Demo rats and impeachment: much worse than partisan hypocrisy

I wrote a post on the general topic of Demo rats and impeachment just yesterday, but I want to focus in on one essential point I raised there to highlight how monstrous these creatures have become these days:

This is the group of creatures, remember, whose standards for impeachment (of their political opponents, that is) is such that they were rushing to call for impeachment of Kavanaugh on no good evidence whatsoever (all the while letting a Demo rat president get away with obvious perjury - how intellectually and morally perverted is that?).  They can't be trusted.

The Demo rats' treatment of Kavanaugh was beyond the pale, clearly so, enough to disgust even some Dems who apparently didn't speak out loud enough against the obvious perversity.  If ever the 'rats destroyed their intellectual and moral credibility, it is because of their reckless attempt to destroy Kavanaugh.

What the current crop of filthy, disgusting, toxic slime known as the Democratic leadership in Congress and their enablers in the media and elsewhere consider to be justified, is the following:

Impeach and/or destroy someone without any credible evidence
and
Let someone else get away with obvious perjury

In other words, knowingly and deliberately punish the (presumed) innocent and let the (clearly) guilty go unpunished.

This isn't comparing like with like and then pointing to a partisan double standard.  This is more sick and twisted than that.  It's one thing to be a partisan hypocrite; it's another to uphold utterly opposed standards of evidence and punishment on purely partisan grounds.  That makes the destroy-Kavanaugh crowd unqualified evil-doers, people who have no business having power in a sane and civil polity.  Morally speaking they are criminals operating under the pretense of doing hardball politics.  They are beyond the pale.  They are sick and twisted fucks.  They are not owed respect, deference, the presumption of good faith, the presumption that they are decent human beings.  The proper attitude to take to the sort of people who adhere to the even-worse-than-double-standard above is one of distrust and enmity.  They are enemies of the good and decency.  They contravene the spirit if not letter of the Constitution they swore to uphold, when they so extremely pervert law and justice (whether for partisan ends or anything else).  They are thugs and should be regarded as such.

Sen. Graham put it in less harsh tones:

If this is the sort of outright perversity that is being normalized, enabled, abetted, excused, not spoken out against, etc., on today's American left, then that speaks even worse about them than everything else I've been criticizing them for up to now.  This puts them into a different category of evil.  There is no good reason whatsoever to concede intellectual and moral credibility to any of the left/Dems/"progressives" who failed to do the right thing during or after the Kavanaugh episode.

If anything, it is the likes of Scumbag Kamala Harris who should be impeached, formally censured, or otherwise punished for fraudulently using the judicial process as a weapon of personal and political destruction.  In no uncertain terms is she and her behavior fraudulent: this career prosecutor declared that she believed Kavanaugh's accuser before hearing the defense's side.  Other leading Demo rat politicians (including Warren, Biden and Sanders) are on the record affirming that Kavanaugh's accuser was credible (and Kavanaugh not credible) enough that Kavanaugh's career should be ended.  (Of course, they accuse Kavanaugh of lying under oath to the Judiciary Committee, in which case the mere usual ol' double standard is at play: they let Clinton get away with perjury but found Kavanaugh's "unacceptable."  Actually, it's obvious Clinton lied; is it obvious in any way that Kavanaugh did?  So even there it's not comparing like with like.)  They fed and enabled media and grass roots hysteria about Kavanaugh's "credible accusers."  And they repeated the same vile act, recklessly rushing to raise or renew calls for impeachment within minutes of "new" allegations coming to light just in the past month that turned out to be a dud along with the others.

This is dead-to-rights stuff if ever there was any.  These creatures don't even meet minimal standards of basic decency.  They can't be treated as co-equals in a search for truth because they sabotage the very underpinnings of that.  It is intellectual and moral bankruptcy, if not outright malicious evil, not to recognize and repudiate this sub-decent, beyond-the-pale-even-for-politics perversity for what it is.  And that appears to be the intellectual and moral state of the American left today.  On the merits their intellectual and moral credibility are utterly destroyed.  It doesn't please me to say such things, but it's where the totality of the evidence inexorably leads.

A simple either-or-or (re "educators" and "white privilege")

Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege."  Can this be expected to:

(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way

"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1).  Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are?  Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?

I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes.  The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.

They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.

Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?

The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.

Am I missing anything here?

I'm going with (2).  Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward?  If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?

[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones?  The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks.  No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly.  See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]

Maverick Philosopher on Peikoff on the Supernatural

Maverick Philosopher (Bill Vallicella; hereafter MP) goes after Peikoff on pretty much the same topic about which he's gone after Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff before.  (I've discussed MP's take on Rand before, and there's even plenty of GOP-bashing in that link just in case anyone was wondering whether I reserve my political bashings for Demo rats.)  The topic - and MP's area of specialization/expertise on which he has published extensively - is theology (and metaphysics).

I'll try not to repeat what I've said in my earlier discussion linked above.  I'll point out, if I haven't already, that it wasn't Rand/Peikoff's views on metaphysics that brought me to enthusiasm about Objectivism.  In specific branches of philosophy my interest in Rand is stimulated most in aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy, and in epistemology with special emphasis on matters of method.  It's these matters of method that are covered most extensively in Peikoff's courses, in particular Understanding Objectivism (1983), The Art of Thinking (1992), and Objectivism Through Induction (1998).  The topic of God is hardly discussed at all in these courses, so surely his points of emphasis/focus are elsewhere.  His Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (or OPAR [1991], which is quoted by MP, and which faithfully represents what can be found at the Ayn Rand Lexicon, all the material in which is vetted by Rand herself even if OPAR is not).  By Rand's own attestation (e.g., pp. 666-7 of Letters of Ayn Rand), Peikoff is eminently qualified to teach about her ideas, and it is these above-mentioned "advanced" courses in Objectivism that the actual, flesh-and-blood, longtime students of Objectivism have been immersed in for decades, and of which Rand-bashers are wholly ignorant.  (Let's just say that these long-time students are not on the same page with the Rand-bashers about a whole lot of things Rand and Objectivism, including especially the fundamentality of cognitive and philosophical method to "living as an Objectivist.")

MP makes criticisms of the passage from OPAR about the that are entirely understandable given Peikoff's wording (and without further elaboration from Peikoff that might counter objections from theologians like MP).  MP goes on to say:

It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence.  But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously.  Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.

