Socrates/Plato/Aristotle vs. Christianity?

Or: is Original Sin plausible?

(a 'Green Friday' special lol)

Based on my exposure to Christian thinking over the course of a few decades, it strikes me that very short shrift is given in Christian thought to the message and examples set by the iconic Greek trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  It compels me now to ask such questions as: Okay, that is a highly disappointing apparent performance by Christendom on the whole, but what about the strongest examples of Christian thought, especially ones deeply conversant with the Greeks and Aristotle (the pinnacle of Greek learning/thought) in particular.  And so, my mind goes (of course?) to Aquinas.  And so I have to envision (for now) what Aquinas might have said on the topic of Original Sin in light of these three sage examples, and it might also work to research whatever he actually did say on the connection between these two topics.  (If he had said things about this connection, wouldn't we have heard a lot about it by now?)

I recently saw quoted a letter from Ben Franklin to a man who claimed to be able to self-rule just fine without traditional religious beliefs, and Franklin said that this may be fine for him (the correspondent) but a lot of people simply don't have the discipline; they're weak of will, perhaps incurably ignorant -  fallen and corrupt if you will.  Some Christian thinkers go further with their wording: "wretched and miserable."  And Aristotle even seems to say as much about a lot of biological humans who just don't seem cut out even remotely for a philosophical life.  They being oftentimes base and vicious, the best we might hope to do in such cases is to train them in nonphilosophical habits of thought that nonetheless encourage socially acceptable behaviors.  The Framers of the United States Constitution said that because of human weaknesses it is best that powers be separated so that bad judgment and appetites be kept in check (especially where the levers of coercive force/power are concerned).  Many present-day American Christians take this as part of the body of evidence of the nation's "Judeo-Christian provenance".  (I ask as I've asked before: so how come it took only until after John Locke, who formulated the most complete theory of individual rights up to that point, for there to be an America-like nation "founded on Judeo-Christian principles"?  Perhaps such Christians should make extra efforts to avoid the vice of epistemic hubris, heh heh.)

But isn't Original Sin supposed to be an unqualified and universal condition of man the species, of mankind, and not merely (say) the vast majority of men, and that all humans need Christ as redeemer?  And isn't it supposed to be eminently plausible (from overwhelming evidence in the world) according to standard Christian doctrine that there are no exceptions to this?  And so now, the obvious(?) question: How do Socrates, Plato and Aristotle fail to be exceptions?

I guess I'll leave it there for now.

[Addendum 12/12/2019: This isn't even to bring up Nietzsche's well-known antipathy to Christianity, particularly its human-weakness anthropology in contrast to his own heroic-possibilities, noble-soul one which he appears to share with Aristotle.  To him, it didn't ring true that even people like him were unavoidably weak and corrupt (without Christ).  But something is telling me that bringing up the examples of the ancient Greek trio is less triggering to Christians than bringing up Nietzsche.  Nietzsche's aphorism about the noble soul comes, after all, in a book triggeringly titled Beyond Good and Evil.  What does Nietzsche's new value system have to offer the weak and less-smart masses?  Roughly, his modus ponens looks like Christianity's modus tollens: if man is weak and corrupt, then he needs Christ for redemption or salvation.  And from what I can tell his anthropology divides humanity into the weak/dumb masses on the one hand and people such as him on the other, whereas Christianity doesn't make the division (except, I suppose, for the one human+divine person in history).  Plato and Aristotle are less triggering in this regard (how much so?...), and there's the Aquinas connection that would be a bad idea for Christians to ignore....]

Dem & GOP impeachment hypocrisy to be revealed next week?

