How much of a commie is AOC?

(Just to be sure that AOC's statements about billionaires are fully contextualized . . .)

Just how to the left of the Chinese Communist Party does this make AOC?  Even China allows billionaires, and I don't think China is much of anything to the right of Rawls (see this blog's Jan 2019 post on Rawls for more).  Maybe there aren't human problems that are easily solved by having the ever-more-big-and-powerful state coercing people into doings things?  Presumably the billions lifted out of poverty by neoliberal market forces (a lot of that interacting with the Chinese Communist agenda) do matter even if they still face lots of financial and quality-of-life challenges (her example being ringworms but there are lots of other challenges still to be met via the usual: capitalistic growth)?  China seems to think that the existence of billionaires is necessary to lift the country out of poverty.  Even China.

More importantly, from an ethical and philosophical angle (and not the more narrowly political-economic one, a matter where, in any event, Mises/Hayek/Friedman/Buchanan tower over whatever academic leftists who egged on AOC), perhaps the Chinese learned a little bit of epistemic caution or 'humility' given its past failures due to zealous reform-ism egged on by charismatic 'leaders'.  Perhaps they're more pragmatic than AOC, and what does that tell you?  Even the CCP.  But back to the key ethical-philosophical point: AOC displays a hubris that the CCP already experienced back with Mao and has greater wisdom on that front than she has.  Even they.

(Implication: Put AOC & academic left comrades in charge of China and watch her/them wreck everything compared to what even the CCP finds feasible-plus-acceptable, poverty-reduction/existence-of-billionaires-wise? ofmg lol, how ever do these academic leftist (qua leftist, etc.) salaries keep getting funded...)

AOC: an excellent fucking idiot, or a perfect one?

AOC's latest is that there being billionaires is not a morally good outcome.  Last I checked, the increase in the instances of billionaires in the world has come along with vast net benefits for masses of people - including drastic reductions in global poverty.

The data are all there at ourworldindata.org.

Take the iPhone and iPad, for instance.  Someone named Steve Jobs made billions (in net worth, not in mansions and cars and golf courses and hookers and blow and gold coins sitting around in an Olympic-pool-sized vault - but rather, something more like current-value-of-expected-future-revenue-stream, i.e., value-created-over-replacement-level, etc. etc. from the iPhone, iTunes, iPad, etc.) through his serving a vast electronics-hungry market of people worldwide.  All the while, global poverty has plummeted, even in the non-iPad-consuming (but perhaps partly iPad-producing...) parts of the world, and someone probably had to end up having some billions of dollars next to their name in the net worth calculations for that to occur.  Mises explains all this quite well in his work on the role of the business tycoon in satisfying mass customer demands, i.e., cultivating a specialized skill in spotting and realizing value-added.  Rand, of course, perfects the analysis in such a way that Atlas Shrugged provides that much more value-added over and above Human Action -- we're at the very tail end of the distribution here in terms of 20th century political-philosophical acumen . . .

I don't know how much more stupid AOC can get than this.  The other day she was saying that the USA was "evolving into fascisuuuuuuum" all the while we have a better example over in China of a more fascism-like environment that serves as a marked contrast to the world's leading light (the good ol' USA, warts and all) which has the moral capital that China lacks to lay claim to being the world's lone superpower for some time to come.

AOC says that she looks about her and does not find "an advanced society."  Her idea of an advanced society involves something called demo-ratic socialisuuuuum where billionaires don't exist while poverty is eliminated (if you can believe that shit), but I've yet to year about AOC's proposal for philosophical education for children (and ipso facto the rest of the mentally-competent citizenry?) ASAFP which would be the fastest way to ensuring whatever the most advanced society we can reasonably expect to realize, which along the way means dialectical engagement between competing ideas about the good and the right at the highest levels of give-and-take (Dennett/Rapoport Rules, etc.) (that's one problem with the Academic Loser-Left, it's all take and no give with them, "the selfish cunts"?).  Ideally it means all informed citizens do their homework as thoroughly as (e.g.) Rawls and Nozick did, at least on the essentials, so as to engage most effectively with their influential-on-academia treatises?  Ideally it means all informed citizens who keep hearing about this Ayn Rand woman know where to look to find good scholarship on Rand.

(Hint: Gregory Salmieri, editor of the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Rand, and not Scumbag Lisa Duggan, author of 'Mean Girl,' is a reputable Rand scholar.  Scumbag Duggan responds to pointed inquiries about the level of thoroughness and care in her work with evasions and insults.  Also, the only decent critics of Rand these past few decades have been libertarians, e.g., Nozick and Huemer, and even there you find some effective pushback from more Rand-friendly figures like Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen - also reputable Rand scholars who were editors of the first academic publication on Rand's philosophic thought in the 1980s.  Also, Sciabarra is a reputable Rand scholar, and the most reputable of all Rand scholars is, of course, Peikoff, by Rand's own attestation.  In the ideal, Dennett/Rapoport society, anyone wanting to comment on Rand and be taken seriously will be thoroughly familiar with the themes covered in Peikoff's output and not just the already-devastating material in Rand's output, e.g., "What is Capitalism?", "Man's Rights," "The Comprachicos," "Art and Cognition," "This is John Galt Speaking," "Apollo 11," "Don't Let It Go," "Philosophy: Who Needs It," etc.  The Peikoff courses are more like material trying to explain in all necessary painstaking detail the cognitive processes that lead to the skill level involved in penning these and other gripping essays/monologues.)

