Black conservative Larry Elder on Trump

To state the essential: for "progressives"/Dems/leftists to ignore what Elder is saying here (8/23/2019) is for them to be intellectually dishonest.

It's a sad thing that Elder even had to go through the motions to explain all this.  It's really just common sense.  The "progressives" should have known all this stuff already, if they really were about putting forth intellectual effort to understand ideas different from theirs, rather than being all full of hubris.

Question: do "progressives" routinely ignore black conservatives such as Elder because "black conservative" simply doesn't compute for them and therefore they regard such things as an aberration or anomaly?  If not, then what else would explain why "progressives" routinely ignore them?

[Addendum 9/2: The same group of leftists/"progs" who routinely ignore black conservatives are also typically the same group of folks who routinely and with much hubris and nastiness assume that philosophers don't take Rand seriously - in which case any philosopher who does can be treated as an aberration or anomaly.  What other excuse do they have for routinely ignoring - indeed, seeming to bend over backwards to ignore - the professional philosophers who think there is value there in Rand?  These professors go through years of training, publishing, etc., and then the "progs" take a dump all over them on the basis of nothing.  I'd give these "progs" a lot more leeway and benefit of the doubt, character-wise, if it were not for all their hubris, which is one thing I cannot abide, especially when there are indisputable facts out there, not exactly unavailable to the curious, that refute their bold yet ignorant claims and assumptions.  (They value pleasure over truth.  In the past I, for one, have taken pleasure in bashing Marx and Marxism, but my experience with Rand-bashers tells me that maybe a lot of that Marx/ism-bashing is based in strawmen or other forms of intellectual laziness.  And so I am extending the benefit of the doubt far enough to reserve further comment on Marx until I've gone through the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx [which I anticipate, based on experience with the Handbooks, to be roughly on par with taking a graduate-level course].  (As philosophers go, it would appear that there are at least a dozen or so larger fish to fry, however; the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel seem to have greater impact on philosophers to the present day; see how many articles are devoted to the biggest names at the SEP, for instance.  [Plato, Aristotle and Kant are the ones with at least a dozen articles there, making them solid candidates for biggest fish to fry.])  The closest thing to an Oxford Handbook on Rand right now would be the Blackwell Companion, in publication for 3.5 years now but - as I should have predicted back then, because the phenomenon here is like clockwork - no word yet from the bashers on what they think of it, since they have routinely bent over backwards to ignore the existence of such things.  I don't think it's a matter of its current price, either; at least if they knew about it they would know it's priced highly.  But they don't know about the other, non-pricey, secondary Rand literature listed in the bibliography of the Rand SEP entry, either, much less all the free courses at ARI Campus.  The water is there and the horses refuse to drink and yet they still keep up with the bashing.  (I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, nor do I expect to ever do so.  It's just not where doing one's homework on Rand leads, as the body of secondary Rand literature makes plain.  The bashers might routinely intimidate college freshmen on reddit who express an interest in Rand, but they're not going to make a dent in Salmieri et al.)  It's not unlike bashing the idea of free will without knowing at least the controversies and subject matter one might encounter in the Oxford Handbook of Free Will [which I need to get to...], the bulk of the contributors to which are philosophy professors rather than neuroscientists [who qua such won't provide answers or methods that philosophers have the tools to deliver on this topic].)  The fact that "progs" don't engage in any serious way with black conservatives, at the very time they scream and cry racism about everything in America, speaks volumes in itself.  I'm not impressed with these creatures in the least, and they need philosophy boot camp ASAFP to clean up their acts.  At least then they'd learn about the vice of hubris.  Once again: if leftists/"progs" are so smart, why aren't they pushing philosophy education (for which there are numerous readily find-able and promising leads in this here blog]?]

[Addendum #2: Huemer takes the present-day 'SJW' culture to task for its rampant dishonesty, disregard for truth, etc.  Hint: the dishonesty and disregard for truth is pervasive when it comes to pretty much any topic that crowd talks about these days, whether the subject is racial and gender equality, or whether it's capitalism, Trump, Rand, etc.  What makes it particularly ugly is how academics/scholars, whose very job it is to combat such dishonesty, partake in large numbers in the dishonesty without remorse (as Huemer explains) and with the silent complicity of the other academics/scholars.  How can the entire education system not be poisoned with this mentality when the kind of crap Huemer discusses occurs there so much and with such impunity?]

One glaring bias of the left

Political leftists aren't nearly as intellectually and morally superior as they think they are; indeed, their political views are at least as much the product of personality/psychological quirks or disorders and cognitive biases as many others' political views are.

One key example of this is leftists' hostility toward capitalism, i.e., the system of private property.  On their view, this system "generates inequities," a phrasing that preys upon standard human failings in the area of jealousy or envy, even as the presence of capitalism in a country is typically associated over the last two and a half centuries with rising living standards across the board.  One prominent instance of leftist rationalization in the face of this evidence is typically to attribute this rise to scientific progress during that time, which is to ignore or evading the role that business plays in bringing technological benefits to a market at profitable scale; the rationalization also thoroughly ignores/evades the close connections between intellectual, political and economic freedoms.  Another instance of leftist rationalization is to shift the goalposts and talk about climate change.  One thing you can't and won't get a leftist to do, however, is to address the very strongest arguments for or characterizations of the capitalist system, such as in Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" which is over half a century old now but has received absolutely zilch in the way of response from leftists, which should be a red flag right there.  Heck, over 60 years ago, Atlas Shrugged and the "Galt speech" were published and no leftist has dared to rebut the content of that speech.  Go google till you're exhausted looking for a decent, non-strawman, non-glib, non-intellectually-lazy, leftist rebuttal to Rand.  Guaranteed result: Zilch!  Pathetic.

(One easy way to tell whether the Rand-bashers have a clue what they're talking about is to compare/contrast their characterizations with those from actual Rand experts giving such courses as "A Study of Galt's Speech" and "The Atlas Project."  If the basher doesn't demonstrate familiarity with the "role of the mind in man's existence" theme, then the basher is in no way whatsoever a competent interpreter, and instead is likely a hubristic/pretentious snot.)

There is a clear-cut tie-in between the way leftists treat someone like Rand and the point I'm about to make.

Leftist website vox.com has this story: Female scientists are up against a lot of unconscious bias. Here’s how to fight it.

Quick, close your eyes and picture a scientist.
Did you just picture a man?
There’s a pretty good chance you did. Many of us unconsciously associate the concept “science” with the concept “male,” even if we would consciously reject that association. Unfortunately, the “science = male” stereotype is making it harder for female scientists to get promotions they deserve. Yes, even in 2019.
A two-year study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior examined how 40 scientific evaluation committees decided which researchers should get promoted to plum positions. It found that most scientists on the committees — whether they were men or women, and whether they worked in particle physics or political science — unconsciously associated science with men.
That implicit bias affected their promotion decisions, so long as they didn’t consciously believe there were external barriers (like discrimination) holding back women in science. But, interestingly, the implicit bias did not influence their decisions if they acknowledged the existence of such barriers.
Basically, if someone can say, “Yes, gender bias exists — women really do get discriminated against on the basis of gender,” the simple fact of acknowledging that can undercut their unconscious tendency to discriminate against women. Aware that such bias can exist, they’ll seek to counteract it.

Leftists have a very-well-developed sense of there being biases affecting people's chances for success, but this sense itself is also stunted and biased.  Consider:

Quick, close your eyes and picture an academic professor in the social sciences or humanities.

Did you just picture a leftist?

There's a pretty good chance you did.  Many of us unconsciously associate the concept "academic professor" with the concept "leftist," even if we would consciously reject that association.  Unfortunately, the "academic professor = leftist" stereotype is making it harder for rightists/conservatives to get promotions they deserve.  Yes, even in 2019.