Or: intellectual honesty vs. political partisanship

(Context: 1, 2)

I don't know whether Trump's actions with respect to Ukraine and investigating Joe and Hunter Biden's Burisma-related dealings (qua point man on Ukraine for the Obama Admin, and not just qua potential 2020 political rival as the dishonest anti-Trump fake news would have you believe) amounts to an impeachable offense.  This is why I eagerly look forward to next week's progression of "the House impeachment inquiry" to the Judiciary Committee, where apparently constitutional experts will give the American People some testimony on what is a high crime or misdemeanor.  We can then find out whether the two major political parties are being consistent in their application of the rules.  A bonus feature of the next week's hearings will be committee Republicans grilling the witnesses about cases such as Clinton, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, et al.  Some questions these experts should help us to answer:

• How are Trump's actions similar to or different from those of Presidents Clinton (who was impeached by the House but not removed by the Senate) and Nixon (who avoided impeachment by resigning...)?  How does this scandal differ from a non-impeachment-level scandal such as, say, Iran-Contra?

• How are Trump's actions qua "using the levers of power to gain an electoral political advantage" different from the following by Obama: (1) Having his IRS make it a lot more difficult for "tea party" groups to gain tax exempt status like any other such advocacy groups; (Obama said there was not a "smidgen of corruption" there, a claim belied by then- IRS director Lois Lerner invoking the Fifth in front of Congress.) (2) Telling Vlad Putin's aides (caught on a hot mic) that he would have more flexibility for whatever Russia-related dealings after the 2012 election; (3) Overseeing an intelligence investigation into a Trump campaign aide apparently on the basis of spotty information.  (The Dems are convinced, after all, that any action whereby a lever of power is used to gain an electoral advantage is impeachable, in Trump's case.  Are they consistent?)

• Is it really more than Trump being Trump, including his causal relationship with the truth?  Trump was under the impression that Biden used aid funds for Ukraine as leverage to prevent a prosecutor from looking into Burisma (where his son appears quite strongly to have benefited from nepotism).  According to Trump it "sounds terrible to me."  Well, if it sounds terrible to him - whether or not he was misinformed by overexposure to the zealously partisan rantings of Hannity & Co. - then what would be unlawful about wanting it looked into, irrespective of whether the guy may be a political opponent?  (The question, then, is whether he would have brought up Biden if Biden weren't running in 2020.  But then we also have Trump milking his usual obsessions about 2016 in the phone call as well, with the Crowdstrike server thing and supposed or confirmed Ukrainian meddling in 2016.  So if we can't read Trump's mind, what do we conclude here, impeachment-wise?)  And what difference does it make to all this that, plausibly, Trump was looking for evidence that Ukraine would be serious about fighting corruption generally?

• What's the evidence that Biden/Burisma was such a big deal to Trump, over and above his having mentioned it in the 7/25 phone call, that he was pressuring people this way and that, sending Rudy and others to home in on that specifically, and basically trying to recruit other government actors into his corruptly-intended plan?  (Basically, the sort of Watergate-related actions that Nixon was involving or trying to involve others in?)

• Does it make a real difference whether Trump was asking for help from Ukraine on finding serious misdeeds/corruption by Biden, vs. asking Ukraine to manufacture dirt?  If there were real corruption there, wouldn't we all want to know about it, irrespective of who benefits electorally?  (The anti-Trump media which have done themselves no favors by pretty much completely squandering their objectivity and credibility, have used the phrase "dig up dirt".  Like, just make it up, or find something real?  The confusion dishonestly generated here may show up in polls, but I wouldn't expect the House GOP committee members or other reasonably skeptical folks to accept that characterization.) 

• Does the evidence of wrongdoing need to be overwhelming and unambiguous before removing a president from office?  (Was Bill Clinton's wrongdoing, for which there was overwhelming and unambiguous evidence, and for which he was stripped of his law license, still not enough to be impeachable?  [See here for analysis on the latter.])  Is that standard met here?

2/3 of the Senate is needed to convict and remove the president; that would suggest the requirement of overwhelming public support commensurate with such a supermajority.  Clear and convincing answers to questions such as the above are necessary for public support to shift in the direction of conviction/removal, particularly as consistent with traditional constitutional practice.  51 percent of the country "supporting impeachment and removal" as of a couple weeks ago is not evidence of overwhelming public support commensurate with a Senate supermajority.

The Dems and their media enablers have squandered too much credibility at this point, from their behaviors during the Trump years alone (not the least of which were their shameful and reckless attempts to smear Brett Kavanaugh), for their interpretations of things to be taken at anything close to face value.