(Then, induce the principle involved with Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff across all the history of philosophy such that (e.g.) an Aristotle-basher like Bertrand Russell doesn't hold the public's attention in the light of the contributions of a most respected Aristotle scholar like W.D. Ross (Aristotle, 1923; editing the Oxford Translation of Aristotle's work in the early 20th century).  In the ideal advanced society AOC has not provided any helpful cues toward, there will be widespread familiarity with the admittedly difficult ideas of Kant and Hegel and their relevance; this includes widespread familiarity with such 'metadata' as where to look for (e.g.) the most thorough or the most cited of Kant or Hegel scholarship.  One should be able to distinguish most thorough and most cited; e.g., I found Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995) to be the most thoroughly researched academically published work on Rand at least for a good decade or two - prima facie evidence of this is the thorough use of Peikoff's lecture materials as well as books, something that Scumbag Duggan didn't bother with in the slightest - whereas the Peikoff-friendly academics affiliated with the Ayn Rand Society (a reputable source about Objectivism...) have been loath to reference or discuss Sciabarra's work much.  The people and organizations near in orbit to "Objectivist apostate" Dr. David Kelley, or Jimmy Wales' Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy email list in the 1990s and thereabouts were, on the other hand, much interested in discussing Sciabarra's ideas/themes.  I'd like to hear from scholars of Rand, and Aristotle, and Hegel and others about Sciabarra's claims about the Aristotelian provenance of dialectics as he understands it ("the art of context-keeping") and his claims - endorsed in all essentials by avid avowed Aristotelians like the Dougs - of Rand's Objectivism being an expert application of Aristotelian-dialectical essentials in the landscape of 20th century thought (with the necessary scale and scope of integration required to compose Atlas Shrugged being Exhibit A).  (I would also use as examples of dialectical sensibilities in action Aristotle's sprawling research program and Sciabarra's sprawling bibliographic references.)  Why should people in an advanced society expect anything less than care and thoroughness in such research and opinion-forming processes?  I find dialectical sensibilities in action to be a rewarding enterprise.)

An advanced society is also a society comprised of people who are aware of the basics of all the major theories and schools of economics (including the Austrians/Mises), and taught to think about those economics ideas in conjunction with possessing a knowledge of the data at ourworldindata.org.  The juggernaut that is industrial capitalism has almost wiped out extreme poverty, for a population of people approaching 10 billion, and has implemented at profitable scale the technologies that made (e.g.) the iPhone possible.  To borrow a phrase from a Gentle Giant song, is any of this that I'm saying here stuff that Aristotle would discontend?  Not the fool AOC, but the sage Aristotle.  Would his homework-doing lead him to the conclusion that capitalism is exactly as win-win beneficial as Rand and Mises say, that it's particularly difficult to envision a system that can supersede it (he would at least have metadata-level awareness of what's going on in David Ramsey Steele's From Marx to Mises (1992), an exhaustively-researched 20+ page bibliography study, itself one of the 1300 or so works referenced in Sciabarra's Total Freedom, so it's like condensations of condensations of exhaustive research going into the present-day pro-capitalism case...), and that Rand's "What is Capitalism?" captures the essential here (which is a condensation, into one essay, of the theme of Atlas Shrugged) at least as well as anything out there?

Would Aristotle provide a much more thorough commentary upon the work of Sciabarra and the Dougs than what they've received so far from their academic 'peers'?  I mean, are they basically right about Rand's being a rightful heir to the venerable Aristotelian tradition or not?  Or do her polemics leave enough to be desired (e.g. not showing the slightest familiarity with Kant's quandary in the Antinomy of Pure Reason before pronouncing him an evil evader? that sort of thing?) that she falls short of the standards of perfection in dialectic and other conduct that Aristotle tried to exemplify?  I mean, he did say of Plato's theory of Forms/Ideas, 'farewell to such tarradiddle; they are mere sounds without sense,' but at least his rebuttal to the Ideas was explained in detail; Rand never went into detailed polemics against her philosophical 'enemies.'  I guess she comes closest to any such thing in her essay "Causality vs. 'Duty'" inasmuch as it comes into direct conflict with Kant's ideas about specifically moral motivation (that it must be done for duty's sake - that there is something irreducibly autonomous about why we are motivated by moral considerations; it doesn't come down to a calculation of interests or the 'virtue of prudence' but rather assigns an inherent dignity to humanity as such as an end in itself . . . the other aspect of Kant that Rand really never touches upon but which actually best explains his profound influence on mainstream moral philosophizing).  Without coming to grips with Kant's Antinomy and with Kant's project being in great part a response to what he regarded as the Rationalists' (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) pretense to knowledge of supersensible realities - which contextualizes his talk of "denying knowledge to make room for faith" - Rand's attack on Kant's foundational appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy isn't particularly helpful.  (Wouldn't we find a suitably 'Aristotelianized' Hegel more insightful in regard to this and other pesky dualisms?)  Her brief polemical attack on Nietzsche in 1961 ("For the New Intellectual" - an essay that is less than utterly fabulous in its entirety, due to the brief polemical attacks) belies her own early Nietzsche influence and even her own positive words about Nietzsche in 1968 which would contextually account for the sources of Nietzsche's appeal.

