after the Cambridge History of Capitalism? Before or after Sciabarra-mentor Ollman on alienation and dialectical method? Before or after the Oxford Handbook of Virtue? And does the section on epistemic virtue therein draw close connections/integrations to intellectual perfectionism? Does LeBar's essay on (virtue-)eudaimonism in this volume serve as an adequate condensation of sorts of his The Value of Living Well [2013]?) One could keep busy with just this Handbooks series for a very long time.
One George F. Kennan condensed/essentialized a long lifetime of learning into his book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), which I happened upon in a used book store. When do I get around to it? Somehow I've already been pulled into reading another book found at the same store, Talents & Geniuses by Gilbert Highet; a nice read, certainly easier to get through than a metaethics text, say.
Dennett is a thorough researcher - somehow only he revived Rapoport's Rules, in Intuition Pumps? - but most of his books I've tried I made about halfway through before moving on to other things; his research priorities have him focused on other things, and that's cool.
Given constraints on time and cognitive powers, one needs to essentialize/condense as much as possible. The above resources seem to be what best survive the process of sifting and a modest book budget. This principle also applies to research in music and film. There are some films I can quote nearly back to front. Essential filmmakers include Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Welles as tippy-top tier. Do enough back-to-front sifting and re-sifting in major American team sports statistics, and you might develop some serious knowledge there as well. I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Bill James' league as baseball researcher, but at least I've read James fairly indepth. Millennials wouldn't remember that On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), a simple but really good measure of batting prowess, was once called Production and included in the Total Baseball encyclopedia.
As indicated in the post title, this was a narrowing down of some kind. Who on this planet has engaged in the research necessary to be able to list and discuss all these things above? Not very many people. In fact, it might be only one person. We might, if so inclined, bring in Leibniz's famous principle of the identity of indiscernables to identify that person. (How soon do I get to the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?) The one and the same person who listed and discussed all the things above also turns out to be the person who authored Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History (2015), which far (?) surpasses anything else I'm aware of in terms of the world-historic-important, fundamental essentials integrated into one work. (From a marketing standpoint it's something of a hurdle just to get past the title. Me, I'm all over a book with that sort of title like a fly on shit, of course. And probably the optimal course in this regard is not to invest a lot of time/resources in marketing but in more research front-loading to the point that it's front-loaded af for the next book or series of them.) On top of that, this author has a really thorough approach to blogging (with posts characteristically chock full of supporting/contextualizing links when needed). On top of that, the author has homed in on a 'Better Living Through Philosophy' theme, as though that were perhaps the most perfect theme one could present to a wide reading audience, and where no one else seems to be (explicitly, systematically) taking up the idea quite so obsessively. The progress here looks promising. Can the research be even better prioritized for honing in on the truly most essential?
If the traces a human leaves to posterity are key to what gives meaning to one's life, it's looking okay so far in this instance; it'll look even better if/when Better Living Through Philosophy becomes a final published reality. (Or, to adopt Norton's conceptual scheme, how does this implicit reality become actuality, where an "ought" and an "is" come into unity? And how Hegelian is that conceptual scheme, exactly?) But what comes before and after that final product, research-wise? And how "self-referential" must that text unavoidably be, particularly if it must be placed within the history (and future? and end of history?) of thought?
[something of a precursor post to this one, here]
(What would a fully meticulous narrowing down look like?... Well, darn, I left out Aquinas. Not an expert there. Doug R most likely would most fully know the integrations/differentiations with Rand there. My experience after about 140 pages of Stump's Aquinas (2003) was that it was coming off as distinctively rationalistic - lots of abstract conceptual architecture but hard to tie down to perceptual/concrete experience. Then very shortly thereafter I am re-listening to one of Peikoff's most essential courses where the subject of rationalist polemics comes up, and Aquinas is mentioned right off. Peikoff had made it his mission from Understanding Objectivism (1983) onward to root out rationalism (e.g., 'floating abstraction') in method. Sciabarra identifies both rationalism and empiricism as one-sided/incomplete rather than dialectical, and doesn't include Aquinas among his paradigmatic dialectical thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Rand). For whatever any of that is worth. Oh, and I did read through most or all of this book, which somehow caught my attention. That, along with the fairly extensive treatment of Aquinas in Irwin's Development of Ethics, is about the extent of my Aquinas study so far. And of course the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas awaits...)