Isn't it blazingly obvious what goes in in the process of academic hiring, promotion, etc., given the unconscious biases if not conscious hubris involved?

Although there are two "sides" of the political spectrum - call them "left" and "right" - a typical college student taking a political science class cannot rationally expect to be provided a fair and balanced picture of what it is that would account for the left/right divide, what accounts for the appeal of rightist ideas to those holding them, what a meaningful left/right dialogue would thereby entail, etc.  The intended or unintended effect of this is to reinforce the leftist biases that formed the ideology of the professors (both current and future, the future ones being the current students).  It would be a surprise if this pathological situation didn't contribute to the toxicity of the political environment nowadays.  Indeed, much of Trump's appeal comes from the fact that many people are fed up with the sort of toxicity and pathology that passes for intellectualism on the left, manifested in a Political Correctness (sic) run amok.  (See the likes of AOC as more or less perfect examples of the pathology at work.)  This toxic PC-run-amok situation further fuels the leftist reaction to Trump and his supporters, basically a doubling-down: "basket of deplorables," "racist" this and that, etc.  It's not like these leftists want to really understand what's going on here, else their whole MO would change to one which respects the process of dialectic with opposing viewpoints.  Jonathan Haidt has rung the alarm bells that this pathology, bias, etc. is basically destroying the intellectual credibility of the left, but it's not evident that the academic left is really interested in seriously listening to the message or in changing its ways.

Yes, even in 2019.  This is more than half a century after Rand's prime, and nearly half a century since Nozick's libertarian treatise Anarchy, State, and Utopia hit the academic scene.  It's not like there are any obvious much less subtle advantages that Rawls' theory of justice has over Nozick's; they're basically competing sets of moral intuitions about the role of the state in people's lives.  Both theories and sets of intuitions have seen lots of challenges and rebuttals over the years - these are difficult subjects where slam-dunk arguments are few and far between - but I haven't seen anything that would compel an unbiased observer to believe that one theory is clearly superior to the other, i.e., I haven't seen a good explanation for why, on the merits, Rawlsians should far outnumber Nozickians.

(We're talking Rawls vs. Nozick here.  We're not even bringing in Rand's neo-Aristotelian arguments [for political conclusions essentially like Nozick's] that revolve around the role of the mind in man's existence and how that entails a uncompromising commitment to a combination of virtue and freedom.  Indeed, I for one don't see what role there is for the state beyond any necessary peacekeeping functions, in a society where Aristotelian virtue is the norm.  And good luck getting leftists of all people to know anything much less speak about Aristotelian virtue; it's all politics with them as a source of meaning and morals.  [Also, as a terminological aside, it makes as much sense to speak of Aristotelian ethics as the paradigmatic virtue-ethical theory, as it does to speak of Kantian ethics as the paradigmatic deontological theory; if we're going to name the usual triad of theories and the deontological one is called Kantianism we might as well call the virtue one Aristotelianism.  If.])

But I don't think you would ever know about the difficulties and challenges involved in the competing theories (libertarianism vs. Rawls-ish liberalism) by looking at the political makeup of the academy.  Nozick's own curiosity was piqued enough by this for him to ask and supply an explanation for why intellectuals (of the "wordsmith," i.e., humanities or social sciences variety) oppose capitalism, and his explanation has enough of a ring of truth to it that it calls for an answer from leftists.  (I am unaware of any such answers; if there had been, wouldn't it they be well-known?)  If academic leftists had the first clue about what is involved in running a business like (e.g.) Amazon - the specializations/expertise differ here, see - they might not be so hostile to the business world and billionaires.  But (of course) it's the very job of academics to identify, uproot, see past, etc. the biases that might affect even their own views of the world.  The evidence suggests that they're just not up to doing this job, which (of course) severely undercuts the academics' claim to a superior intellectual or moral perspective on the world.  They're specialists/experts on certain subject matters, is all.  (The paradigmatic leftist thinker, Marx, could study and write all about capital, for instance, but there is no evidence he himself was capable of running a capitalist or otherwise profit-making enterprise.  Shouldn't this be a red flag *ahem* of some kind?)  My belief is that for roughly every really smart and informed lefty (most likely Rawls-ish) you could find a really smart and informed libertarian, but it's typical leftist practice to be intellectually lazy and give libertarianism (and especially Rand's moral-individualist version) short shrift.  There are two major factors at work that could explain the relatively low number of libertarians in the academy: (1) The conscious or unconscious biases that make the academy a less hospitable and career-advancing place for libertarians and (2) Many libertarian-minded people putting their intellectual skills to work in the business world instead.

For further evidence of my thesis, see the demographic breakdown among those with advanced degrees on pp. 87-88 of Maddox and Lilie's Beyond Liberal and Conservative.  Perhaps the most serious hubris-related problem of leftists is their view that there aren't that many smart people on the right, but this applies especially to their attitude toward libertarians (who tend to fall into the political "right" these days due to their views about capitalism and limited government).  And so:

"What would Nozick much less Rand do about the poor dying in the gutter, or having poor opportunity sets?  Where is their empathy?  We should at least respect if not empathize with one another.  That requires a sense of fairness.  [maybe a couple other main premises or elaboration]  Hence we need a welfare state and/or enforced opportunity maximin, conceptual severing of property rights from human rights, etc."  Does this sound like basically sound reasoning, a basis for political consensus, a homework-doing representation of putatively marginal viewpoints, or anything respectable as a dialectical counter to the libertarian norm that individuals' lives are their own and not the state/collective/tribe/poor/disadvantaged to forcibly dispose of?  Maybe there are good arguments that the state/collective/others do have a right to dispose of individual lives, and/or that private property isn't in any serious way an extension of individual thought/action, and I just missed them?  Maybe I just missed where leftists speak of freedom in addition to their nonstop talk of (in)equality?  This isn't even to address the various conservative arguments about the role of the state in people's lives which leftists routinely ignore - one should distinguish here between hearing and listening - but to which libertarians have a thoroughly reasonable counter along the lines just stated and which has abundant backing in themes motivating the founding of America (which wasn't a conservative movement per se but arguably has the best elements of conservatism including the recognition of the corrupting influence of power, as well as the notion that a sustainably free republic requires a minimally virtuous citizenry).

In short: You may very well be a leftist if you see and decry sexist bias at work in the science professions but not political bias at work in the other fields or walks of life.  This fits quite well with commonsense observations these days about leftist hubris and - what comes to the same thing - the terrible leftist attitude toward real/serious dialogue.  (In the non-academic world, have a look at the almost utterly terrible, awful and pathetic MSDNC channel for what passes for opinion commentary there, at pretty much any hour of the day.  At least unlike CNN, MSDNC doesn't try to hide its biases....)

[ADDENDUM: I shouldn't let it pass without pointing out that hubris comes with costs, one way or another.  Hubris is another word for false pride, as in the age-old saying about pride coming before a fall.  Well, in the case of today's leftists there is not just the "fall" of seeing someone like Trump elected president (much less whatever else is coming to them), but the leftists' hubris about the intellectual and moral superiority of their ideas, combined with their addiction to the political as source of meaning and morals, has them in a very unhappy state in regard to the way things are politically.  In that sense I kinda feel bad for them.  (But it's their own fault....)  It's not just the generally political but Trump in particular that has them very unhappy, because it's not even the real Trump that has taken up space rent-free in their heads, but rather an imaginary and scary Racist President Trump.  (Or let's just say that their case that he is racist is so, uh, trumped-up as to come off as desperate and definitely biased.)  So if the political is all-consumingly important to you, and you're utterly convinced of your rightness and superiority, and yet a political bogeyman is living rent-free in your head, I can see how that would be detrimental to your mental well-being.  I offer no solution to this rather pitiful state of affairs other than a philosophical education.]