"Most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously" is considerably toned down from previous MP postings on Rand/Peikoff.  Some years ago, it was "Rand is a hack."  Or, perhaps, "she argues like a hack."  Or, perhaps, "She argues like a hack on a subject about which I am an expert."  Or, perhaps, "philosophers don't take Rand seriously."  Now, it's "most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously."

I'm supposing that MP has toned down the belittling of Rand in no small part due to efforts by yours truly (through blog as well as non-blog means of communication) to show how and on what subjects she is being taken seriously by professional philosophers, including those without (well-known) pre-existing sympathies to Rand.  There are now three volumes from the Ayn Rand Society (not to be confused with the Ayn Rand Institute, as I've personally witnessed Rand-bashers ignorantly confuse the two) in which Objectivist professional philosophers debate non-Objectivists.  The latest volume, for instance, has (now UC-Boulder philosophy professor) Michael "Why I am Not an Objectivist" Huemer taking Rand seriously enough to devote some of his valuable time to covering (in spite of the proliferation of countless philosophy articles and books that no one human could read more than a fraction of, as he pointed out elsewhere).  There is an exchange between him and the supposedly "intolerant jerk" Harry Binswanger, on the anarchism-vs-government debate, a debate that orthodox Objectivists had supposedly treated as closed as of Rand's 1963 article, or supposedly ran away from upon encountering the subsequent arguments from Rothbard, David Friedman, the Tannehills, et al.  (One might note that none of the three aforementioned were professional philosophers.  It might also be noted that for many hardcore "students of Objectivism" such as myself, spending their time mentally "chewing" the Peikoff courses, the anarchism-vs-government debate isn't high priority unless or until the preconditions for a liberty-respecting society are in place, and that deeper issues of method are much higher priority for both that and for personal happiness.)

Another example that illustrates my point rather boldly is the way philosopher John Hospers approached Rand's ideas.  The place of Hospers in the "Rand and philosophy" timeline is discussed here.  I note there that: (1) Hospers was a well-respected member of his profession, including having served a term as president of the American Society of Aesthetics; (2) Rand's ethical ideas made a deep and lasting impression on him; (3) Rand basically converted him to libertarianism; (4) Hospers wrote a glowing tribute to Atlas Shrugged in 1977; (5) Hospers thought Rand's ideas serious enough that he encouraged her to publish her ideas in professional journals; (6) Hospers wrote a comprehensive guide to classical music listening (which I would have found more useful than I did had I not encountered classical music some years before discovering his guide), which by itself shows he's not exactly a lightweight on aesthetics; and last but not least, (7) in his aesthetics text, Understanding the Arts (1982), he quotes from Rand once, but the quotation pertains to the most central and fundamental of concepts in Rand's theory of art, sense of life.

Now, I can only (safely?) assume that had Hospers encountered some writer on art theory other than Rand who discussed sense of life, he would have mentioned or quoted them.  But sense-of-life appears to be a distinctively Randian contribution to understanding the nature of art.  So, is it Rand's or Hospers' fault that "most philosophers find it hard to take Rand's aesthetics seriously"?  AYFKM?  The best explanation I can think of here is that Rand's Romantic Manifesto is a grand work in aesthetics, the product of a lifetime of thought by a philosopher-artist, and that "most philosophers" have (for whatever reason) failed to recognize its merits.  (The first two chapters of The Romantic Manifesto are titled "Philosophy and Sense of Life" and "Art and Sense of Life," BTW.  The most advanced essay in that collection of essays is "Art and Cognition" from 1971....)

There are other examples which can be gleaned from my linked Rand-and-philosophy timeline.  In The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984), did editors and contributors "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen somehow do an inadequate job of showing how and where Rand should be taken seriously?  Their chapter on Rand's metaphysics, "Ayn Rand's Realism," shows what they take to be Rand's carrying on the Aristotelian torch.  Heck, Rasmussen is a Catholic philosopher and theologian, so if MP is looking for a conversation with a philosophically-trained Christian Rand-enthusiast on theological matters, he can contact Rasmussen and (probably) learn more about how or why, e.g., a Christian philosophy professor could also be a Rand-enthusiast.

Suppose, however, that Rand/Peikoff produce arguments about God that theologians or metaphysics experts find unimpressive, and one were to draw the conclusion that if such unimpressive arguments are the fruit of Objectivist method (in those courses the non-Objectivists much less the committed Rand-bashers know next to nothing about), then the method must not be all that impressive.  (See, I've anticipated a counter-point that MP might bring up.)  I've pointed out above about how these issues of method are key to Objectivist epistemology (and I take chapters 4 and 5 especially of OPAR to be distillations of the methodological subjects Peikoff covered in so many of his courses).  The concepts of context and hierarchy, especially, are central to Objectivist method.  And there's no guarantee that one will apply these methodological principles correctly in all areas, a point I made in my post about how to criticize Rand effectively.  Heck, one of my own takeaways from the constant admonitions from Peikoff about keeping context is that to engage in polemics or debate generally, one needs to establish a grasp of the opponent's context, which is to make every effort to characterize their positions as they would characterize the positions themselves.  (The Rapoport/Dennett Rules, in other words - rules flouted 100% of the time by Rand-bashers, BTW.)  And that's one big issue I take with Rand's philosophical polemics, as I've made well-known.  (I think her political polemics are spot-on; for instance, compare her treatment of the Comprachico "educators" with their most loyal [ideologically-inbred] spawn two generations onward in every left-dominated institution you look at.)