So let's consider the population of philosophers. A great many are in academia as full-time professionals, some are independent of that milieu.
Among that population there are those who are big on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle more or less was the first to perfect a research program (not that Plato was chopped liver). Time and time again Aristotle has reappeared on the history-of-philosophy scene to the great benefit of the participants (as inspiration if nothing else). The recent revival of virtue ethics when before only Kantian and utilitarian ethics dominated the scene is one case in point.
As documented extensively in this blog, there is a by-and-large formidable neo-Aristotelian stream of thought inspired by Ayn Rand. (Now things are starting to get pretty narrowed down.) If there's one central and crucial theme uniting the systems of Aristotle and Rand it is a focus on what I term intellectual perfection(ism). (Narrowing things down further....) The gist of this is that we have an ethical imperative to maximize the actualization of our intellectual potentialities; it is the best organizing principle available for better living. And while philosophers almost to a person (I leave out pseudo-philosophers who are more like sophists) value the principle of intellectual perfection or integrity or wholeness, Aristotle and Rand are among the few to make this into an explicit defining principle of living well. It's not just the actualization of just any set of potentials that makes for self-actualization or eudaimonia; at the foundation, center and peak expression, there is intellectual activity tending toward perfection.
Then there are those Aristotelians and Randians who are obsessively into methodological perfection(ism); the term "dialectic" comes up in connection with Aristotle and his comprehensive and sprawling research program; it's about tying together all the strands in an organized unity. In connection with Rand the terms/concepts "context-keeping" and "integration" cover more or less the same methodological territory. So we've more or less narrowed things down to Sciabarra (editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) and his circle of associates as far as "dialectic" goes, and to Peikoff (Rand's hand-picked heir) and his circle as far as integration/context-keeping go. But there's almost no overlap between these two groups; it is as though they exist in a condition of dialectical alienation or tension. (As to why that is, well. Long-ish story.)
As far as self-actualization or eudaimonist ethics goes, there is a subset of Aristotelian-Randians who specialize in ethics and who picked up on the themes of Norton's Personal Destinies. This includes "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen and Tibor Machan, but not all that many others. Norton integrates themes from classical eudaimonism (namely Plato and Aristotle) with modern humanistic psychology (Jung and Maslow). I've only read some of Jung and Maslow; somehow the intellectual-perfectionism theme in Aristotle and Rand covers the widest explanatory range of the content and appeal of eudaimonism in its strongest form. Anyway, Sciabarra - in the circle of associates with the "Dougs" and Machan - cites a massive number of sources informing his Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000), but Norton isn't among them. I guess he isn't the specializer in ethical theory that the "Dougs" and Machan are? So we encounter yet another division of sorts, resulting from a diversification of specialized knowledge. So an avid researcher would have to home in on the most significant sources/figures cited in Total Freedom (hint: Mises, Hayek, Rand) as well as, say, Machan's Individuals and Their Rights (1989) and the "Dougs" Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), to both have promising leads to Norton as well as to conjure up whatever connections Norton might have to Sciabarra's dialectical-libertarian thesis. Along the way, such a researcher will most likely have encountered the libertarian rights theory of Eric Mack and drew meticulous comparisons/contrasts to these others' rights theories. Further along the way, one may have encountered the 1974 volume edited by Machan, The Libertarian Alternative, which contains John Hospers' "What Libertarianism Is," which contains a memorable knock-down formulation of the synoptic libertarian norm: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."
The number of people who would have engaged in the research covering these works (which have already integrated a lot of source material themselves, so hopefully nothing big got overlooked in the lines of transmission), is probably quite small. But it is, in terms of foundational importance and tradition worked in, probably the most high-efficiency philosophical research to be done. Does anyone really do better work than the Dougs, explicit and avowed perfectionists? Norton also uses the term "perfectionism" as more or less interchangeably with "edaimonism," "self-actualization ethics," and "normative individualism." But he doesn't get into the more distinctively Aristotelian-Randian-style emphasis on intellectual perfection(ism).