[ADDENDUM #2: I've finished the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, so which is the more perfect research move for the next reading, the previously-mentioned Natural Reasons (Hurley) or the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?  I also have The Socialist Manifesto (Sunkara, 2019) checked out, but since the political isn't all-consumingly important to me, I may well skip it for now to focus on the things Hurley and/or Leibniz were focused on.  Just think about it for a moment: Which sort of theme/project would, if carried out really well, most likely do a better job of improving the human condition: a socialist manifesto, or a treatise on better living through philosophy?  Sunkara has implicitly bet on the former.  I'm pursuing the latter.  Perhaps as part of the latter I can skim through the socialist manifesto as part of a sprawling research program, more Aristotle-like than otherwise, and treat it as a foil or contrast case.  For one thing, socialism has a terrible track record at being implemented as its advocates envision.  For another, socialists have historically done a terrible job of engaging in dialectic with their opponents.  And for another, socialism is at root morally evil, stupid and un-American.  And last but not least, soulcraft is a more all-encompassing project than statecraft, and if you attempt the latter without the former, you might well be an idiot or monster.  So skimming the 2019 socialist manifesto would be yet another exercise in seeing just what mountain of good sense got overlooked and just how one-sided the argument is this time around....]

How to criticize Ayn Rand effectively

[This post might serve as a proto-version or background material for a planned future posting or writing on "Rand and philosophy," which would be Part 2 of such a project (a full version of which would involve a comparison/contrast, i.e., integration/differentiation, of Rand with numerous canonical figures in the history of philosophy, and that requires lots of research); Part 1, "Background timeline/players," is already available here.  As if Part 1 weren't enough on its own to give a strong indication of what a bunch of intellectual malefactors Rand-bashers are....]

Perhaps the only way a decent critical commentator on Rand might get some serious traction is to argue that this or that position or argument or claim of hers violates the methodological strictures that she and especially Peikoff (her hand-picked heir) promoted, especially in Peikoff's Rand-authorized 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course (later adapted into his 1991 book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand or OPAR [seminar course]; either the course or the book are pretty definitive statements of the Objectivist philosophy).  (Peikoff's later courses, after Rand's death - especially his Understanding Objectivism, OPAR Seminars, The Art of Thinking, Unity in Epistemology and Ethics, and Objectivism Through Induction get more into the meat of Objectivist method, and are invaluable whether or not Rand was around to authorize them.)

Now, key terms of method in Objectivism are context, integration and hierarchy.  Now, it would be nice to helpfully summarize in the space of a blog post what these concepts are all about, but I don't know how to do such a summary at this point.  But these concepts have (more or less) to do with how to discipline one's mind to arrive at a thoroughly validated picture of the world.  In fact, I can't think of any serious criticism of these disciplinary strictures to be found, anywhere, ever, and the reason for this is a little secret that (unfortunately) few are in on:

The Objectivist methodological strictures are philosophic method proper.

Establishing the proper context for one's concepts, to establish the relationship of that concept within a system of concepts, and to establish the place of a concept within a hierarchy of concepts, and doing this in a fully systematic and disciplined way . . . how does this differ from philosophic method as such?

All I know is, by adhering to the methodological strictures involved here, I've developed the ideas as they've appeared on this blog, covering a rather vast range of subject matter under a relatively few number of philosophical principles.  Indeed, I've come to the rock-bottom, can't-go-any-further stuff, as it were, as it pertains to philosophical education of a citizenry as a major remedy for the ills it faces.  I've arrived at a theme of fundamental importance: Better Living Through Philosophy.  I've developed a sensibility about the study of the history of philosophy that respects the principle of charity and/or Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  (I consider such things a matter of proper application of context-keeping: what, e.g., was the intellectual context within which, say, Spinoza or Kant was operating, and how does that relate to, or integrate with, the intellectual context of other thinkers such as Aristotle or Rand?  And how does one properly differentiate and integrate such concrete particulars as these four thinkers along various axes of measurement?)  I've also arrived at the idea that both philosophic method proper and the Rand-Peikoff themes about method are ways of expressing an intellectual perfectionism, and that such a perfectionist theme is at the core of the philosophical vision of the good life (whatever else is included in or subsumed under this vision).

Now, if the things that Rand and Peikoff say about method are another way of formulating what it is to engage in the method of philosophy as such - in a way that hasn't been explicated by other philosophers in history (else we'd be hearing all about context, integration and hierarchy when studying the history of philosophy) - then acknowledging such a point puts Rand-bashers in a bit of a bind: How can such philosophically negligible figures arrive at such sound methodological principles that are virtually synonymous with philosophic method?

But let's say that Rand-bashers can exercise enough good faith to figure out that these thinkers aren't the philosophically negligible lightweights the bashers pretend them to be, and they're still interested in criticizing Rand.  Well, what better way to put Rand and her defenders on their heels than to show that something Rand said or argued fails to properly adhere to her own methodological advice?  Then they would be effective in doing so.  But note here that if "A is A" - that if Objectivist method and philosophic method are one and the same thing - then all they're really saying is that Rand, in failing to adhere to her own stated methods, is also failing to do philosophy properly (or as well as she could do it).

My advice would be for the Rand-bashers to give up their bad-faith anti-Rand position and go right for the jugular - that, e.g., Rand's argument for a standard of value or a system of virtues doesn't comport with her stated method.  They would be doing the more productive thing which is to acknowledge (a la the Dennett/Rapoport Rules) where Rand is strong (indeed, very strong) before getting to their criticism.  They would also have before them the task of figuring out how it is that, if philosophic thought is indeed properly all about keeping context and respecting hierarchy, philosophers other than Rand/Peikoff hadn't formulated philosophic method in those terms.  (All I know is, framing one's thinking methods in those terms has been very helpful to me in thinking philosophically.  This is a genuine experience that no amount of Rand-bashing from someone else can erase.  So to hell with the bashers, they haven't a clue, although they have it within themselves to get one.)

So basically to criticize Rand effectively you also have to concede that there's something about her/Peikoff's thought and writing that's unassailable, and that this something is very fundamental to her thought.  This is an example of going where the argument leads, even if one initially thinks that where the argument leads (that Rand/Peikoff are right on philosophically fundamental matters) would be a real bummer, a blow to one's low estimate of Rand.  So, whether or not the Rand-bashers are prepared now to follow the argument here where it leads, one can raise the legitimate question: would they ever be prepared to follow the argument here where it leads, as intellectual honesty would require?  Are they seriously prepared to entertain the suggestion that they simply got it very wrong about Rand?  Are they seriously prepared to acknowledge that intellectual perfectionism leads them to recognize that Rand endorsed intellectual perfectionism as a way of life?

And, heck, once they grasp in basic form the idea that Rand's entire ethical system - her concept of egoism - basically has this intellectual perfectionism as its formal characteristic, where does this leave them qua Rand-bashers and qua intellectually credible commentators?  (An alternative route in which they attack the principle of intellectual perfectionism itself doesn't sound viable; how would such an attack not be self-defeating?  Put another way, philosophy always buries its undertakers.  As anyone who's thought this through carefully knows, philosophy is foundational to the hierarchy of knowledge which is why the conceptual hierarchy of wikipedia leads one ultimately to philosophy.  We also have Rand herself emphasizing this point in her own discussions of philosophy itself, and in releasing a lecture/article as well as a book under the title/theme "Philosophy: Who Needs It."  Why the f isn't a critical mass of philosophers writing books and articles along these lines, as is arguably their moral imperative to do given the implications for human flourishing and/or respect for humanity?)

On the merits, the prospects for Rand-bashing at any time in the future are exceedingly slim to none.  (This says something not so good about the intellectual character of Rand-bashers.)  This leaves room only for the usual ordinary give-and-take forms of criticism, but even there, given what I'm saying above, it vindicates Rand/Peikoff on fundamentals and necessarily narrows the scope of what can be criticized (since we already saw above that you can't coherently attack intellectual perfectionism, context-keeping, etc., which cannot be separated from Rand's egoism as understood the way a Dennett/Rapoport-caliber critic would understood it, i.e., as she understood it).