(Can people who recklessly smeared Kavanaugh be trusted to honestly carry out a judicial proceeding?  Sens. Biden, Harris, Sanders, and Warren believed Blasey Ford's not-believable testimony, hence believed Kavanaugh's guilt, either before all the facts/testimony were in [as in the case of Scumbag Harris, and Scumbags Gillibrand and Hirono], or even after all the testimony and sworn statements were in, including Leland Keyser and others' crucial debunking of Ford's "memory," and, not least of all, the fact that Ford and Kavanaugh were in different social circles and so their being anywhere together was highly improbable.  If you were accused of a crime, would you want the likes of Biden, Harris, Sanders, Warren, Gillibrand and Hirono on your jury?  The question should answer itself.  BTW, when yet another bullshit NYT story about an allegation against Kavanaugh surfaced a couple months ago, almost all of these people immediately tweeted in support of Kavanaugh's impeachment.  Biden, prudently, didn't tweet such support along with Harris, Sanders, Warren and also Mayor Pete and a couple obvious clowns now out of the '20 running.  IOW, with the exception of Biden, all of the poll-leading '20 Dems would impeach an office-holder even on the flimsiest of bases.  The flouting of judicial and epistemic standards here is severe/perverse enough that Biden almost surely emerges as the least-worst option of those named above, pretty much by default.)

The likes of AOC (and other manifestly foolish Dems) seem to have wanted to impeach Trump for pretty much anything, including "racism," from the get-go.  (If you still aren't convinced what an obnoxious little nitwit AOC is, check out her vocal fry with the word "racisuuuum" in this excerpt.)  They milked a Trump-Putin collusion narrative for ratings for two years until their time- and attention-wasting charade fell apart after the Mueller findings.  The reasonable presumption here is that they have partisan motivations and hold GOP people to a more unreasonably demanding standard than they hold their own.

The reasonable presumption about the GOP with respect to their political opponents is also the same.  Let's say that a left/Dem SCOTUS justice dies in the next calendar year, a presidential election year.  If Mitch McConnell & Co. decide, contrary to their stance in 2016, to go ahead with a SCOTUS confirmation process denied to Obama nominee Merrick Garland, then they will self-convict as partisan pieces of shit.  The Dems, in their own partisan-POS way, will jump on the partisan GOP POS the split second any such thing happens.  But they were the same people calling for Judge Garland to be given a chance, after having said back in 1992 that SCOTUS nominees should not be given a chance during a presidential election season.  So there.  Perhaps the only serious question at this point is which of the two sides is more of a partisan POS, which side has squandered more intellectual credibility than its opponents, etc.  Philosophy awaits.

Stoned thought re a kid with a smirk and an old guy banging a drum in his face

With my perhaps impressive command of content, I was able to bring this post up within about 5 seconds.  (How about you?)  (If you're at that link, you might as well have a look at the rest of the content produced in this blog in just one month, over on the right there - 39 mostly scintillating posts in January alone.  [Incidentally, that whole problem that leading '20 Demorat candidates have with fair epistemic and judicial process when it comes to their treatment of (claims made against) Brett Kavanaugh, still lingers and is still glaring to anyone with a clue.  Any seasoned investigator would be able to deduce that no such event is remotely likely to have taken place as some party attended by both Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford.  The way that Sens. Warren, Biden, Sanders, and Harris in particular treated these claims is epistemically criminal and the attorneys among them know better.  Blasey Ford's account simply cannot be believed as true to fact, whatever she told a therapist some years ago.  Anyway, just how perverse does one's episteme and value-structure have to get, in order to treat Blasey Ford's accusation as remotely credible once all the sworn testimony has come in (not the least of which is Leland Keyser's, you Dem fuckheads)?  Such epistemic criminality, perversity and bankruptcy just doesn't happen all of a sudden; it has to be cultivated over a matter of years. I blame the intellectually atrophied culture of leftism generally, with its always crying racism, its cancel culture, its context-erasing vilifications, etc. being typical results.  See this blog's "leftist losers" tag for all the exhaustive details.])