I mention in connection with Aristotle the notion of an organized unity. Nozick, who has a sprawling research program of his own (he probably had a lot more raw smarts than I do), spoke of value in terms of organic unity, and more specifically an organic unity made up of two criteria: (1) the range, scope, or quantity of material being organized, and (2) the "tightness" of the unity or organization. (Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Examined Life (1989).) Somehow Nozick manages (I'm not clear as to how, exactly) to keep this conception of value separate from his idea of "flourishing" which he takes to be inadequate as a unifying theme in ethics. Given what I've been saying so far, I think there is a most-viable way to unify these, uh, strands. Are "organized life," "integrated life," and "flourishing/eudaimonic life" mapping different territories? I don't see how.
So at this point we have the following figures mentioned: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick.
Researchers on Aristotle researchers leads one to Oxford's T.H. Irwin, author of Aristotle's First Principles (1988) and the utterly massive The Development of Ethics (2007). Irwin is a good man, and thorough. If one has only so much time on one's hand to study Aristotle and the history of ethics, respectively, Irwin is a good bet. (Irwin is big on the theme of dialectical method in Aristotle, and is cited in Total Freedom.)
Ferrarin ties together the ridiculously abstruse presentation in Hegel's writings with themes central to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and spirit(/soul?), in Hegel and Aristotle (2001). Comparative studies between Aristotle and other towering figures in the history of philosophy include Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Engstrom and Whiting, eds., 1996) and The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Aufderheide and Bader, 2015). Leading Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard draws comparisons between Kant's conception of acting for the sake of duty and Aristotle's acting for the sake of the noble (to kalon), in a comparative essay in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) (or is that a reprint from the Engstrom and Whiting collection?). [Edit: Also, Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, Method (Sgarbi, 2016), which I was all over like flies on shit almost the moment it was published...] [Edit: Also, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Sherman, 1997).]
The concept of to kalon may not be limited just to the noble, but also the fine or beautiful, suggesting an aesthetic component to goodness. On the subject of the noble, specifically, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 287) speaks of the noble soul having reverence for itself. Not only is this mentioned by Rand in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, but the Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche refers to Aristotle on the great-souled man as a proper lover of self. It's like the strands just keep tying together. I'm aware of (but have not yet read) Alexander Nehamas's well-regarded Nietzsche: Life as Literature from the '80s, but the title suggests an aesthetic conception of a desirable or choiceworthy life (although I'm not really clear at this point on how the concepts of "desirable" and "choiceworthy" fit in with Nietzsche's metaethical scheme). In any case, these points need to be properly integrated and/or differentiated with the aformentioned theme in Nozick about organic unity and how aesthetic value specifically fits into that.
So we have a research program that includes so far: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick, Irwin, Ferrarin, Korsgaard, Nietzsche, Nehamas.
The folks who've gone through the Peikoff courses thoroughly to the point of automatization/habituation of the prescriptions therein, by and large have it together pretty well. But I part ways with that crowd mainly on matters of the proper approach to "philosophical" polemics, such as their Kant-bashing. An effort to keep full context as prescribed in the Peikoff courses leads me to making a full effort to understand those philosophers as well as, . . . well, as well as Rand wanted her own ideas to be understood before critiqued or commented on.
Then there's Alan Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment (1998), a culmination of a long lifetime of ethical thought. I was kind of disappointed that Norton receives such cursory treatment there, but Gewirth is also integrating a ton of other material as well. As is an increasingly common occurrence in ethical theory these days, Gewirth synthesizes 'Aristotelian' teleology and 'Kantian' deontology. Mack was doing this back in the '70s with his 'Egoism and Rights' dissertation/article.
And then there's researcher extraordinaire, Mortimer J. Adler, the main organizer of the Great Books series (millennials know all about that, right?), and author/compiler of two massive books: Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought and Great Treasury of Western Thought (co-edited with Charles van Doren of Quiz Show notoriety, of all people?). I've only gotten through some parts of the Treasury but made it all the way through the Lexicon, which was quite edifying.