I take issue with Rand's largely polemical approach to the history of philosophy, and I'd say this is a very ripe area where one can take issue with Rand using all the proper tools of philosophy and/or her own method.  What I'm not clear on is how one could prove that her case against Kant is lousy and also have this be a critique of her own, intellectual-perfectionist egoism.  It really strikes me as an area where the things she says are not tied inherently to the fundamentals of her system, the way (e.g.) her new concept of egoism is tied to its intellectual-perfectionist fundamentals.

(This parenthetical turned into a lengthy digression: Follow the argument where it leads?  That's an egoistic attitude in Rand's framework.  It's in one's rightly-understood interests - one's right desires - to have right opinion about the world.  Does such a concept of egoism turn out to be vacuous or uninteresting?  Is that the best critique we might arrive at?  Why not call the intellectual-perfectionist philosopher who experiences no conflict between feeling or inclination/desire and virtue (this harmonious condition would be virtue proper, and not incontinence or continence or akrasia) a shmegoist?  How does egoism/schmegoism not then line up with morality proper, thereby making the "egoism" concept superfluous, not explanatory of anything, or something like that?  What work does the concept of egoism do here?  IOW: why not just call it "schmegoism" instead, and define a schmegoist as anyone who fulfills his rightly understood interests?  I think it has to do with Rand's tight formal connection between actor and beneficiary in the sense that the actor is the rightful beneficiary of activity directed toward the good life.  So if universalizability (Kantian or otherwise) is a formal constraint on good-life-directed activity, then acting in accordance with such constraints would fulfill the actor's rightly-understood interests and the actor would be the beneficiary (in some non-vacuous sense) of this universalizability-respecting action.  Now, I've made a published case that Rand's argument for rights involves a form of universalizability-reasoning; she employed it in her own writings as a matter of what a logically consistent actor does.  At the same time, the case I made also holds that Rand's egoism itself involves such universalizability reasoning, as a matter of context-keeping - what are the requirements for life qua man, any individual man and not just John G., say - and that the common grounding requirement for life qua man - something about the ability to direct one's own intellect in the characteristically human act of thinking, free of external compulsion - points to both egoism (Randian form) and to rights.  This all becomes very tightly bound up: egoism grounds rights and respect for rights informs what it is to be a (Randian) egoist, and to escape any circularity here we need to acknowledge something about formal characteristics of a good human life (namely, freedom) that is fundamental to the case for both (Randian) egoism and rights.  The very point of a code of values is to achieve happiness and to achieve happiness you need to life according to the requirements of life qua man, and both happiness and life-qua-man are roughly synonymous with rational self-interest, but when we fill this in with substantive content we get (among other things) rights, which philosophers had traditionally said is not an outcome of egoism (traditionally construed).  If we use Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia or self-actualizing, the social component of one's individual flourishing becomes integral to the good-life picture.  In any event, it seems of crucial importance to understanding why Rand uses the term "egoism" that it specifies the individual actor as the proper beneficiary of that actor's efforts - that the social components of the flourishing life redound to the benefit of the actor.  It's just that this flourishing life not only doesn't look like egoism traditionally construed (and it definitely doesn't, otherwise Aristotelian ethics would traditionally be identified as an egoism and not just a eudaimonism) but it also incorporates others' interests in such a way that it becomes something of an issue why one would bother to use the term "egoism" where such putatively egoistic behavior involves taking a great interest in the self-actualizing of others.  Rand would probably put in terms of there being a community grounded in virtue (and virtue in essence is, or is expressive of, intellectual perfection).  Galt's Gulch might be such a society.  But then we're rather far removed from any of the usual lines of strawman-like criticisms of Rand as an advocate of some sort of asocial or atomized "individualism."  We basically have an Aristotelian ethics updated to specify the proper beneficiary of eudaimonic activity as ultimately the actor herself and in which the actor makes free judgments based on her own unique and individualized hierarchy of values as to how to "fit" the (eudaimonic) interests of others into her value-scheme.  The objectivity of human values requires that values be freely chosen based on the actor's hierarchy of values, which excludes the "altruistic" alternative in which some alien set of values is demanded or imposed (by force) on the individual irrespective of how those values are supposed to integrate with the actor's own.  The "altruistic" alternative is a form of intrinsicism where the "values" to be acted upon are imposed from without, i.e., without respect for the context of the individual's own knowledge and decision-making.  Here we are back to that basic methodological concept, context.  This stuff really is all tightly interconnected in Rand and its appeal should be plenty clear to those who do their homework and think this through.  Just from this post there are leads to any number of closely interconnected concepts: context, life qua man, judgment, intellectual perfection, interests, objectivity, virtue.  It just rings to me at this point that without some well-developed understanding of the interrelationship of all these concepts, one is unlikely to understand what Rand was really up to in her philosophical writings.  You might as well glide your eyes over the pages of her writings without integrating any of it.  I'm coming to think - with the aid of some secondary scholarship - that Hegel's system has a similar feature whereby the web of (perhaps mutually-supporting) conceptual interrelations in his system can't be approached in a casual manner with any expectation of serious grasp or understanding.  The further complication in Hegel's case is his abstruse presentation - its needless abstruseness is in evidence by the fact that secondary scholars seem to be able to translate his verbiage into more accessible terms.  So . . . can someone like Hegel much less Aristotle be construed as an egoist in Rand's terms?  I guess it all comes down to whether or not one understands egoism in terms of the beneficiary-criterion spelled out above with reference to the individual's own rationally- and hence freely-integrated hierarchy of values.  So applying the "schmegoism?" challenge and pursuing that where the argument leads, do we still get anything like a serious critique of Rand that should lead to some kind of dismissive attitude toward her work?  We certainly don't seem to be going down any line of careful argument or critique that we'd expect from a Rand-basher, and we certainly seem to end up tying a lot of Rand's ethical concepts back to formal characteristics like intellectual perfectionism and context-keeping, which no one can coherently reject.)

So, to sum up, I think to criticize Rand effectively one must by necessity make a number of concessions about Rand's greatness as a thinker, in such a way that she enters squarely into the conversation with the likes of Aristotle and Hegel (would that she weren't such a shallow Hegel-basher?) and with the rest of the philosophical canon on some issues of fundamental philosophical importance.  As opposed to the usual criticisms of Rand of downright terrible quality that are all over the internet, what we should end up with instead is a treatment of Rand by philosophers much as they treat the other philosophers in the canon: with careful, context-respecting, principle-of-charity commentary.  In other words, the kind of effective criticism of Rand that might be made is almost nonexistent to date.  Nozick and Huemer deserve credit for proceeding as philosophers should proceed.  (Note a key feature in common here: they're libertarians, assessing the strengths of various different arguments for libertarian ideas.  So they have a motivation that is probably not to be found all that widely among non-libertarian philosophers.)  Rand-bashers typically will cite Nozick and Huemer without acknowledging the responses to their arguments.  (Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" doesn't address the way actual Objectivists reason about things, so there's a rather glaring problem there as far as criticism goes.  As things I've said above indicate, Rand's egoism entails, among other things, universalizability constraints and even empathy, if you can believe it.  The Rand-basher will take Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" argument as the final word, as though Objectivists haven't come up with any kind of rebuttal in over 20 years.  The Rand-basher will also "somehow" fail to recognize the existence of the Den Uyl and Rasmussen rebuttal to Nozick, which is quite effective as pushback goes.)  But at the very least the Nozick argument and the published rebuttal to it are an example of how people of a philosophical sensibility can argue about the merits of Rand's ideas, and that's even without touching upon the methodological core of Objectivism (distilled more or less in chapter 4 of OPAR, if a single published resource is what you're looking for).