As to the bearing of Rand/Peikoff/Objectivist method on the subject of God and the supernatural, the connection isn't all that hard to draw, although I don't draw it in the realms of metaphysics/existence or theology, but in the realm of epistemology/knowledge.  They are hardcore anti-Platonist Aristotelians who base all knowledge, all context and all hierarchy on what first comes through the senses.  The notions of God and the supernatural - notions set over and against nature, to use Hegelian terminology - don't have a place in knowledge according to Rand/Peikoff.  There isn't an induction from the range of perceptual concretes that will get us to God (and Rand/Peikoff emphatically don't agree that the timber of humanity is irredeemably crooked...).  But I'll mention, again, that a neo-Aristotelian like Rasmussen surely has some different thoughts about that.  In the interests of engaging fully in the art of context-keeping, there should be rigorous back-and-forth between Objectivists and theologians (any neo-Aristotelian ones, especially) as and when personal contexts (interests, priorities) dictate.  Perhaps the Ayn Rand Society will get around to that.  In the meantime, their focus has been on ethics (Vol. 1 of the Society's Philosophical Studies series), epistemology (Vol. 2), and politics (Vol. 3).  The upcoming fourth volume is on the theme of "Ayn Rand and Aristotle," and that's the one I'm really anticipating very eagerly because, well, Aristotle isn't exactly a lightweight - along with Plato and Kant he has more SEP entries by far than the rest - and you have experts on both Rand and Aristotle, academic scholars no less, who think there is a high degree of similarity between these two thinkers.  A considerable number of these experts are pictured right there on the Ayn Rand Society website.  (The late Allan Gotthelf had the distinction of being both a leading scholar of Aristotle('s biology) and a long-time associate of Rand's.)  Past steering committee members not pictured/listed there include Douglas Rasmussen and Tara Smith.  And you can bet that Prof. Smith knows all about Rand's unique place in the (Aristotelian) virtue-ethical tradition which has seen a recent revival in academia.  (When Rand wrote "The Objectivist Ethics" in 1961 - presented at an academic symposium, BTW, probably with Hospers' encouragement - virtue ethics was hardly even a thing at the time, as ethics was dominated by Kantian and utilitarian schools of thought, along with non-biologically-based accounts of value or goodness.  Rand's theory is (and was presented as) a bold alternative to those schools of thought.  Nozick took up the Randian argument as late as 1971, only for the "Dougs" to show in 1978 how Nozick missed the Aristotelian character of Rand's argument.  See again the linked Rand and philosophy timeline for the links.  Is it that Rand's argument was spotty or shoddy and that trained academics like the Dougs had to step in to buttress the case?  Or does it go to show that some philosophers have identified things in Rand that other philosophers missed, and that those who have identified those things also happen to be strongly Aristotelian?  Gee, ya think?  How else does Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (2006) get written?)

As much of the preceding makes evident, my issue here isn't so much about the quality of this or that argument or conclusion but rather about how philosophical inquiry by trained practitioners should be conducted.  There are leads available to be pursued, and they're not exactly obscure or lightweight.  I haven't even mentioned the lead that is Sciabarra's exhaustively-researched work (including the university-press published Journal of Ayn Rand Studies of which he is lead editor).

Now what I would like to know is how, despite all the available non-obscure leads, there is still so much ignorance and hostility toward Rand/Objectivism out there.  The underlying problem there goes well beyond anything specifically Rand.  The problem hits home for someone like MP/Vallicella who finds there to be so much ignorant hostility toward theism in light of available philosophical theology (and he perceives Rand/Peikoff to be one source or instance of such).  It's a serious, huge, perhaps monumental problem to be overcome.  It is a problem which humanity on the whole has not yet developed a shape of consciousness (to wax Hegelian again) sufficient to overcome.  Perhaps humanity as a whole has missed the point of Plato's Republic all this time, in spite of the not-so-obscure lead in the form of philosopher-ruler Marcus Aurelius (to which no politician I know of today remotely compares).  But it is a problem I have been documenting exhaustively in this blog for diagnostic purposes.  The problem would be solved if a critical mass of humanity were to bring the art of dialectic to a high level.  And guess what: given the leads I've noticed, homed in on, and pursued, Rand's philosophy - and the Aristotelian tradition in general - has a particularly valuable role in providing the tools to practice dialectic at the highest level.  (Hegel and Aristotle, anyone?  Come on, already, ffs.  [I found out about this book in particular by searching multiple university library catalogs for books on Hegel, BTW.  It's available in e-format, even.  Insatiable curiosity carried to the highest level, anyone?])

(Impeachment) How stupid do Demo rats think we are?

I'll boil it down to the essential point from the get-go: It's transparently obvious that the Demo rats are going after Trump for his phone call with the Ukrianian leader because he is a Republican.  Let's hypothesize that Trump or another Republican president clearly lied in a deposition and obstructed a grand jury inquiry.  The Demo rats would be calling for impeachment right off the bat.  But when a Demo rat president does (and did) what I've just described, they refuse to impeach.

The Demo rats must think we've forgotten about all that.  Perhaps they think the rest of us think the way they do, and hence they think that we are as intellectually and morally bankrupt as they, in fact, are (as I've documented exhaustively, overwhelmingly, and incontrovertibly at this blog, under the democrats and leftist losers tags).

To Demo rats, the Republicans went after President Clinton not for perjury and obstruction of justice, but "for sex" and "for lying about sex."  That's all their defense ever amounted to, and it's transparently pathetic.

When Mrs. Clinton, as Secretary of State, set up a private server without so much as seeking approval (which she would not have gotten) from the State Department, and mishandled 110 classified documents, and erased over 30,000 emails under subpoena, the Demo rats made every effort not to understand what all this entails (i.e., that she should have been stripped of her security clearance if not also be subject to legal consequences).  Instead, it was all about "her emails."  Had it been a Republican doing this, they would have screamed bloody murder (as they're doing now, even though they're the boy who screamed bloody murder and lost all credibility as a result).

So we should dispense with any pretense that the Demo rats are approaching their impeachment inquiry of Trump in good faith, or with any more solid understanding of the law than their opponents have.  Demo rat politicians in particular are not very bright people, and they obviously don't give a damn about consistency or principle.  But suppose we come to expect that from politician-creatures.  That doesn't explain the intellectual and moral meltdown of the rest of the American left (in particular academia and the media), as documented exhaustively on this blog.

Being the unimpressive bunch of hubristic fools that they are, they will find a way to screw up their impeachment moves.  Their calls for the impeachment of Justice Kavanaugh are evidence enough that they don't pursue such things in good faith, or in even a remotely solid grasp of principles of justice.  If ever you wanted to see Demo rats reveal their true colors when the chips are down, look at their completely discreditable (and discredited) treatment of Kavanaugh.  (On a more intellectually demanding level, see how they treat Rand: nothing but misrepresentations, distortions, and outright smears, when they aren't culpably ignoring her.)

This is the group of creatures, remember, whose standards for impeachment (of their political opponents, that is) is such that they were rushing to call for impeachment of Kavanaugh on no good evidence whatsoever (all the while letting a Demo rat president get away with obvious perjury - how intellectually and morally perverted is that?).  They can't be trusted.