So, what it all really was, in the end, was a kid smirking and a buy banging a drum and chanting up in his face.  The MAGA hat really was entirely incidental, and the Native American ancestry completely irrelevant to the kid's reaction to what this man was doing in front of his face.  Basically, what the kid did according to today's insane "politically correct" leftists is commit a facecrime, from which they could interpret, rorschach-blotch-test-like, anything they damn well pleased (and they know, deep down, is exactly the dishonorable thing they are doing).  They do this all the time with Trump's pronouncements; on Day 1 of his political career, he said something something Mexico not sending its best and that it sends crime and drugs (e.g. opioids) and perhaps even some great people, and the Left immediately assumed the worst and has kept it up from then onward, really pathetic.  Speaker Peloser said repeatedly that his border wall idea is categorically an immorality because it's about Making American White Again, when plain reading and ordinary common sense says it's about keeping criminals out, since the only people the wall would keep out would be those trying to enter illegally/unvetted, and the Demorats are rightly perceived as soft on illegal immigration (and their political motivations are rightly called into question, especially when it involves a level of dishonesty and demagoguery like Peloser's about the border wall).

The incident between the smirking kid and the banging drum guy had nothing to do with America's racial and ethnic tensions (like one big happy semi-dysfunctional American family or something, more or less, right?), but with a kid reacting as any kid might normally react in such an increasingly bizarre situation that it was.  To make it in any way about race or ethnicity (on its face or otherwise) is to be an absolute fucking idiot with no business being near a viral or mass media outlet.  This goes for the relevant scumbags over at CNN, among other supposedly "center-"-left race-, sex-, gender-, ethnicity-. class-, etc.-baiting scum (more or less in lockstep with the likes of AOC+3) who've inundated the Demorat Party with their anti-intellectual, anti-philosophy, anti-wisdom, anti-Western-civ . . . does "nonsense" even dignify it?  Too much of it is already entirely false to fact (e.g., notions that capitalism is a fundamentally unfair or harmful economic system; see this blog's "capitalism" tag for all the juicy essentials).

Anyway, I'm sure that unlike the typical leftist slobs at D.C. events, the MAGA boys didn't leave trash behind.  Not so sure about that guy chanting and banging his drum in a kid's face.

Addendum: so how long before this shit is legalized everywhere?  FFS, already.

A bit of stoned blogging re Battle of the Billionaires

^_^

So I happen to know certain things (I've got information, man) about the "professional wrestling" industry (from which McMahon made his billion(s?)).  I happen to know that Trump happens to know what is or isn't fake, hence his constant and consistent use of the term "fake news."  (The whole thing where he "said" that Charlottesville neo-Nazis were "very fine people" and that either he never explicitly repudiated at least 3 or 4 different forms of "far right" racist groups or his very repudiations must have been a dog whistle, somehow, is essentially nothing more than a fabrication of a fevered leftist media.  You can look this all up, google is your friend.)  So Wrestlemania 4 (1988) was held at Trump Plaza, where there was this fake wrestling "tournament" (all in the span of 4 hours, mind you, and you'd think Macho Man Savage and Million Dollar Man DiBiase would be absolutely spent by the final fake-title-match...), where the Hulkster (Chump Hogan, as Jesse the Body always called him) used a chair when the referee was "knocked out" to knock DiBiasi out and win the title for his then-buddy Macho Man (the Mega Powers the duo would be called...).  This, mind you, all after Hogan fake-lost the title the previous month or so to Andre the Giant through a whole shenanigan involving a fake referee who was a not-fake identical twin of the real referee (and on the pay by Million Dollar Man, to whom Andre was just going to give the title he won right away to Million Dollar Man; then-WWF "president" Jack Tunny decided the most "fair" solution to this whole dirty trick once inevitably exposed is to vacate the WWF heavyweight title and have a tournament - all in one day, all within a 4-hour span - for the belt at, you guessed it, Wrestlemania; it's all quite believable to a credulous preteen audience of that certain time period before all the fakeness was exposed for sure at last...).