But Rand's deficient polemics aside, when she's talking about her own ideas and theories, and applying her thinking and writing habits to contemporary cultural commentary, how is she not a first-rate figure?  I mean, has no one noticed that in the 1960s she had no public-intellectual competition to speak of - that no one was producing anything remotely like the body of theory and observation contained in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967)?  I mean, whatever the value-added-over-replacement-level of works like Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), do they exceed overall and in deepest fundamentals what's going on in C:TUI much less Atlas or The Fountainhead?

Would AOC's advanced society involve people often trying to envision what Aristotle might or might not discontend given all the readily available data about political economy, moral theory, and related areas of study?  Or is AOC's idea of an advanced society predominantly involve people who are as ignorant, intellectually lazy, one-sided, hubris-filled and annoying (if only because she wields real power, a legalized kind involving a gun, in a nominally free country) as AOC?  Do we one-sidedly Chicken Little about the global climate crisis while proposing solutions no consensus of economists could take seriously, while providing no accounting of the pace of technological advancement (in this "not-so-advanced society," see) or - most important of all, as Rand as well as anyone could recognize - the record of humankinds' capacity for problem-solving?

(For example, I am currently in the process of solving or trying to solve how to deliver an incontrovertible, thoroughly researched, one-stop clearing house of a book or series about the eudaimonia/happiness-benefits of a life lived philosophically (and, in the process, discovering the best philosophical paradigm for the organization of life - e.g., is it Aristotelian-style dialectic; or at the least is Aristotelian-style dialectic a better philosophical paradigm or set of organizing principles than, e.g. Marxian dialectical materialism)?  Are there dangers in applying a totalizing 'dialectical' paradigm to the formation of society?  Dangers only with some strands of totalizing dialectics but only benefits with others, like if a society of full-fledged Aristotelians set itself to the task of optimal problem-solving?)

From what I can tell, the Academic Left qua such doesn't produce thinkers like Aristotle or aspiring Aristotelian(-style dialectician)s ; it produces loyal mouthpieces like AOC (and left to run amok it would produce only such loyal "minds") who like routinely to shit all over the things that made America and distinctively Western civilization great, and then to pretend that the USA is a nascent fascist entity when we have a real and very contrasty example of such an entity right in front of our noses in China, as I like to think Aristotle would affirm.  As much as erecting more border barriers might trigger the word "fascism" in AOC's noggin, the wider question being begged is why so many non-white people from around the world would want to gain entry into even a nascently fascist and hateful country.  And, a commonsense question in this context given current Beltway events: Can Xi Jinpeng be impeached for anything?  Given current and past Beltway examples, wouldn't you probably need an opposition party for that thing, much less a minimally effective one?  Seems like only disloyalty to the one, ruling party in China could get one into deep trouble in that context.

So how on earth would this U.S. Representative (NY-14) be so out of it, as to think there are nascent cultural-political forces in the USA that would make us more like the regime in China?  How does someone with a degree in International Relations and Economics from Boston University end up being so out of it as to imagine such things?  How does someone so out of it get an endorsement from Obama?  How does someone so out of it get such a free pass even from the more reasonable and responsible of center-to-left big-govt "liberals" much less the fawning adoration of the far & academic left which unleashed her kind on the polity?  I mean, basically, the academic left has as a core idea for an advanced society something euphemistically and kinda dishonestly called "demo-ratic socialism" but once everyone gets their better-living-through-big-government, punish-the-most-able benefits, where do these advanced citizens go from there presumably with all their new free time?

When do they get around to implementing Philosophy for Children for all schools from grade 3 or so onward?  Why haven't they already, given that it's a no-brainer and the literature makes it perfectly obvious that kids can consider and reflect on bona fide philosophical material (e.g., the nature of justice, happiness, the soul, God)?  What about the whole meaning of life issue?  Is that solved by demo-ratic socialism, or should the citizenry be informed of the state of the art research on the topic, which doesn't seem to make reference to capitalism vs. socialism?  How about applied aesthetics such as getting kids and the citizenry exposed to the essential canon of classical music (in addition to other essential genre-canons, but this one arguably has priority).  Wouldn't there be a closer tie to better living with research into these areas, than with whatever "benefits" supposedly accrue to ordinary folks from a punitively redistributionist fiscal scheme?  (Once the billionaires are outlawed, how do they suppose that the next generation of high-tech goods and services would be realized and delivered at the most feasible combination of quality, price and time saved?  Do these leftists have any viable and sustainable alternative to point to, besides an economic system that has worked better to alleviate human problems than any other economic system on record?)