The Demo rats in Congress are desperate.  They don't have a solid candidate to put up against Trump in 2020, and they're not guaranteed a recession.  Their media interference-runners spent upwards of 2.5 years peddling useless speculation about a Trump-Russia collusion narrative.  We still don't have so much as a hint from Demo rats as to how Trump's supposed obstruction of the Mueller investigation is any worse than what President Clinton did.  Again, Clinton clearly lied under oath, dead to rights and everything, when asked whether he was ever alone with Lewinsky.  Where is that with Trump, with the Ukraine phone call or anything else?  The Demo rats don't care.  All they care about is that Trump is some malevolent force that has to be opposed and destroyed by any means they think they can get away with (that don't also destroy themselves in the process . . . and good luck with that, 'Rats).

Demo rats have intoned time and time again that "our democracy is under threat."  It tells you a lot about the mindset of the 'rats that they keep characterizing our political system as a democracy when it is in fact a republic.  Individual rights, separation of powers, the unalterable 2-senators-per-state rule reflecting the fact that it's the United States of America and not some People's Republic, and all that.  You won't hear these ignorant clowns these days talking about the primacy and centrality of freedom to what makes America what it is.

(Sen. Warren "has a plan for that," eh?  Well, I've got a link for that.  Every which way you look I have a link showing how pathetic and loathsome these Demo rats have become.  You want dozens of links in one paragraph?  I've got that, too, with so many "etc" points linked one loses count just of the "etc"s.)

The nature and quality of today's Demo rats is such that they will screw up this impeachment effort in a way that will only further reveal how loathsome, vicious, willfully inept, etc. they are, and they will repulse the American people all that much more.  The question will inevitably come up, over and over, as to how they let President Clinton get away with what he did, how that is any less worse than what Trump did, and similar questions, and they will have no honest answer.  They must think we are not merely stupid, but dishonest (like them) as well.

They will screw this up, mark my words.  From a diseased tree, you will get diseased fruits.  Left-wing academia and media will degrade themselves further than they already have, as well.  There is no winning by them to be had here when they are losers (on the merits) by nature.  They are a bunch of people made most unhappy by their having replaced religion with politics as their source of meaning, their utmost confidence that they are intellectually and morally superior to the irredeemable deplorables clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, and yet they face what they take to be a racist president (Oh, I've got links for that, too; as any ultimate philosopher who is a staunch enthusiast for context and integration would have at the ready) who must be more corrupt than the Clintons ever were (lol!).

I anticipate posting, in the not distant future, with the following post title: "Demo rats shit the bed, yet again."  Because that's all they quite-predictably do nowadays, just like Rand-bashers always do whenever they think they've finally got their "gotcha" goods on Rand.  [Aside: What if I told you (holding out red & blue pills) that pretty much every negative story you've ever heard about Rand is a misrepresentation, distortion, or outright smear, starting with the roundly discredited Brandens and those who were and are all too eager to take the Brandens' portrayals at face value?  (Barbara Branden describes this exchange as one in which Rand got angry and shouted at "the girl" who had nonetheless professed that she was now all grown up intellectually.  With the visual evidence of the exchange right in front of us, how credible are Ms. Branden's summary account of countless other relevantly similar interactions?  And Ms. Branden is easily the less dishonest of the two Brandens....)  What if the author of "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult" acknowledged in private that it was fictionalized (although it's clearly not represented in print as such)?  At some point the examples of this sort of thing become countless and redundant, at which point induction against Rand's critics is warranted, just as my inductive generalization about the overall intellectual condition of the left/Dems/"progressives" is warranted based on countless and increasingly redundant examples.]

As always, clues as to the philosophical antidote to all this intellectual and moral bankruptcy can be found all over this blog.  It's not that I even mind having left-wingers and Democrats (as well as right-wingers and Republicans) around to disagree with; rather, I'd rather that we have Much Better Things to Disagree About . . . Through Philosophy.  If we're going to be arguing about who is the more corrupt weasel, Trump or the Clintons, or whether it's Demo rats or Republicans who are more intellectually and morally bankrupt, shouldn't it be as a means to arriving at a better grasp of the preconditions for an (Aristotelian) end of history?  How about we put all this childish crap behind us and discuss/debate how to teleologically measure the value of artworks, and/or the role art plays in eudaimonia and/or the meaning of life, instead?

(Silly me, upon visiting the SEP's "meaning of life" entry this time around, I immediately went to the bottom of the page to see the "related entries" section, and those are: afterlife | death | ethics: ancient | existentialism | friendship | love | perfectionism, in moral and political philosophy | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic | well-being .  What led me to do so this time?  Well, to see what connection there might be between eudaimonia and the meaning of life.  And ancient ethics, perfectionism and well-being (as well as, subordinately, friendship, love and, yes, death) bear on the topic of eudaimonia, pretty much under different names.  Norton develops these connections at great length and beauty of exposition.  Internet hyperlinks are there to facilitate mental integration, but philosophy can and does optimize that integration process.  Like, duh?  I don't like seeing potentialities going to waste, see.  So, while today's Demo rats are particularly shitty at mental integration, being the solutions-oriented soul that I am, my solution to their current situation speaks for itself.  For one thing, they're really going to love Rand's ideas once they actually get to know them. ^_^ )

[Addendum: I comment in the context of Prof. Huemer's facebook post on this, thusly: "Indeed, if impeachment is the correct way to go, and if Demo rats' blatant hypocrisy over matters of impeachment is exposed as a result, then I'd have no problems with that. The morally correct and just outcome in that event is that Dems are discredited, along with Trump's removal from office. What I don't care to witness is the 'rats somehow getting away with their obvious partisan double standards."]

Ideological inbreeding isn't progressive

How far today's most-unimpressive American left has fallen since the days of a true progressive like the philosopher John Stuart Mill.  The spectacle today is one of a bunch of hubris-filled folks refusing to take the ideas/arguments of non-lefties seriously, usually because they have a lousy grasp of what the non-lefties advocate.  (See the preceding Mill link; as one glaring instance, lefties today are utterly awful and deranged when it comes to accurately depicting the views of Atlas Shrugged's author.)  You can't blame the "increasingly business-like models" of the universities as they cater to "woke" customer-students, as anti-market leftists try to rationalize it; since how did those students get "woke" in the first place?  Via the non-business-like public schools, run by "educators" with predominantly left-wing ideological frameworks (and this goes also for tenured university professors who aren't so beholden to the universities' bottom lines).