So, after about the time that Hogan fake-lost the WWF heavyweight title "fairly for the first time" to Ultimate Warrior in what was otherwise an epic-ly billed WM 6 (1990) face-off between two truly iconic figures of fake wrestling - it's basically up there by that point in time with the WM 3 (1987) battle between Hulk and Andre the Giant.  (I guess the idea there was for Andre to "lose" the match in a gesture of good will or whatever for the profession or the company, handing the torch much as Hulk would do himself at WM 6....)  (Also, let's not forget that the venue for WM3 was the Pontiac Silverdome with a crowd of over 90,000, setting some kind of record for like an indoor venue or something.  I just remember this kind of shit, somehow.... :-/ )

Then fast forward about 20 years to WM 23 (2007), and there's this "Battle of the Billionaires" between Trump and WWF/E founder Vince McMahon.  As you can see above, Trump ends up shaving McMahon's head while McMahon "protests."  It's all staged, all faked, of course.  But by then, the staged/kayfabe thing itself became part of the whole WWE shtick in a meta/ironic/satire way; it's all more like a stage play at this juncture with real life people "acting" for a crowd the role of heel/face/turn/troll/etc.

Anyway, come 2020, another Battle of the Billionaires may take place, and it might not be so staged/fake/kayfabe this time around.  "Little Mike" Bloomberg, as the mini-Billionaire said of the $50B man, has jumped all into the race.  I may have to eat my words from earlier this year about Trump being a guaranteed victor in the 2020 election since at the time Mike B had said he had no plans to run.  (I'll let the differently honest context-erasing fake-oppo dig up that post, where they'll also find an inductively compelling bundle of links, all taken together proving beyond a doubt the intellectual bankruptcy of the American Left.  June or July of this year is that post.)

Now, one thing that a philosopher armed with (a) a general knowledge of the whole fake-wrestling/kayfabe/acting thing that Trump's been involved in (did I mention he's in the WWE Hall of Fame? Not in this post I hadn't...), and (b) with a reasonably good working knowledge of the American national political system and scene over the last quarter century or so, must do is to determine all of the relevant differences between one "kind" of (scripted, dramatized, fake/not true to fact) Battle of the Billionaires and another.  To identify all relevant differences one would have to also have a good way of identifying relevant similarities, whatever those might be (beyond the similarity of there being two billionaires "cast" against one another).  And integrating and differentiating so, a philosopher might also have a pretty fun time, and perhaps even more fun of a time doing so while enjoying whatever creativity boosting substances one might find.

[Gotta take another hit, hold on.]

(in the meantime, ponder also the Schiff-Lebowski connection.  Evidently Schiff believes the prick is stonewalling him.)

Okay, I am thinking of how to liken and differentiate late-1980s WWF matchups from late-2010s presidential matchups.  As far as billionaire net worth is concerned, Mike Bloomberg is in the top 8 or so, so think the tier of WWF wrestlers who were in the "main event" of the first (1987) Survivor Series, maybe?  Well, only about 5 of those top-tier guys are really memorable; this would include (for sure) Hulk, Andre, (likely) King Kong Bundy, Bam Bam Bigelow, Ravishing Rick Rude (pretty great qua heel personality, as well as being totally ripped), (maybe) One Man Gang and Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff.  But top 5 or 8 is only a number; what's the proper adjustments?  There were maybe a few dozen "star" wrestlers at any one time (including tag teams), and perhaps up to 10 or 12 superstars (the 1987 Survivor Series tier-2 undercard included such superstars as Macho Man, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat (and the Honky Tonk Man was the Intercontinental Champion at the time, and I know who he lost it to in like 12 seconds hee hee . . .).  So what's the comparable population, the top few dozen billionaires with like 10 or 12 "superstars" which would include most likely Bezos, Gates, Buffett, and . . . Bloomberg?  But there are like at least a few hundred billionaires in the USA alone.  In the WWF you had in addition to the superstars and stars the "jobbers," the weak wrestlers with no stage personality to speak of who may not even ever appear in more than a match or two; the jobbers are basically there for the stars/superstars to showcase their skills against, although the superstar-against-jobber action was pretty limited, of course.  Let's just say that the jobbers aren't part of the regular rotation, but the numbers still seem a bit off here using a raw numbers-vs-numbers comparison.