Rand's writings stand outside of the philosophical "tradition" or "canon" in certain ways; they stand especially outside of the academic mode of philosophical writing with its abundant footnotes and whatnot.  (I readily imagine referees calling Rand to task for her controversial yet undocumented characterization of, e.g., Aristotle's view about value-justification in "The Objectivist Ethics."  But as a paper delivered at an academic symposium - which it was - it does overall the job it's supposed to do, and it presents a serious alternative to the dominant ethical positions of the time (1961), enough so as to place "The Objectivist Ethics" within the neo-Aristotelian, virtue-ethical canon that was nearly nonexistent in 1961.  I can understand the professionals at the time not taking up Rand on her virtue-ethical alternative, given the relative unfamiliarity to them of the conceptual structure of virtue ethics.  And while Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) gets plenty of acknowledgment and credit for being a seminal virtue-ethical essay, I don't get the impression that Anscombe's essay was widely credited or embraced at the time.  (Did Veatch's Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) get much traction either?)  But now it is canonized after the philosophical community has had time to come to grips with it.  Well, the philosophical community has had plenty of time (given the three-year proximity of the two essays, although the essentials of Rand's argument were originally published before Anscombe's, in a 1957 fiction book) to come to grips with Rand's argument as well.  Those in the community don't seem to have come up with a compelling refutation of it, or a reason to dismiss it as unserious.  But there are a relatively few of those in the community (again, listed here) who have come to analyze Rand's argument and find merits in it, and even to debate its merits in published forums such as the first volume of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series.  So the attention and discussion is happening, just not all that much.  But this notion that there's some vast divide between the respective merits of Anscombe's and Rand's articles is little other than a myth peddled by people with anti-Rand biases.  The differing amounts of serious attention paid to these two articles among academic philosophers might have to be explained by something other than their respective merits.)  Rand was by an large hostile to how the academy was doing philosophy, the main exception being her relationship to Hospers.  (Whatever exactly the academy was doing wrong in Rand's view, I don't really have a good idea - my best guess is that it supposedly indulges in methodologically-inferior "rationalism" or play with concepts not rooted in concrete, readily accessible and practical reality -  but evidently she didn't think Hospers was part of that problem.)  So for a philosophical community not already committed to Rand or even the Aristotelian tradition to take up a figure such as Rand would require overcoming certain barriers, to communication or otherwise.  Time and priorities might even dictate more or less the course of action many philosophers are on already, such that they're more inclined to focus their energies and interests on Aristotle's own writings.  The Aristotelian virtue-ethical tradition has seen a revival in academia, after all, which is all for the (ahem) good.  It just seems to me (and to many Rand-fans who are academic philosophers) that this revival can be further sped up and enhanced by incorporating Randian insights into the virtue-ethical framework - e.g., her emphatic intellectual perfectionism which ties into her core methodological commitments; or, the specific virtues (e.g., independence, integrity, productiveness) Rand sets forth as essential.  But the wheels of research turn slowly; how exactly does a philosopher go about setting the virtue-ethics tradition in relation to, say, the themes of Parfit's On What Matters?

And here I was supposed to be getting back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza already.  I've done written enough in this one post as it is.  Long story short, you basically have to invoke Rand's greatness in order to deny it, so you might as well affirm it (and then, if you want to critique her, make a case showing in effect that she might have been greater, although that opens up another can of worms; let's just say for now that if Rand had had a Plato-caliber teacher, for purposes of perfecting the art of dialectic, of course, she may well have been as great as Aristotle; given what she did have to work with as teachers/associates and circumstances go, what good reason is there to think she didn't do her very best?).

Going where the argument leads

I was thinking recently about the debates (rather limited ones, given the nature of all the entities concerned) I've had with Objectivists online who adopted the Rand/Peikoff line against Kant; the debates concerned the idea that Rand was wrong in some major ways about Kant (most obviously the claim that he was "the most evil man in mankind's history" - remember, this is Immanuel Kant whom Rand is talking about here).  The main point I usually try to make in these debates is that if you apply the principle of charity to his writings (see also: Dennett/Rapoport Rules) in the very same way that Objectivists rightly demand that Rand's commentators or critics apply to her writings (which with rare exceptions they never do), then you probably won't get the same sweeping conclusions about Kant that Rand/Peikoff did.

For example, a Kant-bashing session that makes light of his sharp dichotomy between acting from inclination and acting from duty, but doesn't bring into consideration his ideal of a Kingdom of Ends, much less other foundational and difficult things that informed Kant's argument, doesn't conform to the principle of charity or the Dennett/Rapoport Rules.

A series of polemical attacks that make minimal specific reference to or quotation from original materials, is unlikely to conform to the principle of charity or the Rules.  Unless I'm mistaken, Rand made one direct quote from Kant in the entirety of her anti-Kant writings, and it is a quote that any Kant scholar would tell you requires a context of understanding that Rand's polemical attack doesn't demonstrate a grasp of.  (Amazingly enough, when I make reference to serious Kant scholars, the Kant-bashing Objectivists don 't think this carries any serious epistemic weight.  It's as though the Kant scholars' expertise on the subject should have no bearing on whether one's interpretations of Kant are sound, even though the very concept of expertise has to do with whether someone has come to a sound grasp of the subject matter.  But an appeal to expertise is perfectly legitimate in its proper context, just as it is perfectly legitimate for me to point out that serious Rand scholars don't take 99% of criticisms of Rand seriously, since the quality of those criticisms - usually based on a sloppy "understanding" of Rand's words - is so low.  The appeal to expertise is nothing other than an appeal to: "This is what people who've studied the subject indepth have come to conclude, but of course this is defeasible if you come up with a better interpretation than theirs, with - of course - specific reference to a canonical data-set about that topic."

Or, to take the most extreme claim about Kant that Rand makes - that he is supremely evil - it would help her case if she could specifically respond to the arguments Kant presents in the Antinomy of Pure Reason, a kind of lynchpin to his argument that we don't have epistemic access to any supersensible realm.  But I've never gotten a Kant-bashing Objectivist to address what's going on in the Antinomy portion of the first Critique.  This should be as much of a red flag as when a Rand-basher can't or won't deal specifically and head-on with matters especially of method that longtime students of Objectivism (and of courses like Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism, much less the Rand-endorsed 1976 course The Philosophy of Objectivism) are versed in well enough to know how the method-issues drive everything else in Rand/Peikoff's writings.

(And there's no good, non-self-defeating argument against Rand on these methodological issues.  Sciabarra's method-focused and exhaustively researched 1995 book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, shows how seriously Rand should be taken in the context of the history of thought, and no rebuttal of its central thesis has happened or could happen.  You just don't mess with dialectical method or systematic context-keeping without being self-defeating, is all.  [The criticisms of his book from the 'orthodox' Objectivist faction surrounding Peikoff didn't address the substance of that the methodological theme but rather Sciabarra's placement of Rand in intellectual history.  I'm not going to say that these criticisms were in the spirit of the principle of charity or the Rules, either.])

Part of the issue here is - to borrow a formulation from Maverick Philosopher - that polemics, while often appropriate to the adversarial realm of the political, are not appropriate to the properly collaborative realm of the philosophical.  Unless there is uncontrovertible evidence that a supposed philosopher is presenting dishonest arguments, then the proper approach isn't polemical.  (And there is no way around applying thoroughly the principle of charity or the Rules to arrive at the conclucion that an argument is being presented dishonestly.  Once one does arrive at a conclusion that an argument is being presented dishonestly, then one should also drop the identification of the dishonest arguer as a philosopher; such a person is more accurately called a sophist.)