I've written previously about a San Francisco school board choosing to waste $600K on removing a "harmful" mural depicting history.  (Should the school fall short by $600K for genuinely educational purposes sometime in the future, they shall elicit no sympathy whatsoever from this commonsense blogger.)  To the irredeemable deplorables in flyover country clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles, that sounds pretty idiotic if not bewildering, but it's all too clear that the left-inbreeders don't care what those outsiders think.

Now we get more along the same lines: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.  (Tucker Carlson discussed some main points of this article on his show yesterday, but my attention was drawn to this Atlantic piece by Google News, of which I am a regular user.)  This piece details the way in which, since roughly 2014, the "educators" have made a fervent effort to systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the NYC public school system in the name of, you guessed it, "diversity" and its cluster of associated "progressive" values.  They have gotten really obnoxious about it, too.  For instance, without informing parents, the "educators" removed the "Boys" and "Girls" signs from the bathrooms, leading to unpleasantness for the students who eventually went back to using the bathrooms they used before.  (After the parents found out, the school had to come up with a better solution.  "After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral."  Gee, these progressive woke geniuses charged with "educating" the kids couldn't figure out such a common sense solution on their own?)

This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

If you can't tell the difference between satire and the real thing, that should be cause to reconsider the real thing.

So, how could one tell a satire of today's unhinged American left and Demo rats apart from the real thing?  Apart from having knowledge of their histories, how could one tell idiots like AOC apart from a GOP plant?

As a result of ideological inbreeding, many prominent members of the American left today are lightning quick to identify controversial statements as racist.  It's not enough to oppose racism; you have to agree with them on what qualifies as racism, and you'd better agree pretty quickly, because, well, that's what they're used to getting after all that inbreeding.

(Case in point: Yet Again, Trump Attacks a Prominent Black Journalist.  So who's injecting race into this, and when race is injected into things, isn't that a subtle form of racism?  Headlines like this only prove Trump's (and Trump voters') point.  Anyone with a clue knows by now that Trump could very well attack anyone who isn't part of his own family.  Have you seen how be badmouths numerous former high-level members of his administration?  Nevertheless, he is a very stable genius at selecting high-level officials.  As for the "prominent black journalist" in question, MSDNC's Joy Ann Reid - someone with an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - she is symptomatic of the badly degraded opinion-quality standards on that channel.)

As you might suppose, I don't like ideological inbreeding wherever it occurs.  I don't like the ideological inbreeding of the George W. Bush years that culminated in the GOP drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid.  (How could you tell either way whether Palin was a plant, absent knowledge of her history?  The parallels between Palin and AOC are quite strong, are they not.)

Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: philosophical education.  Philosophers (the genuine articles, of course, not pseudos) avoid inbreeding by practicing the art of dialectic.  Among human cognitive endeavors, philosophy is as progressive and woke as it gets.

The latest '20 nomination betting odds

Past experience shows time and time again that polls about candidates at this point of the election cycle are next to meaningless as predictors of the outcome.  What do the people who are putting their money on the line think are the chances that a candidate will be nominated?  Such people may have better information or insight on how the nominating process might play out.

The smart-money front-runner

Sen. Warren is now the clear front-runner in the betting markets for the Dem nomination (with a 37% chance, to Biden's 23% and Bernie's 12%).  I'm not surprised by this at all; indeed, I probably should have gone on record earlier as saying that Warren seems to be the "best" fit for the '20 Dem party.  [Edit: well, I did make this point in person to at least one individual several months back; the response was: "she's an idiot."  Well, this is the '20 Dem Party we're talking about here, so the bar is lower than ever, with lots of Kool-Aid being consumed.  Nonetheless, I don't agree that she is an idiot, exactly....]  The party is lunging well to the left, and her rhetoric is a good match.  She demagogues pretty well about all those "fairness"-values.  She's a woman, and sexism favoring women is acceptable to many of today's Demo rats.  She has a "likeability" factor many of the other candidates don't have as much of.  Her "Pocahantas" baggage is not all that serious by today's standards.  (I mean, after all, the sitting president has personality/temperament baggage that leads to calling people names, such as "Pocahontas.")  Anyone not drinking right-wing Kool-Aid can tell the difference between her wrongly thinking she had Amerind ancestry and her knowingly lying that she did.

Warren hasn't embraced that toxic word "socialism" (and outside of leftist Kool-Aid-drinking districts, it is toxic); in fact she has said that she is a "capitalist to the core" but says the D.C. crony structure needs to be reformed in the direction of "fairness."  She has a life story indicating lots of grit and persistence.  (Yes, "she persisted.")

Warren's shameful/disgraceful Brett Kavanaugh baggage (Swetnick was a credible accuser, eh? let's hear more about that...) doesn't set her apart from the other leading '20 candidates, since they, too, got in on the shameful/disgraceful act (as demonstrated at the preceding link) and the Demo rat primary voters probably find the smearing of Kavanaugh to be normal, acceptable, imperative, etc.  So while this may affect her general-election electability, it wouldn't have any affect on her chances of getting the nomination.

Given the pathological identity-politics ethos of today's Dems, Warren has an edge over Biden and Sanders, the old white men.  (Well, they're older than she is by a few years.)  With two otherwise equally qualified candidates, they'll go with the woman or the person of color over the white guy.  Biden is facing fitness questions, for good reason.  Sanders has the "socialism" toxicity even though he and Warren are probably not far apart policy-wise.  Again, such a high degree of similarity works in the favor of the woman.  Plus, many Dem primary voters will look at general-election electability and find Sanders a poor choice (given the Warren alternative) to put against Trump.  Scumbag Harris would face electability issues as well, not the least of which would be her predictable phoniness.  (She's a rather distant fourth in the betting markets now, with a 7% chance of nomination.  This is noteworthy for a party that has pathological identity-politics issues; she must be really objectionable even to many Dems.  Maybe they didn't like how she recklessly smeared Biden over race.)

Yang (5%) and Buttigieg (4%) are not known-enough (whether to me, to the general public, or to the betting market participants) for anyone to assign all that high a probability of either one of them being nominated.  For all anyone knows, they are in fact the strongest of the remaining candidates on the merits - hence their non-negligible betting market chances - but there's simply too much uncertainty there.  Warren is well-known and her policy positions pretty well worked out.  As probabilities go, it just makes sense that she is far out ahead of these two.