AOC is faithfully parroting the Academic Left line.  She hasn't really put any careful and thorough thought into any of this stuff, so that leaves us the question: What about the Academic Left itself?  What's its excuse?  How did it fail to put 2 and 2 together by comparing the history of the world before and after modern industrial capitalism and conclude anything other than that it alleviates misery and solves problems (although it tends to do this in unequal measure across the population, which seems to be the real "problem" for the left)?  How does one manage, as does the typical academic leftist, to attribute no credit to capitalism for the problems it solves, while making light only of capitalism's supposed evils - e.g., not crediting capitalism for the dramatic fall in global poverty, but blaming it for climate change (as though there were no connection between these two things, as though it's not the markets-adopting, widespread-absolute-poverty-reducing China with its 1B+ population that is now the world's highest-volume carbon emitter)?

The likes of AOC are where the Academic Left's theoretical rubber hits the political-praxis road.  Is it a remotely impressive result?  Or should we instead rate these phenomena on a scale of (dis)value describing the exact opposite of impressive - e.g., willfully destructive?  Would there be a more perfect example of the willfully destructive run amok than a critical mass of AOC mentalities?  Through the usual pressures for ideological purity on the left, wouldn't a critical mass of AOC types end up being indistinguishable from 20th century Red movements?  If we replace "AOC types" with "Academic Left types" do we get any more encouraging an answer?  Is the Academic Left a perfect fucking idiot?  Any more/less so than the genuine 'fascist Right'?  As for combating climate change, can we leave this to the reasonable and responsible experts in the sciences of the doable?  Past performance tells me that such types are not to be found on the far left; even so much as a loser as Nancy "Keeping out Illegal Border Crossers is Immoral" Peloser recognizes what an obvious epic loser the Green Dream or whatever it is, is.  Cutting poverty increases carbon emissions, ceteris paribus.  What isn't held equal is population size, technological capital, and human problem-solving capacities.

And so the loser-left's last-gasp effort to destroy capitalism is to destabilize the poverty-reduction effort to "save the planet" while giving no accounting on the other side of the ledger of these other not-held-equal things?  The same bunch of leftists who delivered and/or apologized for 20th century socialism - those unaccountable intellectual thugs?  They're sure we shouldn't try out nuclear energy or something before diving headlong off the abolish-capitalism cliff?  They're sure that they're so on the ball that if(/when?) AI gets sophisticated enough - as superior and sophisticated and advanced as your typical leftist, see - to diagnose (or not) on the basis of systemic features of capitalism, that it'll endorse the far-left abolish-capitalism prescription?  Is the Academic Left 100% sure that it's done its homework here, enough to warrant systematically excluding, ignoring, belittling and punishing as many (presumably) intellectually and morally inferior non-academic-leftists as they can?  If the Academic Left can't be blamed for spawning an obvious loser like AOC - if she is come kind of anomaly among undergrads unleashed on the public - then what about the Academic Left itself?  What successes won't it try to discredit, and what failures won't it excuse?  To disambiguate and translate the wording of the post title into a more familiar metaphor: just how sick is this puppy, exactly?

Just how big of a loser is the Left/leftism, exactly?

Since the example of Ayn Rand is way to triggering for these intellectual lowlifes, how about we present a more, uh, conservative (as in very likely understated) case of unexceeded libertarian intellectual excellence in making the scholarly and technically-refined case for right-libertarian (i.e., capitalist) political theory/philosophy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000).  Sciabarra has since gone on to be lead editor for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999-present) while his academic background is such that he was a student of a leading Marx scholar of his day, Bertell Ollman, author of such works as Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971).  It is also of such an astonishing research orientation that his Total Freedom ends up with 48 pages (or some 1300-ish) references, including all the major philosophers and works of philosophy throughout history along with pretty much anything dialectics-oriented (a tradition stemming from Aristotle, by reputation probably the greatest philosopher of all time, and continuing most especially through Hegel and Marx (in transumated form, i.e., dialectical materialism), and then on through to - Sciabarra argues quite convincingly - the 'dialectical libertarian ascendancy' of Mises, Hayek, and Rand.  And judging by his Rand-related work (not the least of which would be his also-thoroughly-researched [which by necessity includes all the Peikoff courses up through its preparation/publication period] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995)).

Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses.  In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part.  And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it?  Wanna do dialectics excellently?  Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs.  (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones?  Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story?  If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly?  Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique?  Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)

(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)

Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics.  Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms.  Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.

So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting?  Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them.  So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm

First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.

And why would there be, really?  Leftism is wrong, false to the facts.  The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve.  They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added.  The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid.  Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe.  Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence.  (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources."  "The resources" presumably including the human intellect?  Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)

So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism.  If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when.  (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....)  Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding?  Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle?  Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll.  And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?

I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard.  (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class."  Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?)  Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.

Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged?  Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly?  Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?

If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is?  There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.

And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism.  Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one.  The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority.  Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.

(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be?  From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip.  (Or why not a family?)  Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality.  If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.

[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc.  Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty!  Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way.  I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives?  And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life?  Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of).  And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there.  Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]

So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there?  (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?)  Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind.  What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing?  Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living.  All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).  The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek.  Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology.  I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights.  I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining?  Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears.  If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does?  [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])

So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?