But here's the problem I'm leading to here: Many, many "rank and file" folks in an intellectual movement are not philosophers either by profession or by temperament.  Their loyalty is often to the ideas of the movement, sometimes even to the leading personages of the movement.  It's no accident that the leading academic philosophers of Objectivism have also not gotten in on the Kant-bashing act.  Not only is it a matter of professional suicide if one took the Rand/Peikoff line on Kant, but just as a matter of standard academic protocol where the charity principle and the Rules are (by the nature of the discipline) encouraged to a maximal feasible extent.  (Note: in actual practice, the adherence to these standards are not consistent, uniformly and fairly applied, etc.  Much as academic philosophers are lovers of wisdom, and pursue intellectual perfection, that is no guarantee that they will have achieved such perfection.  Some academic philosophers are Rand-bashers, i.e., taking the route of hubris and mean-spiritedness over withholding judgment where they are ignorant [and demonstrably so].  Indeed, those who adopt such a hubristic and mean attitude are, to that extent, not even being philosophical.)

On the subject of Kant I'll put it this way: there isn't an academically-respectable path from Kant's texts to Rand's sweeping vilification of him.  There's also the issue of specialization and priorities: Rand scholars in academia are usually too focused on obtaining an adequate grasp of Rand's ideas and related issues to attain expertise on Kant; unless they have a publishable criticism of Kant the prudent thing for them is to refer to the Kant literature, SEP entries, etc.  And I don't expect any time soon to see Rand scholars publishing on Kant in a way that supports Rand's claims and conclusions about him.

But with a non-philosophical person - you'll find tons of these in politics within a stone's throw - such prudence, withholding of non-expert judgment, principle of charity or the Rules, etc., are not standard practice.  And applying this to certain Objectivists/Randists who also display cult-like behaviors: they are more interested in adhering to Rand's claims/conclusions about Kant than they are about where the arguments on this matter would lead.  If they lead to showing Rand being seriously wrong in her claims/conclusions about Kant, that may threaten the adherent's perception of Rand as a flawless reasoner.  (If I say "Rand was a tremendous reasoner on a whole host of subjects, but..." the adherent is likely to have a knee-jerk reaction along the following sort of lines: "this is what Rand-bashers do; they offer a fig leaf before they go about trying to discredit Rand."  I've met this reaction myself, notwithstanding all the Rand-promoting I do.  It's kinda ridiculous....)  I mean, given the integrated nature of human cognition, how can someone be really good about some things but not about others?  How would someone so meticulous in formulating her own ideas on the basis of exhaustive induction and integration manage to slip up when it comes to representing what other philosophers have said?  Note the key distinction here: formulating one's own ideas, vs. representing others'.  I don't think it's hard to figure out how a disconnect might happen here.

Aristotle said of his teacher Plato that he loved him - but that he loved the truth even more.  That's my basic attitude toward Rand.  I have found Rand's system to be a tremendous engine of mental and philosophic integration.  That doesn't mean that her anti-Kant polemics are worth much of anything, are conducive to learning and insight, etc.  If there are good anti-Kant arguments out there, they're likely from others who've put in the research and made publishable arguments.

So if you're thoroughly willing to go where the argument leads - no matter where it leads - then that's a sign you may be a philosopher.  If you're not willing to do so, you may be any number of other things: dogmatist, partisan, polemicist, follower, ideologue, loyalist.  And as much as this thought began with Randian Kant-bashers, it's the Rand-bashers who may actually be among the worst of these un-philosophical types.  At least Rand herself, as per what her philosophical and ethical principles dictate, put forward the maximal effort to get things right, which matters more in this context than actually getting things right.  Error is one thing, evasion (which includes intellectual laziness) is another.

So there are at least two distinguishing features of the philosophical mindset that I've highlighted today (the first feature having been brought up here):
1. Being guided in life by a vision of the good (over and above what is pleasurable, fun, career-advancing, family-building or loyalty-encouraging [think of the Corleone family as a contrast case], powerful, popular, etc.)
2. Being willing to go wherever the argument leads

In this post I took at least one argument where it led: if one is (rightly) dismayed by the usual Rand-bashing tactics, one should see the same red flags in the way Rand and Rand-devotees bash Kant.  And there seems to be a whole lot of people out there who are willing - indeed eager - to take exception to one but not the other, i.e., they're not willing to follow the argument where it leads.  The underlying problem here is exemplified in all the hypocrisy in politics we all know about (and "it's the other party that's hypocritical, not mine" is itself part of that very hypocrisy, thereby rendering all the much less clear and distinct one's understanding of the phenomenon of hypocrisy one is otherwise inchoately aware of).

Anyway. doesn't a whole lot of argument ultimately lead to, say, advocacy of philosophy for children, and doesn't that lead to advocacy of philosophy for everyone and ASAFP?  It's where I keep ending up time and time again, after all.  (But I'd be willing to go wherever the argument leads, even if it leads (somehow) to a rejection of these things; right now the idea of that happening sounds like a real bummer but how would it be a bummer if that's where the argument leads?  (And what about some argument that (somehow) shows that one shouldn't take an argument (or just any argument) where it leads?  Hopefully such an argument contains coherent advice on whether to follow that argument or not, since incoherence is a real bummer.)

I'd like to get back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza now.  (I still have Hurley's Natural Reasons to get to, as well.  The wheels of research grind only so fast....)

[Edit: To take another example of Kant-bashing from Rand/Randians: she attributed to Kant the view that "because man's consciousness has a specific identity, it is an agent of distortion, i.e., that identity is the disqualifying element of consciousness: it's equivalent to saying that man is blind because he has eyes, deaf because he has ears, etc."  Now, it would have been helpful had Rand tied this characterization to something, anything specific in Kant's texts, for some frame of reference, because I for one am at a loss as to where it is that Kant made such a line of argument.  I've actually had defenders of Rand's Kant-bashing suggest that there isn't a problem about leaving the reader guessing here, that it's just a matter of common knowledge about Kant that this is an aspect of his system.  [Turn the tables and apply the same kind of crap to "common knowledge" about Rand's ideas that aren't really knowledge, and you might see how I lose patience with this stuff.]  I mean, I'm quite familiar with Kant's (in)famous distinction between the 'thing in itself' and its appearance or manifestation which may have a character different from the 'thing in itself' - and indeed we even seem to get such a logical absurdity in his system as a cause that is 'phenomenally' determined while 'noumenally' free (in which case the causal character of appearance and of the thing in itself are in direct conflict with one another, not merely that the character of the thing-in-itself cannot be said to have the range of qualities or determinations that the subject-conditioned appearance has; alternatively, to say that consciousness adds or guarantees qualities or determinations that we cannot attribute to the thing-in-itself is not the same as saying that consciousness generates or might well generate determinations that run counter to the character of the thing-in-itself; to say that noumenal freedom in the face of phenomenal determinism is a matter of "faith" does not resolve this problem, since not even "faith" can square a circle: either we are free or we are not).  But because consciousness has identity, Kant somehow/somewhere claims that this is what gives rise to the appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy, and that consciousness isn't merely an agent of conditioning of its object but of distortion?  Something tells me that a critique of Kant's infamous distinction/dichotomy from someone like Hegel would be much more useful and informative.  Something tells me that Kant scholars pay attention to critiques other than this apparently idiosyncratic one from Rand about "identity disqualifying consciousness."