After Yang and Buttigieg the betting markets are putting money on Crooked Hillary (3.5%), as though (there is a small chance that) Dem voters would try her again against Trump (a matchup I wrote about at length shortly before the '16 election) and expect a different outcome.  And HRC hasn't even declared intentions to run.  And barring some disaster for Warren, why would Dems go with HRC over Warren?  The candidates after HRC have pretty small percentages in the betting markets; the only other candidate with at least 2% is Booker.  I wouldn't dismiss Booker, and it makes sense to ask why Dem voters aren't enthusiastic about him.  Perhaps another element I've yet to mention comes into play: age or accumulated life experience.  For a younger candidate to overcome such obstacles, things like exceptional smarts (for sifting and integrating information) or charisma would have to compensate.  And with Obama the Dems already got their president fitting this description.  Booker just doesn't seem to compare all that strongly here.  But I wouldn't be surprised to see him surge in the polls in the coming months as primary voters "try out" the options available (before usually tiring of this or that option).  The betting market participants have already taken this probable surge or mini-surge into account, of course.

Of course, all this is about the best fit for the nomination, not for a general election win.  Warren appears to have the best combination of leftist policy and chances of winning against Trump, both being the key considerations for primary voters.

Trump, Iran, MBS and Khashoggi

I assume that regular readers of this blog have enough of a clue to guess where the headline here is going.  But for those why might need some cluing in:

Say that the U.S. intelligence assessment (currently being awaited by the President) comes to the conclusion that Iran is responsible for the recent attack on Saudi oil facilities.  Can the intelligence assessment be trusted, relied upon?  Well, it seems that our leaders - Trump being among them - have been selective about which intelligence they choose to treat as reliable; further, the only serious accountability that would come with acting upon bad intelligence (read: the Iraq invasion) seems to come at the ballot box.  (Which intelligence officials were held accountable for the bad Iraq intelligence?  Was our intelligence apparatus improved after that debacle?  What assurances would we have of any of this?  [Edit 9/19: Not to mention the Steele/FISA fiasco.])

In October 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by members of the Saudi regime, and our national intelligence assessment placed a high degree of probability on the murder being ordered by acting head of state, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).  In the face of this intelligence assessment, Trump issued a bizarre statement, including:

Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!
That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!
I understand there are members of Congress who, for political or other reasons, would like to go in a different direction – and they are free to do so. I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America. After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world. They have worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels – so important for the world.

Such skepticism and caution!  So, (here goes the philosopher again...) when the Iran intelligence assesment comes in, can we expect the same skepticism and caution?  Can we expect him to say, "Maybe Iran ordered the attack and maybe it didn't!"  (Exclamation point is apparently necessary here.)

No, we wouldn't reasonably expect this response from Trump.  Not when the culpable party is Iran.  They're an enemy, and Saudi Arabia is an ally (for what reason besides its vast oil reserves I don't have any idea).

This is just one example of why I don't consider Trump all that credible or reliable, more or less forcing the contrast with the even-worse (perhaps even far worse) Demo rats.  It is just one example of how the lack of philosophy and wisdom in our politics corrupts pretty much any discussion in that arena.

Logic, reason, context-keeping, and other such positive epistemic values would say that Trump's previous position in the reliability of our intelligence assessment (in the case of MBS/Khashoggi) constitutes something akin to an estoppel against his accepting the forthcoming one (about Iran) as fully reliable.  (Estoppel is a legal concept but shouldn't there be a quick-and-easy term for the same concept in the realm of logic, reason, philosophy, and morality?  We can say "be consistent ffs" but that just doesn't seem to carry the same sort of cash value and enforceable effects of legal estoppel.  The point in either case is to promote accountability.  The only accountability we might see in this case is at the ballot box, but where Trump will probably face an even-worse opponent.)

And, what's more, there is the very palpable sense that the American citizenry have become cynical (or more so than ever before) about expecting much in the way of decency, integrity, intellectual conscience, or other positive values coming from the elected officials.  If Trump has a blatant double standard about the reliability of intelligent assessments depending on the target of the assessment, well, that's just more of the usual ol' D.C. bullshit we come to expect nowadays.  (Even though he pledged in '16 to Drain the Swamp....)  The only question at that point is about whose bullshit is the most ridiculous, dishonest, etc.

If Trump wanted to be more straightforward, and dispense with the bullshit about MBS's culpability, he could have likened his relationship with the Saudi regime to FDR's alliance with the heinous mofo Stalin (i.e., against that other heinous POS Hitler).  In other words, some kind of 'pragmatic' realpolitik where you make and shift alliances as needed to (e.g.) fight a common enemy.  If Stalin's country were the world's largest oil producer, it would have that much more leverage and provide that much more motivation for American leaders to form an alliance.  (After all, some spike in oil prices that might result from MBS's ouster would likely result in a sizable number of deaths around the world....)

Something tells me, though, that this ever-cynical American citizenry wouldn't be comfortable hearing this line of reasoning.  (After all, do we hear that line of reasoning explicitly from our leaders?)  So perhaps they're getting the corrupt, bullshitty, philosophically-vacuous government they deserve?

So, what if CA emigrants turn TX blue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unserious Halls of Fame

First, let's consider a serious Hall of Fame, the Baseball one.  Now, one of the criticisms one can make of the baseball HOF is that it's selection criteria are loose enough to allow the likes of, say, Tony Perez or Billy Williams, who are marginal HOFers (whereas marginal HOFers for me would be players who are, well, more famous).  But the induction standard is also pretty high there, requiring 75% of the vote, so maybe the voters know more than I do about HOF-worthiness.

Anyway, the main point I want to make here is that while there might be some dubious inclusions in the baseball HOF (what if Perez weren't part of the Big Red Machine with such no-brainer HOFers as Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Pete Rose [rendered ineligible for the HOF for betting on the game but otherwise an easy "95% on the first ballot" entrant]?), the baseball HOF has no glaring exclusions.  What counts as glaring these days, in the age of more advanced baseball value-metrics?  Well, if, say, a player has more than 90 career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) but is kept out, then that is glaring.  Such players with 90 or so career WAR - e.g., Cal Ripken, Roberto Clemente, Bert Blyleven, Cap Anson, Al Kaline, Wade Boggs - are all no-brainer HOF inductees.  Indeed, on that all-time WAR leaders chart, the first player to appear who isn't a HOF inductee is Lou Whitaker with 75 or so WAR.  Almost all players with 70 or more WAR are HOF inductees.