What if we try out comparing the population of the few dozen stars/superstars in WWF in 1987 with the population of US billionaires?  The ratio is something like, roughly, 10 to 1?  And Bloomberg is in like the top 3% of the few hundred or so U.S. billionaires?  So the top 3 percent of WWF stars is basically the heavyweight champion himself.  (We have to take into account the fact that the wrestling talent that year was also spread out across wrestling associations.  In 1987 the key superstar in the biggest non-WWF wrestling association was (of course? the legendary?) Ric Flair.  Sooner or later they'd all basically merge, or something.  (I lost track not long after WM6 and then Warrior "losing" the title not long after.  All I know is, 13 years later there was the Battle of the Billionaires.)

So Trump's net worth is legitimately/documentably something like $5 billion.  He boasts that his brand name itself is worth (an additional) $5 billion on top.  (Is that a heel move?  What would the Million Dollar Man - a pretty memorable heel character, BTW - do?)  So that's in, what, like, the top half of U.S. billionaires, I might plausibly guesstimate?

That's assuming that measured net worth is the criterion on which to compare the "cards" here.

As far as heel stuff goes, the American Left does indeed have its heel figure in Trump, although that's mainly their problem since they're so deranged these days.  (These are the same losers who treat Ayn Rand as a heel figure - Scumbag Duggan's 'Mean Girl' is the best/worst smear effort the left could come up with in all of 6 decades after Atlas; pathetic.)

I do like how this will throw the Demorats into a bit of disarray.  Doesn't the existence of billionaires basically victimize the bottom 99%, or something?  Are the less deranged/corrupted among them ready to examine more carefully the whole value-added-by-billionaires thing as they possibly end up explicitly or implicitly rating Mike B higher because of the rare-skills value-added generated by someone whose net worth is about ten times higher than his opponent's.  (No doubt some hack-level MSDNC types are forming a wealth/skills narrative in their heads that conveniently fits with their possible Bloomberg-over-Trump narrative, seeing as they will also regard center-left politics as the view espoused by the more highly skilled people [unaccountably disregarding the libertarians as MSDNC hacks can be expected to do, of course].)

Trump says that Mike B would be the man he'd love running against the most.  Now, Mike B got into this race because he rightly suspects that the non-Bloomberg crop of Demorat candidates don't have what it takes to beat Trump.  The Demorat Party has (perhaps inevitably) let itself become beholden more than ever to a far-leftist-loser constituency and the public sector unions, giving the "moderates" like Biden that much harder of a time landing the nomination unless they shift their positions leftward.  And I think there may be a good chance that the gradually dwindling number of non-insane Dems and lefties end up seeing the merits in his view that he's probably the only one who could beat Trump in the general election.  (If he does become the nominee, then pretty much all but the staunch anticapitalist radical-left losers will rally around the "less-worse" non-Trump candidate.)  Given his wealth, can his doing an independent run for the office be ruled out?  (See, Ross Perot was the first billionaire [I think] to run for president (1992), and at the time his net worth was maybe like $1.8B, which was a much bigger deal back then.  He gets 19% of the vote, even after a mid-election-year flake-out....)

Anyway, what possible connection is there between Trump's asking Little Mike to bring it on, and the imagery/promotion related to a Battle of the Billionaires that must have been going through his head all this time?  Given his entertainment background, his mindset is only all that much more prepared for the concept.  Exactly how, I don't know.  It couldn't hurt his being prepared, could it?

A bit of stoned blogging about FISA abuse / Saddam WMDs

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/10-guy

I suppose we could file this under the general heading of either "Epistemology: human error/shortcomings" or "Ethics: virtue and vice: malice aforethought" or a bit of both . . .