Here's another one: Rand and Peikoff can't get their stories straight on the relation between desire and duty in Kant.  Rand claims: "An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action."  (This screams of strawman.  The issue of benefit might be said to be incidental to Kant's criterion of moral value - expressed in the various formulations of the Categorical Imperative - but I don't think a single Kant scholar in the history of the planet would endorse or take at all seriously the interpretation about a benefit destroying the moral value of an action.  Heck, in application of the CI, benefit comes back into the picture.  It's just not foundational as the moral criterion for the CI, however.  But you can certainly do something that benefits yourself, as a matter of respect for your own humanity, and Kant might even argue that this makes your action morally obligatory, a matter of duty.  And Kant is plenty clear that a desire as such doesn't give rise to a moral imperative - that the desire has to be conditioned or constrained by the CI.  At the very minimum there is a distinction shared by Rand and Kant and pretty much any moral philosopher in history, ever: the distinction between desire and right desire.  There's no way Rand endorses a desire "out of context"; in fact she might describe this as "whim-worship.")  But then, later, Peikoff says this: "In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind."  So Peikoff concedes that "in theory" for Kant an inclination or desire doesn't destroy the moral value of an action.  And so as if to seemingly save Rand's extreme claim to that effect, he introduces the "in practice" part, although that depends on the latter portion of the "in theory" part, where he makes the claim that for Kant an inclination can only be incidental and not part of the moral person's motivation.  I suppose this reconciles the two characterizations that on their face don't seem to say the same thing (either desire or inclination destroys the action's moral value or it doesn't...), but it's fishy, and it still suffers from the strawman problem.  There's also that whole matter of Kant's not using the term "happiness" the way that either Rand or the Greeks tended to use it; "flourishing" and "satisfaction of inclination" have different meanings, but Kant was going with the latter and it's not clear that Kant was well-versed in the Greeks on this point; details on this are in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (Whiting and Engstrom, eds., CUP, 1996).  I guess the best that might be said for Rand/Peikoff's polemics here is that they make a clear and bold stand against any moral theory, whether such a theory was in fact endorsed by Kant or not, that would tell us that inclination or desire is antithetical to moral motivation or that happiness is irrelevant to morality.  So if Kant endorsed such a theory, then he is a bastard of sorts.  Well, that's illuminating.  I mean, who actually does endorse such a theory (under a non-strawman interpretation, of course)?  Something tells me that moral philosophers tend to go out of their way to avoid ending up at such a psychologically implausible notion of moral motivation, or to avoid being mistaken for advancing such a notion.  And of course none of the Rand/Peikoff characterizations of Kant account for the actual source of Kant's appeal and/or influence in ethical theory, which has a shit-ton more to do with the CI (both its grounds and application) than with some inclination/duty distinction which is really just another way of making a distinction - between desire and right desire (the latter usually grounded in reason) - endorsed by all moral philosophers.  I just don't see anything in Rand's anti-Kant writings that moral philosophers can make use of that furthers their understanding in any way - unlike with her main writings on ethics, virtue, method, etc.  See more on this in my subsequent post.]

CNN: "Trump's Racist Tweets"

Part of Trump's appeal comes from people's disgust with what he calls Fake News.  He has said things to the effect that "the fake news is the enemy of the people."  What do the fake-news outlets do in response, as if they were on Trump's payroll and going out of their way to prove his point?  They twist his words into: Trump considers the free press his enemy.

I've written before about CNN's outright, undiluted fakery when it came to Trump's "very fine people" comment on the Charlottesville incident, deliberately (how could it not be?) ripped from its context in which he was referring to (supposed) non-white-supremacists who were there to protest the removal of statues.  As far as I'm concerned, this and numerous other incidents lead me by cognitive necessity and sanity to discount, doubt or disbelieve things that I see asserted on a network such as CNN.  CNN has made it rather abundantly clear - especially after Trump's becoming president - that in its political coverage it is in the business of advocacy and not reporting.

Here is perhaps the most obvious case in point to date:

Now, Trump's tweet about the "Squad" of leftist freshman (freshwoman?) Congresswomen contained plenty of inflammatory language but the language the left/Dems/"progressives" and their media allies seized upon to the exclusion of everything else, including Trump's original point about loving one's country, was his "go back to the countries they came from" language.  Now, there's a case to be made that this "go back to where you came from" language is racist in content (whether it is in intention) but here's the thing: there's controversy here.  Trump's point - I assume his own perspective is relevant here as to what his point was - is something about the "squad" not being sufficiently loving of America.  This makes it a matter of controversy, interpretation and opinion whether it is appropriate to refer to the entirety of the tweet as racist.

If you don't see this as a matter of interpretation and opinion, then there's no point in my trying to reason with you further here.  As a matter of indisputable fact, today's leftists/Dems and much of the rest of the country are not in agreement on what constitutes racism, racist speech, hate speech, and the like.  This is precisely why the left's cult-like chants of "Trump's racism" are so ineffective and fall on so many deaf ears.  The un-deaf-ears they fall on tend to react in terms of how idiotic and ill-supported the chants are.  The whole process here feeds into a vicious escalating cycle: The left calls Trump (and a lot of other things/people) racist, that leads the opposition to be increasingly disgusted with the left, which increases the likelihood that the left will react with more charges of racism, and on it goes.  Observers from outside of this vicious cycle might note just what a stupid and indeed vicious cycle this is, just more of the same "politics as usual" (except it really isn't; the political situation in the USA today can be likened to a Red/Blue Cold War, when this hasn't been the case in the past; I'll just refer you to many blog entries of mine under the "leftist losers" tag for which "side" I think is way more at fault for this phenomenon, and I've grown tired of commenting on all the new examples that illustrate my point, the essential trend having been overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly established in any honest and thoughtful reader's mind).  (The only issue here is just how intellectually bankrupt the non-left is, compared to the left.)

Now, it's one thing for activists, pundits, and opposing politicians to call Trump a racist or to claim that he says racist things.  That's all fair game in politics and their arguments and credibility should be assessed on their merits.

It's another thing for a purported news outlet to throw the term "racism/racist" around the way the activists/pundits/politicians.  Given that it's pretty obvious that people in the country don't agree on what persons or statements merit being called racist, a news outlet should be extra-careful about how it respects and reflects such a difference of opinion/interpretation.  The charge of racism is itself toxic enough that a news outlet needs to take cognizance of this.

CNN has determined that it's a matter of fact that Trump's tweet is racist.

How can the producers of CNN hold such an opinion honestly?  And if they don't know well enough to know that such an opinion cannot be held honestly, that points to a different set of problems.  I'm going on the assumption here that CNN's producers know better.  They might try to rationalize their editorial decisions on the grounds that this is a matter of fact, that in the age of Trump matters of opinion need to be treated in some cases as matters of fact, that truth needs to be spoken to power, etc.  But that's a piss-poor rationalization, because of the simple confusion of fact and opinion/interpretation.

Now - and it would sure be nice if this could go without saying, but these days the toxicity levels are too high - there are clear-cut cases of racism and they could be factually reported as such.  But in the case of Trump there is simply too much there that's ambiguous and controversial.  I (for one) am not convinced that Trump is a racist, much less that his anti-Squad tweet was racist.  And no amount of cult-like "if you deny Trump is a racist that makes you a racist" argument from intimidation - basically an attempt to coerce agreement from a mind that hasn't been swayed by the arguments - is going to sway me from that.

CNN's dishonest editorializing-as-news seems premised on the notion advanced all over the place by leftists nowadays that there isn't controversy here, that it is a matter of established fact that Trump is a a racist, and that those who don't see it as they do are part of the (racism) problem.  This mentality sounds more like that of a cult than of a group of people ready and willing to engage in a good-faith, mutual-understanding dialogue with those they disagree with.  This cult-like mentality becomes more obviously nasty and destructive if it is adopted by a purported news organization.  It not only destroys or diminishes their credibility on this subject, but on everything else (at least when it comes to political coverage).

It's not even so much an issue of what appears on CNN per se, but of the time slots in which the editorializing (masquerading as news) appears.  It's one thing for Don Lemon in his opinion-show time slot to call Trump a racist.  (At that time slot Lemon is opposite Laura Ingraham on Fox.  I don't find myself devoting my valuable time to watching much of either show in that time slot.)  At least Don Lemon's show, or shows during his time slot, are marked clearly enough as opinion programming.   But it's another thing for "Trump's Racist Tweet" to appear in the CNN headline banner during The Lead with Jake Tapper, which represents itself as a harder news program.  (Am I wrong?)  And this is hardly one defining incident; it's just one that came up readily via the usual internet searching after seeing "racist tweet" all over CNN's headlines for days (so it wasn't hard to find a visual example with those very words).