[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear!  Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like?  Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective).  Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]

[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode.  Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"?  Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?)  If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]

[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!"  This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims?  I'm talking the Academic Left, here.  Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention?  I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics?  As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people.  I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly?  It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently.  Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.).  She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century.  I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx.  On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication.  As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit.  The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left.  There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible.  Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology?  Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words?  But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al.  I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise?  I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell?  Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)?  I guess not.  Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")?  I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...).  Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one.  What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this?  Jack shit, that's what.  And on and on it goes.  As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims.  So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...).  So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO.  And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought.  (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives.  That's kinda fucking sad, actually.  I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere?  Monograph-length?  Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere?  John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he.  Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'.  And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from.  I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective.  Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume.  (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.)  It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward.  Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history.  So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?)  One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then?  Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist?  By failing to recognize its significance?  Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get?  Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's?  The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets.  Its scholars are perfectionists.  So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure?  Metadata-wise, what does it tell you?  Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern?  That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars?  I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient).  The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes.  Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx.  How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]

Some obviously scummily unfair process from House Demo-rats

So I'm only a few minutes into Mark Levin's interview with Prof. Alan Dershowitz and he raises the fact that House Judicary Committee had 3 pro-impeachment law professors testifying and the Republicans were given one anti-impeachment professor.  Now, just think about that for a moment.  I mean, really give it a bit of careful thought if you have to.

Let's say that on the committee there are roughly 12 Democrats and 10 Republicans.  Shouldn't the number of for- and against-witnesses be as close to representative of the composition of the committee, as someone motivated to (within reason) bend over backwards to demonstrate fairness and accountability might very well call for?  Wouldn't it be simply a matter of basic, commonsense fairness that the Republicans be invited to call at least 2 if not 3 witnesses?  Dershowitz suggests equality.  Some Demo-rat-like apologist might rationalize this little bit of cutting of corners in the fairness department with some version or other of "elections have consequences, we run the show."  But is that the attitude of someone with dual motivations probably in conflict with one another: getting to the truth from as broad a range of credible adversarial input as one can bend over backwards to consider; and then the motivation to damage Trump and empower Demo-rats politically.  And this scummy little 3-to-1 witness ratio shows their biased and partisan hand right on its face; how could it not?

Philosopher's question: if this doesn't fall into the "at least somewhat scummy, beyond any reasonable doubt" category, then how much more biased does it have to be before it does?  A 10-to-1 witness ratio?  Let's get some non-disingenuous specifics about where to draw the line.  All I know is, the Demo-rats crossed that line here, in at least this instance.

It's obvious that they're being at least a little scummy here and that they should bend over backwards and remove any doubt about act-cleaning commitments.  If you can't accept that obvious truth, what other obvious truths won't you accept?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of contemporary Demo-rat (and fellow leftist social-circle travelers') scummery and intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  Hopefully the Republicans in the Senate can brings themselves to support at the very least some overwhelming bipartisan denunciation of Trump's Ukraine policies as they were done (and for the reasons that they raised alarms among so many ambassadors; does Trump have a corrupting dual motivation there very akin to the one described just above and about which he failed, Swamp-like, to bend over backwards to avoid? Gee, ya think?), and put him on notice.  I've heard the word "censure" in the context of what sort of compromise the Senate may come to, short of a very-high 2/3 threshold for removing the president.

Maybe a fair Senate trial might involve the GOP inviting the Democratic law professor and Clinton donor Alan Dershowitz to testify, with plenty of rigorous cross-examination from fellow Democrats?  (Philosopher's question: Why wasn't Dershowitz among the 4 professors last week?  Or at least the 5 [with 2 for the minority] that would have met a grudgingly minimal fairness threshold?)

[Addendum: House Republicans said that they were promised a minority-run hearing day.  One day.  Whether or not they were indeed promised that, why didn't they get one?  Part of the answer is that the Demo-rats were in such a big fucking hurry to "conclude its inquiry" before a full House vote before Christmas.  I guess they also figured that the GOP-led Senate would be sufficient obstacle to their aims that one day for House GOP-led hearings wouldn't be necessary.  But we're only left to guess here, given our knowledge of how corruptly partisan things are nowadays.]

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

Greenwald vs. Comey's Crooked FBI (Plus: the scummery of the Left)

Scumbag Comey

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald for doing as Greenwald does for well over a decade now: calling out Swamp corruption for what it is, and those who enable it for what they are.  And it vindicates Trump when it comes to the need to drain the very Swamp that used the very Swamp-like means to try to take him down.

Trump's instincts in firing the non-contrite James Comey turned out to be right: Comey's either an incompetent piece of shit, or a willfully corrupt one.  (And it only further proves Trump's point that Comey's enablers would react to his firing as they did, by launching a bullshit investigation that it appears Mueller's team had good reason to believe back in 2017 would not turn up what it was digging for.)  It doesn't really matter which at this point whether Comey was crooked or incompetent; what matters is how other folks - namely, Demorats and their allies/enablers (including their talking-points outlet, MSDNC) - enabled his behavior and continue to enable it still.