A great many of these items/authors seem to me to be essential parts of a top-notch philosophical research program. Other books that strike me as essential (but which I have not yet gotten to) include: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); S.L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (1989); and Parfit's major works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2010 and later). Also on any avid lifelong learner's bookshelf should be volumes of writings by Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. We're talking bare essentials here, now; if you have room for Thomas Paine he should be included.
I have among my "essentials" in hard copy format (in addition to gobs of books in e-format...) a 2001 or so volume titled Moral Knowledge (ed. Miller, Paul and Paul 2001), a collection on metaethics. Metaethics is a difficult genre; I have not yet gotten more than a few pages in that volume.
Back when I was an obsessive/completist/perfectionistic student of Econ before transferring that obsession to philosophy research (mainly due to Rand), I homed in on a particular volume titled A History of Economic Theory and Method (Ekelund and Hebert). I've since supplemented that with Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Karier, 2010). And I still have a nice volume, Austrian Economics: A Reader (Ebeling, ed., 1991-ish) which I must have discovered in a Laissez Faire Books catalog.
The Oxford Handbooks series is also a very useful, state of the art, highest-tier-university-press learning resource. (There's even an Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning. How soon do I get to it? Before or after the Cambridge History of Capitalism? Before or after Sciabarra-mentor Ollman on alienation and dialectical method? Before or after the Oxford Handbook of Virtue? And does the section on epistemic virtue therein draw close connections/integrations to intellectual perfectionism? Does LeBar's essay on (virtue-)eudaimonism in this volume serve as an adequate condensation of sorts of his The Value of Living Well [2013]?) One could keep busy with just this Handbooks series for a very long time.
One George F. Kennan condensed/essentialized a long lifetime of learning into his book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), which I happened upon in a used book store. When do I get around to it? Somehow I've already been pulled into reading another book found at the same store, Talents & Geniuses by Gilbert Highet; a nice read, certainly easier to get through than a metaethics text, say.
Dennett is a thorough researcher - somehow only he revived Rapoport's Rules, in Intuition Pumps? - but most of his books I've tried I made about halfway through before moving on to other things; his research priorities have him focused on other things, and that's cool.
Given constraints on time and cognitive powers, one needs to essentialize/condense as much as possible. The above resources seem to be what best survive the process of sifting and a modest book budget. This principle also applies to research in music and film. There are some films I can quote nearly back to front. Essential filmmakers include Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Welles as tippy-top tier. Do enough back-to-front sifting and re-sifting in major American team sports statistics, and you might develop some serious knowledge there as well. I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Bill James' league as baseball researcher, but at least I've read James fairly indepth. Millennials wouldn't remember that On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), a simple but really good measure of batting prowess, was once called Production and included in the Total Baseball encyclopedia.
As indicated in the post title, this was a narrowing down of some kind. Who on this planet has engaged in the research necessary to be able to list and discuss all these things above? Not very many people. In fact, it might be only one person. We might, if so inclined, bring in Leibniz's famous principle of the identity of indiscernables to identify that person. (How soon do I get to the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?) The one and the same person who listed and discussed all the things above also turns out to be the person who authored Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History (2015), which far (?) surpasses anything else I'm aware of in terms of the world-historic-important, fundamental essentials integrated into one work. (From a marketing standpoint it's something of a hurdle just to get past the title. Me, I'm all over a book with that sort of title like a fly on shit, of course. And probably the optimal course in this regard is not to invest a lot of time/resources in marketing but in more research front-loading to the point that it's front-loaded af for the next book or series of them.) On top of that, this author has a really thorough approach to blogging (with posts characteristically chock full of supporting/contextualizing links when needed). On top of that, the author has homed in on a 'Better Living Through Philosophy' theme, as though that were perhaps the most perfect theme one could present to a wide reading audience, and where no one else seems to be (explicitly, systematically) taking up the idea quite so obsessively. The progress here looks promising. Can the research be even better prioritized for honing in on the truly most essential?