Is it safe to say, then, that the credibility of CNN's political coverage is pretty much as shot as MSDNC's?  I mean, I don't even bother with MSDNC here because their bias is so obvious and the intellectual quality of their punditry so low.  But CNN still touts itself as "the most trusted name in news."  (I don't think so.  This isn't the previous generation's CNN.)  And none of this is to excuse the problems one could readily point to on Fox News (or, what doesn't appear on Fox given its selection of topics and facts to cover/report, a selectivity exercised by the other two as well).

Given all this, it strikes me as reasonable to say that when CNN has a banner saying or implying Trump is a racist, it is engaging in the very sort of Fake News of which the president speaks.  If there's one thing that Trump speaks about with credibility, it's how dishonest and biased the media coverage is.  But the reason Trump speaks about this with credibility, when he speaks about so many other things without so much credibility, is that this is pretty much a no-brainer that anyone can see (anyone, that is, whose cognitive and critical faculties aren't destroyed in a cult-like fashion).  So when a regular CNN-viewer manages selectively to notice all the examples of bias on Fox but then doesn't see the problem with CNN, we're not talking about an honest opposition to Trump here; it's bias and fake news/narrative combined toxically with hubris.  But one naturally expects better from the CNN producers than from the rank-and-file CNN viewers; so what's the CNN producers' excuse?

"Keep America Great"

I may be blogging less overall (trend-wise) as my 'Better Living Through Philosophy' research project kicks into higher gear.  (Currently working through the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza and I have the Oxford Handbooks for Leibniz, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Virtue high on my reading list.) I intend to (by and large) avoid polemics going forward, and focus on development of the positive vision.  (Maybe it's a coincidence that both "polemics" - a term with roots in reference to war, with Polemos as the divine personification of war - and "politics" both begin with "pol.")

For various reasons, politics is an arena in which humans' irrationality, mean-spiritedness, intellectual atrophy, etc., are on a pretty full and ugly display.  Politics either helps make people uglier or reflects an ugliness looking for an outlet, or both, and it has a hell of a lot to do with the way of handling the fact of human disagreement - physical force - in a manner that falls short of war proper.  But the activity of political polemics is called that for a reason; it resembles warfare in an arena where reasonable and good-faith disagreement are not to be had.

I would say Trump sets a pretty low bar for what counts as reasonable and good-faith in politics.  It would be appalling were an entire political wing of the country double down on the things that elevated Trump to power - in other words, to go below the bar Trump sets.  So as much as Trump might disgust one, there may well be other political actors and factions out there who have gone out of their way to be more disgusting, more irrational, more dishonest, more anti-America and anti-freedom.

Anyway, about Trump: his new '20 campaign slogan, "Keep America Great," makes the obvious assumption that within 3 years Trump has turned a 240 year old nation that wasn't great into a 243 year old nation that has attained greatness.  The dishonesty of this should be so evident on its face as to not require explanation.  It isn't even a question of whether his actual policy agenda has been good much less made America great "again," it's a question of whether it's even plausible that a country could go from not-great to great within 3 years.  It's telltale evidence that hardcore Trump supporters are more akin to cultists than to rational interlocutors accountable to fellow citizens.

America's founding generation made a great nation (with major flaws), so we have some historical evidence of what it takes to make a country great.  What would keep that country great is if its People do cultural maintenance, which requires (if nothing else) intellectual maintenance.  To the men who founded America, the notion of a country going from great to not-great or vice versa, within a 3 year time span, would have been ludicrous.  (Unless, that is, I'm thinking much too highly of the founding generation.)

I've pointed out numerous times that pretty much all the key figures of America's founding generation were members of the American Philosophical Society.  One of them was president of the APS at the same time he was president of the USA.  What work was done at the APS is less significant in this context than what membership in it reflected about the mindset of the key founders.  Philosophy is (and there are different ways of making this same one point) about intellectual perfection, as an organizing principle of right human living.  There is something about the philosophical disposition that has the philosopher being guided in life by a vision of the good, with a more thorough and systematic understanding of "good" that goes above and beyond the goals/aims of a less reflective life.  (That life and especially human life is a goal-directed phenomenon doesn't tell us about what the standard of value is.  If that standard is something like "life qua man, or the conditions of living proper to a rational being," then to fill that in with substantive content, you need philosophical study.  At the very minimum, even so much as confronting and grappling with the standard-of-value subject is a gateway into thinking about life philosophically, which is (I think) to think about the good life.  (In an unexamined life, the good might well be thought synonymous with, say, pleasure.  In an examined life, the concept of virtue comes to the fore.)

What does any of this have to do with Trump's delusional/dishonest campaign slogan?  (Again, an alternative political faction would have to be pretty darn disgusting, irrational, etc., for Trump to look preferable by contrast.)  It seems kind of far removed.

Well, in a sense I guess it does.  There certainly does look like a very large disconnect between philosophical talk of the good life and the act that Trump and his cult (and many of the rest of the political actors) are up to.

In another sense, it's not far removed.  Because the connection here is that founding generation and APS thing.  We have pretty good historical evidence that perhaps the most momentous founding of a nation in history was directed by a group of avowed wisdom-lovers.

It's not just about better living through philosophy.  It's about better politics through philosophy (which may or may not turn out to be anarchistic - that has to be examined...).  But it's not just about better politics.  As I mentioned above, the irrationality, ugliness, injustice, etc., in human life comes to a head in politics (and whatever in politics that leads to war) but it makes about as much sense to think that this irrationality is confined to politics, as it is to think that a country's greatness can make a dramatic 3-year turnaround (absent a change in something really fundamental, such as, oh, the country taking as long as 3 years to adopt the no-brainer philosophy for children program).  (The only thing that would keep philosophy for children from being by far the biggest no-brainer of all time is a philosophy-for-everyone program.  As with new-language-acquisition, however, it may be more developmentally efficient to begin the program with kids.)

(And how many knockdown, drag-out no-brainers in life can you think of?  Well, if you're having a hard time with that one, you can always compare/contrast with philosophy for children as a reference point.)

Back to the non-parenthetical line of reasoning: irrationality and injustice in human life stems from ancient programming; humans have a capacity for reasoning while at the same time having a ton of evolutionary baggage that - absent a program for putting this baggage in its proper place - impedes the pursuit of intellectual perfection.  And all this baggage infiltrates all sorts of aspects of human life.  (In psychology, this problem is referred to as cognitive bias, and these biases are rampant (and generally less so among philosophers worth anything).)  Outside of politics, we have bad lifestyle choices, lack of organization, etc.  Modern human life creates demands that weren't there in the primitive human condition.  How are the homeless people in the big CA cities these days supposed to navigate the modern environment given its demands on cognition, effort, etc.?  Not to say that human life in its primitive condition was easy, but it seems like it was simpler: the habituating/imprinting necessary for human life to happen in its primitive condition is not the same habituation/imprinting necessary to live in modern human society in, e.g., big-city CA.

America can be only as great as the people in it.  Modern life introduces complexities that didn't exist in the primitive human condition, in which case humans need to adapt to function optimally today.  The main locus of adaptation is within the human cognitive faculty, not the least important of which is the rational/intellectual center of thought.  To make humans better enough to make America better enough, philosophy as an organizing discipline is key.

Hence, from this standpoint of understanding where we need to go, "Keep America Great" is a slogan-level red flag of intellectual bankruptcy and irrationality.  Just in case you were wondering whether anything about Trump (qua political leader) was a red flag before, "Keep America Great" should remove any doubt.  Once America again begins electing the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, then we talk about keeping America great.