Long story short, a pretty good (but not altogether infallible) measure of HOF-worthiness in baseball is career WAR.  If there is a player with 90 career WAR kept out of the HOF, that would seriously call into question whether the voters were doing their jobs.  (Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are kept out of the HOF on suspicion of use of illegal performance-enhancing substances; otherwise their omissions would be even more glaring than Rose's.)  But the HOF voters appear to be doing their jobs well enough to take the Baseball HOF seriously.

One Hall of Fame one cannot rationally take seriously is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.  In such an area as music, how could one determine HOF-worthiness, anyway?  Music appreciation is a form of aesthetic appreciation, which is based on ordinal rather than cardinal value.  (WAR is a cardinal measurement, whereas Babe Ruth's #1 ranking is ordinal.)  But let's say that one could develop certain "advanced" metrics of aesthetic value in music derived from some more-or-less sophisticated application of cardinal value.  I have one such a metric in mind: the top-ranked artists based on rateyourmusic (RYM) user ratings.  (I haven't found full-time music critics to be any more reliable a guide to interesting music than the user ratings at RYM.  And RYMers are, by and large, analytically-inclined music enthusiasts whose opinions would be unwise to ignore if one is seeking promising music leads.  The ranking rationale for this list is explained at the link.)  I would consider pretty much any top-100 artist on this RYM-derived list to be HOF-worthy (even if I'm hardly a fan of many of the artists listed, myself).  But if an artist who is ranked only, say, 80 on this list is kept out of the Rock HOF, that would not be what I call a glaring omission.  But if an artist in the top 20 in this list were kept of the Rock HOF, that would be a red flag that the Rock HOF is more a popularity contest than a recognition of merit (and one key function of a HOF is to confer fame where it is merited, where the inductee is otherwise much too overlooked).  And here are examples of artists that hardcore music enthusiasts (with as much claim to expertise as anyone) are big on but who are still being kept out of the Rock HOF:

King Crimson, Iron Maiden, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno

I can't think of any good reason for why these artists aren't in the Rock HOF.  This calls into question the very credibility of the selection criteria the selectors/voters are using.  But the incompetence/unreliability of the selectors is revealed not just in whether such artists are inducted or not, but in whether they are even nominated.  Here's a list of a bunch of worthy artists snubbed by the Rock HOF, some of whom haven't even been nominated.  (I see that Captain Beefheart hasn't even been nominated [even this comes as surprise...], which is about as glaring a HOF snub as any, even if he doesn't appear in that RYM-derived list.)  How is it that Iron Maiden hasn't even been nominated?  What is wrong with these people?

It doesn't matter how many snubs there are in this or that HOF: if there is so much as one glaring omission (of which there are none in the Baseball HOF), that calls into question the voters' competence or selection criteria.

Now for another HOF that isn't serious: the National Women's Hall of Fame.  Guess Who is a glaring, inexcusable omission among the inductees?  I did just send a message to the NWHOF asking what good reason there is that Rand isn't among the inductees, and did just receive a reply that all inductions begin with a member of the general public making a nomination.  I was invited to nominate her, but . . . well, why hasn't she been nominated by anyone yet?  How does that even happen?  (I note that the baseball HOF doesn't require nominations from members of the general public; I take it that the BBWAA members are entrusted with having enough expertise to make their own nominations.)  And it's not like I really care whether this or that figure makes it into this or that HOF.  Awards and Honors are only as good as the process by which they are conferred; the Baseball HOF induction process pretty much ensures that the greatest players are inducted, leaving debates over which inductees are (properly considered) the marginal ones.  The Rock HOF and NWHOF haven't ensured that the greatest artists/people are inducted (and my nominating Rand obviously won't ensure her induction).  It's the very fact that as of 2019 something called the National Women's Hall of Fame hasn't inducted Rand that doesn't sit well with me, making me that much more turned off to bothering with submitting a nomination.  It's up to me to make the first nomination, because no one else apparently has had the good sense to do so, while a bunch of other women have already been nominated?  (What, you hadn't heard of, say, Julie Krone?)  How does the logic of all this end up making the NWHOF look worth taking seriously?  What if I decide as a sort of experiment to see how long it takes for anyone else to nominate Rand?  What if it takes until 2050?  Would the NWHOF consider updating its nominating/inducting criteria then?  I don't mind waiting them out on this to make the point.  (I had considered that maybe it's blatantly political, but famous left-anarchist Emma Goldman isn't in the NWHOF, either, so we have another glaring omission.)

I hadn't even heard of the NWHOF until a day ago.  Now, if Rand had been inducted into the NWHOF, chances are very good I would have heard about that and hence would have heard about the NWHOF.  Indeed this raises a very interesting question: which entity is more well-known: Rand, or the NWHOF?  And why?  Perhaps the NWHOF would have a boost in its cultural recognition/standing if Rand had been inducted when she should have been (i.e., at or near the NWHOF's outset, just as Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, Johnson and Mathewson were the first Baseball HOF inductees).

I mentioned above that I don't even really care all that much whether this or that person is in a HOF.  King Crimson is still easily one of the greatest rock bands whether or not the Rock HOF people are idiots.  HOF induction doesn't itself improve the quality of the inductee.  It's like if there were an Architecture HOF and we asked Howard Roark whether he belongs there: his response might well be, "But I don't think about it."

Likewise, we could look at the Academy Awards with all its glaring omissions over the years; Kubrick (ranked #2 here) received all of one Oscar (for [Trumbull's] special effects on 2001, which is such a no-brainer that even the Academy couldn't fuck that one up).  (On a completely related note, however, the Academy didn't even consider 2001 eligible for Best Costume Design, since apparently the judges thought the apes in the opening sequence were real.  IOW, the costumes were too good.  I mean, why the hell else wasn't it nominated for the category?)  (On another note, if the Academy's attitude toward Kubrick films was all that much like critic Pauline Kael's dipshit ones, then it's no surprise he was snubbed so much.)  Or, why did Russell Crowe not get a no-brainer Oscar for A Beautiful Mind?  Or, how did all those rich fucks in the Academy overlook the Coen brothers 1998 masterpiece The Big Lebowski, now an iconic cultural phenomenon?  Are we dealing with morons here?  I mean, say what you will about the tenets of Shakespeare in Love or Saving Private Ryan, but at least they could have nominated Lebowski and its ethos rather than snub it.  (What, did the Coens' skills magically take a dive between the Oscar-nominated Fargo [1996] and Lebowski?  That's fucking interesting.  What, were the other top movies in 1998 better than those in 1996?  [It so happens that RYM users are aesthetically attuned enough that their movie ratings blow away just about any other movie ratings/rankings resource out there; the IMDb ones are a joke by comparison, although its users' aggregated pick for #1 is likely correct.])