If the traces a human leaves to posterity are key to what gives meaning to one's life, it's looking okay so far in this instance; it'll look even better if/when Better Living Through Philosophy becomes a final published reality. (Or, to adopt Norton's conceptual scheme, how does this implicit reality become actuality, where an "ought" and an "is" come into unity? And how Hegelian is that conceptual scheme, exactly?) But what comes before and after that final product, research-wise? And how "self-referential" must that text unavoidably be, particularly if it must be placed within the history (and future? and end of history?) of thought?
[something of a precursor post to this one, here]
(What would a fully meticulous narrowing down look like?... Well, darn, I left out Aquinas. Not an expert there. Doug R most likely would most fully know the integrations/differentiations with Rand there. My experience after about 140 pages of Stump's Aquinas (2003) was that it was coming off as distinctively rationalistic - lots of abstract conceptual architecture but hard to tie down to perceptual/concrete experience. Then very shortly thereafter I am re-listening to one of Peikoff's most essential courses where the subject of rationalist polemics comes up, and Aquinas is mentioned right off. Peikoff had made it his mission from Understanding Objectivism (1983) onward to root out rationalism (e.g., 'floating abstraction') in method. Sciabarra identifies both rationalism and empiricism as one-sided/incomplete rather than dialectical, and doesn't include Aquinas among his paradigmatic dialectical thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Rand). For whatever any of that is worth. Oh, and I did read through most or all of this book, which somehow caught my attention. That, along with the fairly extensive treatment of Aquinas in Irwin's Development of Ethics, is about the extent of my Aquinas study so far. And of course the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas awaits...)
Music break
I've just about reached my limits with the current political shitshow (has it reached fever pitch yet? If not, do I want to be there when it does?); what else is there to say that I haven't already covered in the last month? (And is there anyone on the planet who's come close to generating the philosophically-relevant commentary produced in this blog in the past month? And if so, how would that have escaped my attention? Where on the scale of plausibility do I rank "This blog has far surpassed any other commentary outlet in the last month?" Up there with #2 in the plausibility-ordered list in the previous post, I guess? If there's any content in existence approximating rough-draft material for a Better Living Through Philosophy e/book for the ages, aren't all the essentials right there in the posts and (gobs of) links?)
(From here onward does it turn into sardonic comment on the passing shitshow? Is that what it is going to have to take to really drive the message home? Sigh. And what if I don't really do sardonic, or do it well?)
(And should I just go ahead and post that item titled "Schmilosophy" that's been sitting in my draft queue for X number of months now? Only I know what's in there.... ^_^ )
Ideally, I go into supercharged research mode and spend the next X number of weeks/months reading through Oxford Handbooks and whatnot without spending further time repeating the obvious about the political shitshow and its no-brainer solution. Philosophy proper (metaphysics, aesthetics, ... ?) is where I really want to go full-time ASAFP.
My other passion, along with philosophy, is music. My top five favorite music composers/writers are Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Dmitri Shostakovich, Robert Wyatt, and Frank Zappa. My single favorite Zappa composition is probably "Big Swifty" (1972). But going through my head a ton lately are his shorter works, "Sofa No. 1" and "Sofa No. 2" (1975). Listening to these short pieces is best when one can hear the bass as loudly as one can take it (headphones or large speakers, it don't matter).
Ich bin der chrome dinette?
Bonus:
(From here onward does it turn into sardonic comment on the passing shitshow? Is that what it is going to have to take to really drive the message home? Sigh. And what if I don't really do sardonic, or do it well?)
(And should I just go ahead and post that item titled "Schmilosophy" that's been sitting in my draft queue for X number of months now? Only I know what's in there.... ^_^ )
Ideally, I go into supercharged research mode and spend the next X number of weeks/months reading through Oxford Handbooks and whatnot without spending further time repeating the obvious about the political shitshow and its no-brainer solution. Philosophy proper (metaphysics, aesthetics, ... ?) is where I really want to go full-time ASAFP.
My other passion, along with philosophy, is music. My top five favorite music composers/writers are Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Dmitri Shostakovich, Robert Wyatt, and Frank Zappa. My single favorite Zappa composition is probably "Big Swifty" (1972). But going through my head a ton lately are his shorter works, "Sofa No. 1" and "Sofa No. 2" (1975). Listening to these short pieces is best when one can hear the bass as loudly as one can take it (headphones or large speakers, it don't matter).