So the "best intelligence" ca. early 2003 told us that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs.  Secretary of State Colin Powell went before a UN assembly and made a case for this and everything.  Trillions in treasure and many thousands of lives directly affected or ended.  Some say "Bush lied, people died."  Trump even said it boldly and clearly in a 2016 GOP primary debate (my jaw almost dropped, but by that point Trump had said any number of bold and crazy things (kill the families of terrorists, e.g.), only to treat them and many others as the high-end ("art of the deal" stuff here, I think/guess/ass-u-me) opening proposition, something provocative to float out there, all TrumpSpeak-like, only to draw back on the rhetoric when a better (more Trump-opinion-centric) political equilibrium is the achieved new focus.  (Trump's main point about the borders and the drugs etc. flowing across the southern border is about the need to secure our borders better; his initial July 2015 announcement rhetoric, as politically unpolished as it had to have been, (ffs, are Dems this stupid?...), is taken by the Dems/left as dead-to-rights evidence of "Trump's anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant racism," and then Trump wins the election on the actual issue (border/national security, the drug overdose crisis that basically won him the WI/PA/MI battleground states based on the latest research from somewhere on the interwebs doing all the properly adjusted statistical regressions, supposedly...).  (Here's a clue to Dems: The best chance you have of beating Donald Trump in 2020 is not to be so vile yourselves, so first on the order of business for cleaning up your act and getting into high gear is (a) study philosophy (a1) thoroughly and carefully; and (b) actually learn other ideas besides leftist ones so you can actually debate them better, and not be such loathsome losers otherwise, as they are especially when it comes to libertarians and especially Rand.  But they're also vile when it comes to Trump, immediately assuming the worst (i.e., racism) whenever Trump says any of his outlandish things that might possibly be interpreted by someone not in the target/intended audience as some kind of "dog whistle" (as Trump must have been using the word "lynching"; just ask Uncle Joe, he "knows" it for a fact...the doddering old fool...?)  So anyway, Trump said that Bush lied us into the Iraq War, but Colin Powell presented the Best Intelligence Available at The Time.  So was it incompetence in the intelligence community, a bit of lying by actors within the intelligence and/or political community, or a bit of both?  Were "intelligence findings" basically selectively twisted for political and perhaps (gasp) partisan-political ends?

And so, when it comes to that FISA court application to spy on Trump aide Carter Paige in late 2016 which the leftist media & ilk/enablers have been studiously evading awareness about, all the while they pursue for countless hours a Russia/Trump collusion conspiracy narrative for 2 and a half years instead of waiting for the Mueller Report (to find nothing collusion-wise...so Adam Schiff-show is a doddering younger fool, yes? ... and if you turn the party-affiliation tables, what Trump did in his "favor" phone call (7/25; Never Forget) is comparable impeachment-wise to, what, Obama's hot-mic "favor" of Vlad Putin in light of Barry's greater flexibility after the elections.  But Schiff-show's job is not intellectual honesty, it's basically as a shield for Peloser who could be less of a Peloathsome Peloser by starting with steps (a, a1 & b) above).  So, now, we are asked to believe by apologists for the, let's just call it for the moment the DEEP STATE (spooky music, etc.), and/or even some of the very same people who vilified the intelligence/Bush43 Admin for its quote unquote intelligence failures over Iraq/WMD, that - get this - the Steele Dossier was credible and well-founded enough to use as a key basis for the FISA application.

OR . . . the so-called quote unquote intelligence officials - the best and the brightest, the state of the art people, etc. so we were told - were not so pure in their motivations and so were willing to cut ethical and perhaps legal corners if that meant something that might at least kneecap a man they believe(d) to be a dangerous figure national security-wise.  (What, was Machiavelli the only political philosopher they remember from their Best and Brightest University Survey Course?  Presumably they never bothered to cover Aristotle and they - again, presumably - missed the point of Plato's Republic.  [Wait, so that particular utopia sounds too demanding for mere mortals, so might as well give up on the idea of utopia?  Is that where Aristotle went with Plato's message?  Let's ask the Best and Brightest.  Speaking of the Best and Brightest, I assume Socrates and Aristotle qualify.  So, Socrates, having failed to convince his fellow Athenians of the value of his philosophical services, submits to their (unjust...or is it, since they haven't been rationally persuaded?) verdict and punishment, which is death.  This man whom we might take to be supremely wise accepts the verdict of his fellow citizens, however ignorant and vicious it might be.  They found Socrates irritating, let's say, or perhaps a threat to any number of powerful people who thrive power-wise on poor public opinion formation.   Anyway, Socrates put his life at the polis' disposal, quite un-libertarian-like, if you ask me, but this is a man thought to be supremely wise in the face of death and everything, so his opinion should be heard out, thoroughly and carefully.  The life of a philosopher - perhaps even a sage - was at stake.  At any rate, the products which he did not live himself to see where the schools run by Plato and Aristotle.  Aristotle's body of work is the crowning achievement of humanistic learning in ancient Greece.  Now, Aristotle was tudor to Alexander the Great, who by a relatively very young age conquered much of the then-known world before dying, and some kind of anti-Alexander backlash back in Athens made Aristotle unsafe doing business there, and so he left to some other part of Greece, Macedonia, whatever, his parting shot to Athens being something to the effect of, "...lest Athens sin twice against philosophy."  So there.)