The enablers are on the "best" team the American Left is able to field any longer.  And here's the philosopher's smackdown: without contrition for peddling falsehoods and a good-faith effort to clean up their acts to avoid such fuck-ups in the future, then they are liars retroactively.  They fail to call out their earlier selves for their falsehood-spreading, thereby falsely certifying themselves as reliable truth-tellers.  The likes of Greenwald and myself don't let them get away with it.  (Indeed, what would it make me if I failed to call out their corruption and sliminess and intellectual dishonesty in no uncertain terms?  What if I don't call obvious motherfuckers obvious motherfuckers?  How would I live with myself?)

During the GWB years, the Demorats had an ally in Greenwald because he went after the motherfucking behaviors of GWB officials (& enablers/allies) with all the necessary documentation/links and cold hard logic.  If Greenwald says you're a motherfucker, it's because he's got overwhelming proof that you're a motherfucker.

This here post is the very, very last opportunity I am giving today's Demorats/enablers to redeem themselves and own up to their enabling of Comey's FBI's motherfucking behavior.  Slinking away in silence would (of course?) not be good enough; doing so itself is motherfucker behavior reasons that should be clear by now: they are unwilling to acknowledge and condemn their own bad behavior.  And it isn't just some triviality, some white lie or mishap: this is a powerful law enforcement agency running roughshod over citizens' rights.

I would take issue with this statement from Greenwald, although perhaps as an attorney he is more closely familiar with what he's talking about than I am:

Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.
The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.

It does appear easy enough for the NSA and FBI to abuse their surveillance powers as long as they act like crooked motherfuckers, and as Greenwald says earlier in his article:

About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.'”

Apparently Greenwald considers it unrealistic to expect FBI actors to behave scrupulously?  (The measure of scrupulousness should be something like, "Assume that you're the one that the FBI is seeking to surveil."  Like, duh?)  Apparently the supposed safeguards in FBI policy against this kind of abuse just aren't good or reliable enough?  What if heads roll when this sort of abuse happens?  There are fuck-ups and crooked actors, but the key here seems to be accountability.  And it's motherfuckerly to oppose accountability or to run interference for the crooked and the fuck-ups, as Demorats/enablers appear committed to doing.

I have a hypothesis, a hunch, or what have you about the American Left and its Demorat team-on-the-field: They've been rotten and motherfuckerly for a while, that they've been getting increasingly worse over time, but the candidacy and election of Donald Trump sent them over the edge and put their rotten motherfuckerliness way out into the open for all (well, all of those with a clue) to observe and draw their disgusted conclusions from.  I wouldn't have expected an entire political party and its enablers to prove themselves to be such a bunch of pathetic pieces of shit, but a mountain of overwhelming evidence points me to this unavoidable conclusion.  I have to call it out as my inner daimon urges me to.

And, since I already did know what a bunch of pathetic motherfuckerly pieces of shit they are when they've recklessly smeared and belittled even so titanic a figure as Atlas Shrugged's author over the course of decades - showing their true colors when the chips are down - it couldn't exactly come as a surprise to me when they turn the same tactics on a president that triggered them just right.  (Kudos to Trump for the rope-a-dope?)  I guess the main difference is that they didn't devote all their resources to smearing Rand given her limited (so far) influence on the culture and polity; but with Trump they feel the necessity to do so and debase themselves in no uncertain terms in the process.  But they would go all-out on Rand in just the same way if/when they consider it necessary.  They are, after all, behaving just like the intellectually bankrupt pieces of shit responsible for the dystopian conditions in Atlas.  I think I might be able to build an incontrovertible case that they're even worse than the statist scum of Rand's fictional portrayal.

Scumbag so-called philosopher

This brings me to the Academic Left.  I now consider the Academic Left to be the nearest thing to irredeemable deplorables as we have in this country, a bunch of dishonest parasites hell-bent on smearing their opposition and destroying honest dialogue.  (See Rand's comment about the potential of intellectuals to be either the most beneficial or the most parasitic of all social groups.)  It may well be that a fully-documented, dead-to-rights smackdown of the Academic Left and the intellectual culture of Leftism generally has to be part and parcel of a wider 'better living through philosophy' project, since the Academic Left serves as such a glaring contrast case - an example of what happens when those with the letters "PhD" after their names manage (in a concerted, systematic, institutionalized fashion) to bastardize philosophic inquiry, with all sorts of sophisticated rationalizations to boot.  To do philosophy perfectively one has to pursue metaphilosophy perfectively, and part of the latter involves being able to reliably and systematically distinguish real philosophic activity from pseudo-philosophic activity (the pseudo- part involving clever rationalizations for systematic biases).

Pseudo-philosphic activity seems especially devious and toxic when there's a political agenda involved; I mean, were they allowed to run amok, how would today's Academic Left behave differently than Marxist movements of the 20th century that grabbed power and murdered millions, time and time again?  (You should immediately be suspicious when you hear Marxists/enablers protesting that Marx's vision was never truly or properly implemented, i.e., that it was psychopaths - time and time again, somehow - who misappropriated Marxian doctrine for reliably murderous totalitarian ends.  To explain that one away, we'd need a really good, BS-free explanation for how Marx's dismissive attitude toward "bourgeois rights," for instance, wouldn't lead to atrocities committed time and time again - an unmistakable pattern - by avowed Marxists.)  What are the differences between these two groups of ideologues, exactly?  Get someone like a Trump or an Amy Wax to trigger them just right, and out come their true, hard-to-distinguish-from-Red colors, particularly with their eagerness to rush to shut down the Prohibited ideas, or to smear them beyond recognition.  (That the silence/punish/smear-Wax effort occurred at an Ivy League University says it all.)