Ich bin der chrome dinette?
Bonus:
Monday, July 15, 2019
So, is Trump a racist?
 |
| You're a statesman? Speak with wisdom, then, or STFU. |
If anything distinguishes a full-time philosopher from an ordinary civilian, it's the degree of imagination and skepticism a philosopher applies to putative truth-claims.
Let's say, for instance, I test the strongest, most thoughtful representative of the Trump-bashing Democrat/left/"progressive" opposition with the following "offer" of exchange:
I concede that Trump is a racist, and you concede that the Trump-bashing Democrat/left/"progressive" opposition is intellectually bankrupt.
Fair exchange?
I'm not sure, because I'd be "exchanging" a certainty with overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence in its support for a mere probability or likelihood with a contentious body of evidence.
What's more, I don't expect to get such a concession of intellectual bankruptcy from even the "best," most responsive-to-evidence advocate of the Democrat/left/"progressive" segment of the electorate. If they haven't figured it out by now, with all the evidence available, what will get them to concede what I take to be a certainty given all the evidence available to anyone who does his homework?
The very same Dem/left/"progressive" crowd, even its "best" representatives, are dismissive toward Ayn Rand, a towering neo-Aristotelian genius, and their attitude isn't just dismissive: it is grounded in an ideological hubris, arrogance, smugness, conceit, complacency, and a demonstrable ignorance of what Rand said and meant. So when they savagely attack such an unknown ideal hidden under a strawman, do I expect much of anything better when they're going after lower-hanging fruit like Trump?
I regard it as a certainty that the left/Dems/"progs" are the boy who cried racism, and in doing so squandered their credibility and displayed their intellectual bankruptcy.
I'll now imaginatively reframe this topic, by ordering putative truth-claims in degrees of likelihood, plausibility, reasonableness, and so forth. The basic idea being something that I may have gleaned from reading the Oxford Handbook of David Hume more than anything else I gleaned from it: beliefs or probability assessments should be proportional to the evidence. (I take it that classical realism, a philosophical expression of common sense about the laws of nature independent of our experience of them, is not, for Hume, supported in principle by any of that experiential evidence. His common sense is, as I understand it, pragmatic rather than involving "metaphysical" commitments about real mind-independent laws, entities. etc. Different can of worms for another time...)
Now, not everyone has the same evidence-set. Not everyone has done all the same body of homework. But any careful observer of this blog knows that when I make a bold or controversial-sounding claim, I document it thoroughly with links or a process of independent reasoning. So this is my personal assessment based on the homework I've done, which you the reader may not possess. I don't expect you to accept that Rand is a towering neo-Aristotelian genius without having done the inductive homework necessary to recognize that fact. (This is one way of stating Rand's distinction between the objective and the intrinsic. That something is true doesn't automatically and immediately oblige someone who hasn't done the necessary cognitive processing to accept it as true. Truth doesn't passively imprint on the human mind, as is the position of the authoritarian 'intrinsicist.' But if an exhaustive and overwhelming inductive process supports an affirmation of it, then it is objectively true.)