So that "Steele Dossier" (which should in all transparency be identified as the Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS/paid for by Hillary Clinton Steele Dossier) garnered a whole lotta attention within that very same(?) United States Intelligence Community, and officials even swore under oath to the FISA court that this was well-vetted information, this Simpson/Fusion/Clinton/Steele Dossier.

So I find it interesting if not intriguing if not fascinating in its own right - and I think all the American People possessing so much as an ounce of intellectual curiosity should find it likewise - that this now-discredited document full of Russian [i.e. Putin? the grandmaster? the man who evaded pointed questions from Chris Wallace more thoroughly than anything I've ever seen, I mean, after one of Putin's answers in that interview I didn't know whether he had me coming or going, the man is a grandmaster of obfuscation, I credit him with that.] lies, was treated by all the high-level Intelligence Community Officials as not only credible enough to warrant a bunch of attention but well-supported enough to be used as a key basis to obtain a FISA warrant.  All under Obama's where-the-buck-stops watch, too.

To restate the point more succinctly and directly: This phony "Steele dossier," full discredited and unreliable smears, was attested to as a reliable-enough document by Obama high-up DEEP STATE officials, to be used as a basis for a FISA warrant.  Wow.

So, either:
How easy is it to fool the American Intelligence Community?
or:
Can politically-appointed high-ups in the American Intelligence Community be trusted to act in good faith when questionable "information" comes their way?

(Hillary Clinton gets caught in a similar logical bind when it comes to her whole "email thing."  She said "she's sorry for that," and then pivots as fast as possible to another topic, but what would contrition mean here, Hillary?  So maybe, just maybe, you didn't break the law with that whole unauthorized-by-State server and the mishandling of the 110 duly classified documents (you even bullshitted the American People about that? Pathetic.), but what are the logical consequences here, Ms. Clinton?  Explain to the American People how someone who did what you did should be granted a security clearance at any point thereafter.  If Comey were forthright in his July 2016 press announcement and testimony, he would have been specific that this behavior would disqualify anyone from having a security clearance, whether or not laws were broken.  But that's Comey for you, I guess.  He assures us he's all on the up and up, scout's honor, etc.  Plus that whole meeting between Crooked Bill and Crooked Loretta Lynch on the tarmac didn't look good even by Swamp ethical standards, so he had to intervene, supposedly.)

(The high has mostly worn off by now.)

In the hopper: considerations of the thesis/theme that the more philosophical a life the more eudaimonic it is, or some variation of that idea, and that one cannot have eudaimonia (certainly not full or complete eudaimonia, if that differentiation can be applied here, that is, if eudaimonia is not something complete by definition) without one's life being philosophically organized and engaged.  In brief question form it's: Is eudaimonia possible without at least some amount of heavy-duty philosophical activity?  And philosophy here specifically means theoretical contemplation (toward and from first principles, etc.) as distinct from (merely) the love or pursuit of practical wisdom or phronesis.  This is the pursuit of sophia, i.e. theoretical wisdom.  So can one have a complete conception of eudaimonia without engaging in philosophy to identify the nature of eudaimonia, be able to identify instances, etc.?  And can one be eudaimonic without having a complete conception of eudaimonia?