So I've fucking had it with the Left in its current incarnation, its systematic bad faith and dishonesty, its totalitarian methods, its refusal to learn from or atone for past errors/misdeeds.  (See Alan Charles Kors on whether we can ever realistically expect the Academic Left to own up to the spectacular and bloody record of failures of efforts to implement socialism, efforts they supported for decades on end.  Failure to do so makes them what else than motherfuckerly apologists for totalitarianism?  This also goes for the "leading" so-called philosophy blogger with a long track record of reckless smears of non-leftists such as Rand.)

(Speaking of this so-called philosophy blogger, a reckless smear of Sesardic that only proves Sesardic's point: "Sesardic is a right-wing crank who has even written a whole book expressing disbelief that philosophers might not all be anti-Marxist zealots like he is.  [UP: Actually, Sesardic's point is that there are provably too many leftist zealots even in the history of "rigorous, analytic" philosophy than is warranted by the quality of the arguments for leftist ideas.  Anyone who's gone through Sesardic's book knows this.]  I even make a brief appearance in the book, based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of a post on this blog.  [UP: Actually, there are without question dozens of posts from which Sesardic draws for his depiction of this so-called philosopher; see here for some further context.]"  For a "Doctor" who chides Sesardic for lack of argumentative rigor, some self-healing is in order.)

My educated hunch is that a mountain of overwhelming, dead-to-rights, no-holes, no-escape case against the Academic Left can successfully be built, if it hasn't been done already.  As I state above, I may have to build such a case myself as part of my project.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: What more would I need to show than what I've peppered this here blog with already, or what any honest reader would reasonably induce from it all?  What more does it take to prove what a sick puppy the Left is?)  Of course, the target audience for such a case won't be the Academic Left, which I suspect has unlimited ability to evade or explain away even mountains of evidence they don't like (and the ones who don't possess that ability would have ditched the Left already); the intended audience will be those, such as mainstream Americans, who have an incentive to fight and remove parasitic destruction of American institutions and traditions.

Perhaps the main challenge remaining, assuming that what I've already peppered the blog with tells any reasonable observer all they need to know about the intellectual and moral character of the Left, is to connect the two things, to demonstrate how one led to the other: the Academic Left's anti-philosophical nature on the one hand, and the Demorat/enablers' enabling of FBI corruption on the other.  Would you be surprised if such a connection could be demonstrated beyond all doubt, or that if any media outlet carries out such a demonstration it would be this here blog?  Do I have to get saganized and see where my saganized inner daimon leads me?  Is that what has to be done here?

I mean, fuck.  The pattern is the same: Demorat-allied media propagating smears against Republicans (e.g.) while excusing and running interference for scummy Demorat behavior, all under the guise of professional journalistic objectivity; and the Academic Left propagating smears against opposing ideas while excusing the bad ideas that appear to lead inexorably to totalitarianism when applied, all under the guise of professional scholarly rigor.  All with the hope and wish for impunity and unaccountability.  And lots of overlap between these two groups.  How could there not be a deep connection between how these groups operate?

[ADDENDUM: How about this little gem I encountered via searchwords "academic left".  When the institutionalized dishonesty and malice overtake the philosophy (sic) profession, what hope for integral academic honesty is there?  It was nothing short of an ultimate litmus test - Leftism vs. Philosophy - and in today's academic environment, Leftism won.  And note - surprise, surprise - that the further left you go, the more malicious, scummy, and Red-like the behavior.  If this isn't dead-to-rights shit that should make every decent person fucking pissed, then what is? [Edit: Of course, given a lot of recent evidence regarding the reliability and reproducibility of social science studies, surveys, methodologies, etc., this study should be approached with as much skepticism as one approaches any study of this sort.  See the more downthread comments here, for instance.  (So I jumped the gun somewhat here, and that's not acceptable to this here intellectual perfectionist, although my inner daimon isn't pointing me toward the assessment that I'm a motherfucking piece of shit for having done so; this has to be weighed against the entirety of this blog - just as it would only be fair to weigh the scummery of contemporary leftist intellectual culture against the widest context of behavior by leftists; while they may routinely be motherfucking pieces of shit when their cognition and behavior are politically-oriented, their non-politically-oriented cognitions and behaviors may have some redeeming value.  But what did I say the other day about acting like a decent person one moment and a scumbag the next?  I'm not quite yet prepared to resolve the tension between propositions here.  Either their duality of cognition/behavior from one moment to the next is itself still fundamentally scummy, or the leftists are only scummy for sure qua contemporary leftists.  I'm really not sure which.  Gee, if that's what any reasonable disagreement comes down to, the assessment of contemporary leftism as an anti-philosophical shitshow stands either way,)  But . . . what if a body of overwhelming anecdotal evidence exists to establish essentially the same basic assessment of the Academic Left's nature as this study (if largely true and accurate) suggests, as I think such body of evidence does?] ]

Charlottesville fake news, 2+ years later

Scumbag CNN

CONTEXT

The notion that Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, skinheads, the KKK, or any related groups who might have been in Charlottesville in 2017 as "very fine people" is false, thoroughly and easily debunked, as perfect an example of fake news as any.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: if that isn't fake news, then what is?)  Trump's statement about "very fine people on both sides," stripped of context, would appear to be some sort of dog whistle to these racist groups.  The full context includes not just the entirety of the press conference in which he said "very fine people" but also other statements made within days of that in which he explicitly and unambiguously repudiated - by name - neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK, etc.