First, the statements in the order they occur to me:
The American Left is intellectually bankrupt
Capitalism is far superior to socialism, morally and economically
Trump is a racist
Trump has a casual relation to the truth
Trump is less worse than the American Left
Ayn Rand is a towering genius
Aristotle is a better philosopher overall than Rand
Chris Cuomo is CNN's most thoughtful host
The current American political conversation is a shitshow
Philosophical education would solve a huge number of American and human problems
Trump is an equal-opportunity offender
Trump says a lot of racially insensitive and inflammatory things
Trump hasn't shown in action that he is, as he claims, the least racist person you'd meet
Trump inspires confidence in his policymaking abilities
Religion or politics without philosophy is a recipe for disaster
The sun will rise tomorrow
Mind is to body as form is to matter, rendering substance dualism defunct
We have free will, i.e., some broad range of behavior is ultimately up to us as agents (we have moral responsibility)
Moral responsibility and free will mean exactly the same thing
There is structural racism in America
The American Left cries racism so much that its credibility is shot
The American Left has a heightened sensitivity to racial and other injustice
Roughly half of Trump supporters are deplorable and/or irredeemable
CBP agents told detainees to drink from toilets
AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Trump's
AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's
Noam Chomsky's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's
Climate change is a serious problem requiring drastic action and soon
Artificial Intelligence will direct us to climate-change solutions
Now, the statements ordered approximately according to plausibility-to-this-here-homework-doer using basic copy-and-move tools:
The sun will rise tomorrow
Philosophical education would solve a huge number of American and human problems
Capitalism is far superior to socialism, morally and economically
We have free will, i.e., some broad range of behavior is ultimately up to us as agents (we have moral responsibility)
Religion or politics without philosophy is a recipe for disaster
Aristotle is a better philosopher overall than Rand
The American Left is intellectually bankrupt
The American Left cries racism so much that its credibility is shot
Ayn Rand is a towering genius
Trump has a casual relation to the truth
The current American political conversation is a shitshow
There is structural racism in America
Trump is less worse than the American Left
Chris Cuomo is CNN's most thoughtful host
Trump is an equal-opportunity offender
Mind is to body as form is to matter, rendering substance dualism defunct
Climate change is a serious problem requiring drastic action and soon
Artificial Intelligence will direct us to climate-change solutions
Trump inspires confidence in his policymaking abilities
Trump says a lot of racially insensitive and inflammatory things
Trump hasn't shown in action that he is, as he claims, the least racist person you'd ever meet
The American Left has a heightened sensitivity to racial and other injustice
Trump is a racist
CBP agents told detainees to drink from toilets
Moral responsibility and free will mean exactly the same thing
AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Trump's
Roughly half of Trump supporters are deplorable and/or irredeemable
Noam Chomsky's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's
AOC's intellectual and moral compass is superior to Ayn Rand's
So, yeah, I could affirm Trump is a racist but only if I were to affirm everything else on the list that appears before that. And if I've done my homework, then I'm basically right about the Dems/left which means they're the ones who haven't done their homework before spouting or implying any number of truth-claims (including the patently ridiculous one about AOC being morally and intellectually superior to Rand - but that's what their intellectually bankruptcy has them committed to by implication if not explicit affirmation).
So where does it go from here? The way I see it, either I have the Dems/left/"progs" dead to rights on their near-astronomical levels of hubris, or I just haven't done my homework thoroughly enough. So, we're basically either an an impasse, or the Dems/left/"progs" need to clean up their act, big time, and they can start with taking in and digesting the second item on the second, plausibility-ordered list above (which I can state with a very high degree of confidence they have not undertaken, not yet anyway). Implied in any number of high-plausibility things said above is that the American Right also needs to clean up its act (starting with item #2, again), although their hubris levels aren't nearly as triggering.
The way I see it, everything about this, based on everything produced to date in this blog, only stands to reason. I need to get around (when?) to the Oxford Handbook of Free Will to be more confident that I've done requisite homework in that area, hence the "ambivalence" above about free-will-related statements. (I'm more confident there is free will than that I know what exactly free will involves. Am I a free-will libertarian or some kind of compatiblist, or is that a false dichotomy? Still too busy working my way through the Oxford Handbook of Capitalism to focus my attention on all that right now. And do I get to the Free Will handbook before getting to the Spinoza and newly-published Karl Marx ones? I still haven't figured out the perfect research program yet, but I'm trying to via some kind of inductive process of elimination. Meanwhile, what are lefty Trump/Rand-bashers focusing their intellectual energies on?)