So perhaps the point of this post is to call into question the very idea, legitimacy or usefulness of a Hall of Fame (or perhaps even Awards Ceremonies) of anything.  Or, at the very least, to question the grounds upon which we would or should take any HOF seriously.  Of the three discussed above, only the Baseball one seems to have its act integrally/reliably together.  But the WAR chart at baseball-reference.com may well be regarded among hardcore enthusiasts nowadays as more authoritative than anything that the HOF does to confer recognition/status.  Aside from the experience that visitors to Baseball's HOF exhibit in Cooperstown get (I'd visit it...), what does the HOF accomplish in terms of recognizing player greatness that isn't already being accomplished by other means?

Demo rats vs. Kavanaugh, again

The rat-like elected creatures of one of the two major political parties seem to operate on the assumption that the rest of us think and moralize as sloppily and dishonestly as they do.  The latest accusations against now-Justice Kavanaugh does not (and cannot) vindicate these creatures and what they were up to the last time around.

They blew their credibility when they deemed credible the evidence-lacking accusations made against him in 2018 (including, as in the case of Sen. Warren, the ridiculous repeat-drugged-gang-rapes allegation from Swetnick).

They looked the other way when a Demo rat president was accused of rape.

They refused to impeach a Demo rat president even though he lied under oath, even as they now call for the impeachment of Trump and Kavanaugh.

They looked the other way when Demo rats in the highest offices in the state of Virginia faced scandals and Republicans would be their replacements.  (When it comes to comparable claims made against Republicans, they routinely immediately assume the worst.)  As one article put it, Demo rats were rendered speechless as scandal engulfed Virginia's Demo rat leadership.  Isn't being caught dead to rights something that naturally causes speechlessness?  (Rand-bashers also get speechless - and also not contrite - when their reckless misrepresentations and smears are refuted.)  They have no defense for their blatant double standards, after all, and no one will believe their bullshit anyway.

This isn't to comment on the credibility of the latest accusation or new shit brought to light by the latest NYT piece.  It is, however, to say that Demo rat politicians (along with various others in the media) should be left out of any discussion of these things, as they only bring toxicity and deliberate partisan water-muddying.

I mean, think about it from the perspective of anyone who wants to build a credible case against Kavanaugh: how on earth would such a person make any use of anything that the elected rats have had to say on the matter?  Bringing in what they say could only damage one's credibility.

It's epistemic chickens coming home to roost, is all.  The bums lost.  If getting Kavanaugh ousted is what justice requires, then let's find some credible spokespeople for the cause, which means encouraging the elected rats to STFU so they don't manage to build sympathy for their target.

Addendum: Any responsible inquiry into this sort of thing will involve looking at the pushback from the other side, which Demo rats clearly refuse to do.  One example: "What Pogrebin and Kelly left out of their story, yet reported in their book, is that the alleged victim doesn’t remember the incident and refuses to talk about it. That’s journalistic malpractice."  Is it really too much to ask for "reporters" at "the paper of record" to, well, report such things in their article?  (Using the Witch Hunt Epistemology of the Demo rats, the alleged victim's lack of memory should probably be attributed to drunkenness on her part.)  (The linked NY Post piece also discusses - although this isn't new - the glaring holes in the Ramirez story about drunken junk-exposing at Yale.)  Or: how is it that the author of the National Review piece could come up with ample grounds for skepticism, right on the spot (namely: how does the logistics of a classmate directing someone else's junk work?  Witch Hunt answer: Kavanaugh must have been so blacked-out drunk that he didn't mind someone else pushing his junk in this or that direction), whereas elected rats treat the allegations as a basis for impeachment?  (The phrase "journalistic malpractice" also comes up in that piece, for the same reason.  So either some coordination of talking points is going on, or the authors are simply speaking common sense, independently.  And it is common sense.  The "paper of record" apparently lacks it.)  One of the rats, Scumbag Kamala Harris - again, a career prosecutor who cannot fail to know about the obligation to hear both sides before rendering a verdict - appears to believe (both in 2018 and this time around) allegations after having heard only the allegation-side.  Other things being equal, it is better for such a rat to remain a Senator where the alternative is being elevated to President.  [Edit 9/16: Six '20 Demo rats on twitter immediately called for impeachment after the latest "news": Scumbag Harris, the two outright fools O'Rourke and Castro, Warren, Sanders and Booker [edit: Mayor Pete].  Scumbag Harris in particular claims that Kavanaugh lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearings.  This is one example of how destructive a format twitter is.  A "longer" format would virtually call forth evidence for such a serious charge, some weblink or explanation or other, because unlike Scumbag Harris many Americans don't find it remotely obvious that he lied to the Senate.  But this serially dishonest and unaccountable, and ultimate unimpressive creature abuses the twitter format to make unfounded charges.  How is she supposed to be better or more impressive than the Orange Man?]

Addendum #2: Even if Kavanaugh lied to Congress, that doesn't in any way vindicate or excuse the rats' epistemic criminality.  (Heck, even if the accusations against him are true, the Dems did a terrible job of justifying their position that the accusations were credible, just as they routinely do a terrible job justifying their positions generally nowadays.  Heck, even if Republicans are scumbags, that still doesn't vindicate Demo rats.  The best they could hope to show in that case is that they're less scummy than Republicans, but I very much doubt that they could show that, either.  Today's Demo rat party is too much of a sick puppy and, given the nature of epistemic justification, if they happen to be right about something [e.g. climate change] it is an accident.  Since when do Demo rats listen to experts on subjects where the expertise would not vindicate the Dem viewpoint?  They routinely ignore the majority of economists when it comes to the minimum wage, for example.  And anyway, neither Dems nor Reps have particularly good arguments for rejecting libertarianism, and neither party is remotely progressive when it comes to philosophical education of the citizenry which is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time.)

Addendum #3: Some more pro-Kavanaugh commentary that the epistemically reckless Demo rats ("epistemically reckless" is the minimum charge I would level at these willfully scummy creatures) can be relied upon to deliberately/culpably ignore: Dreher and Kimball.  And it's not like it pleases me to say that the only thing Demo rats are reliable about these days is being intellectually reckless, lazy, etc.  I would rather that they behave like decent human beings.