[Addendum: This country cannot have a rational conversation about racism or who is a racist when there is not common agreement on what is racism. The "side" that has cried racism umpteen times does not agree with the other "side" about this, nor do I think (based on countless observations at this point) that the "side" that has cried racism umpteen times is prepared and willing to have a good faith dialogue with the other "side." The former is too filled with hubris and is too insulated in its own epistemic and values bubble. "He calls Mexicans rapists" or "His proposed border wall is racist" or "He calls black athletes sons of bitches" or "He said white supremacists are very fine people" is shitty so-called evidence revealing more about the thought processes of the "evidence"-mongers than anything; it doesn't matter if they come up with stronger examples, because they degrade standards of evidence when including the far-weaker ones (and treat them as obviously good evidence, no less). Observe what they considered good evidence when they recklessly and unaccountably smeared Kavanaugh. Etc. (etc. etc....) There is (I believe) structural racism in the country, that it is more extensive than the Right is willing to acknowledge but much less extensive and pervasive than the Left keeps crying, and the Left is guilty of ignoring the perspective of black conservatives like Sowell et al. The Left squanders credibility by bitching and whining all the time about how unfair things are, and with its reverse-racism of identity politics and race-based university admissions discrimination. And how they go out of their way to avoid good faith dialogue with the opposition destroys their credibility the most. Their narratives are ludicrous. Just get them to address the arguments and positions of Ayn Rand with a strong Rand-defender present and watch them turn into basket cases, which I absolutely guarantee they do and will.]
[Addendum #2: This video makes a good point! Would that the MAGA-bashers also get the message therein? Or: how about if everyone wises up, ffs already? [Addendum to addendum: this was the next video in my feed. It seems like it's on the right track but at the end Prager says that good people overcome their feelings with the right values. An Aristotelian phronimos (virtuous/wise person) doesn't experience a conflict between feelings and values. What Prager is speaking of isn't virtue proper but continence.]]
[Addendum #3: What if the American Left considers it a worthwhile "exchange" to blow all its credibility by crying racism so much if they get a polity more sensitive to racial injustice in return? But it's a rather unfortunate and unnecessary "exchange," innit? Once all that credibility gets blown on this topic, what about the next important/urgent topic that arises? And what if they've already blown their credibility on these other topics as well (which they have)?]
[Addendum: This country cannot have a rational conversation about racism or who is a racist when there is not common agreement on what is racism. The "side" that has cried racism umpteen times does not agree with the other "side" about this, nor do I think (based on countless observations at this point) that the "side" that has cried racism umpteen times is prepared and willing to have a good faith dialogue with the other "side." The former is too filled with hubris and is too insulated in its own epistemic and values bubble. "He calls Mexicans rapists" or "His proposed border wall is racist" or "He calls black athletes sons of bitches" or "He said white supremacists are very fine people" is shitty so-called evidence revealing more about the thought processes of the "evidence"-mongers than anything; it doesn't matter if they come up with stronger examples, because they degrade standards of evidence when including the far-weaker ones (and treat them as obviously good evidence, no less). Observe what they considered good evidence when they recklessly and unaccountably smeared Kavanaugh. Etc. (etc. etc....) There is (I believe) structural racism in the country, that it is more extensive than the Right is willing to acknowledge but much less extensive and pervasive than the Left keeps crying, and the Left is guilty of ignoring the perspective of black conservatives like Sowell et al. The Left squanders credibility by bitching and whining all the time about how unfair things are, and with its reverse-racism of identity politics and race-based university admissions discrimination. And how they go out of their way to avoid good faith dialogue with the opposition destroys their credibility the most. Their narratives are ludicrous. Just get them to address the arguments and positions of Ayn Rand with a strong Rand-defender present and watch them turn into basket cases, which I absolutely guarantee they do and will.]
[Addendum #2: This video makes a good point! Would that the MAGA-bashers also get the message therein? Or: how about if everyone wises up, ffs already? [Addendum to addendum: this was the next video in my feed. It seems like it's on the right track but at the end Prager says that good people overcome their feelings with the right values. An Aristotelian phronimos (virtuous/wise person) doesn't experience a conflict between feelings and values. What Prager is speaking of isn't virtue proper but continence.]]
[Addendum #3: What if the American Left considers it a worthwhile "exchange" to blow all its credibility by crying racism so much if they get a polity more sensitive to racial injustice in return? But it's a rather unfortunate and unnecessary "exchange," innit? Once all that credibility gets blown on this topic, what about the next important/urgent topic that arises? And what if they've already blown their credibility on these other topics as well (which they have)?]
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