In other words, there really is no excuse for spreading what is in essence a fucking lie that Trump called Nazis "very fine people."

It's a notion that took hold in the minds of vast swaths of the American left - Democrats, "progressives," academia, and media such as CNN.  And if you have any doubts that this notion went all the way to the top, just see what Obama said: "How hard is it so say Nazis are bad?"  (How the fuck can Obama not know better than this?  How can he not know that Trump explicitly, repeatedly repudiated Nazis?  This makes Obama a fucking liar, plain and simple.)

But what really pisses me and a ton of people off, is the likes of CNN refusing to own up to their de-contextualized misreporting - the spreading of fake news and lies.  CNN refuses to accept accountability and responsibility, indicating they think they can spread lies with impunity.  (And, yes, had CNN done the right thing and issued a full and clear correction, it would be headline news impossible not to have heard about.  All we have so far, it appears, is a half-assed admission from one if its anchors.)

It's one thing to spread lies and fake news; it's another to refuse to own up to it.  There's only one logical consequence of this: CNN deserves no credibility as a news outlet - certainly not when it comes to its coverage of politics.  The only logical question to raise at this point is: What else might CNN be lying to our faces about, this very day?

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (for one) has spent lots of time calling CNN to task for its lies, and CNN has chosen to ignore him.  Well, fuck CNN, then.  If they ignore him, who won't they ignore?  Fake-news motherfuckers.

But as I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt throughout many blog postings, this is a problem going well beyond CNN and applies pretty much to the entirety of today's American Left and what, to them, passes for decent and responsible discussion about political matters.  The American Left has become chock full of dishonest motherfuckers who think they can smear their opponents (not just politicians like Trump but intellectual figures like Rand) with impunity, and cry "racism" all the time with no consequence, and generally act like scum who have no business wielding power over others.  What's more, if they're not in on this scummy act directly, they are complicit in it.  If they don't actively take measures to hold the likes of CNN to account for its lies (while still rooting out every mistruth stated by their opponents, and screaming bloody murder when they pretend to have found something for sure), then they're partisan pieces of shit who also have no business pretending to act in the name of truth and goodness.

I hardly bother watching CNN any longer; it's quite predictable how its commentators will one-sidedly distort things (i.e., lie through context-omission), exaggerate the misdeeds of their opponents and downplay/ignore their own, etc.; whatever value it might have to offer I can get on another network, anyway; they offer no-value-added.

And that is part of a wider picture which I have also suggested before: the best (not merely good, or okay) minds in politics today have ended up being on the Right broadly speaking.  (Think about it: if someone like Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies and isn't succeeded in Democratic politics by anyone of remotely comparable stature, then where do you suppose the potential successor-minds have gone instead?  Suppose that the very best minds coming of age in, say, the 1990s make lots of attentive effort to sift through competing political ideas.  Such a mind would be carefully observant of the state of the debate, a meta-level observation as it were.  And what if such a mind is not only disappointed by what Democrats and the Left have to offer, but becomes increasingly disappointed over time to the point of being appalled at the intellectual bankruptcy a quarter century later?  What if the so-called minds of the Left nowadays consistently and unaccountably caricature and smear their opponents on the Right (and pat each other on the back for doing so) rather than engage in serious dialectic?  And what if those so-called minds, with increasing regularity, accompany their smears with hubris and contempt for their (imagined) opponents?  At what point does the best and most attentive mind stop giving these intellectual slobs the benefit of the doubt; how obviously slovenly and slothful does their behavior have to get?)  I'll add: those with the more reputable moral character have also ended up on the Right.  The Left has deluded itself with the notion of intellectual and moral superiority, which is belied the moment you get leftists pretending to debate the merits of opposing political views.  The likes of CNN are employing lesser intellects and more morally defective people than their competition.

(MSDNC is even more of a fucking joke; I haven't wasted a second of my time on that pitiful excuse for a news/opinion network in well over a month now; its commentators are obviously of a lesser intellectual and moral caliber, and the only point of its "news" is to propagate DNC talking points.  Or maybe it's just that CNN does a better job of disguising itself doing essentially the same thing; in that they would happen to be only more clever, but hardly wise.)

Even if you still wanted or hoped to trust CNN, to give it the benefit of the doubt, how can you?  If what they've done so far isn't enough to have squandered the benefit of the doubt, then what would be?

If "liberal centrist" Jonathan Haidt and his now-4-years-old Heterodox Academy project, with all its commonsense recommendations for how the Academy (and especially the Academic Left) might restore a reputation for honest inquiry, is pretty much ignored by the Academy (and especially the Academic Left), then what more do you need to convict the Academy/Left of peddling the equivalent of fake news and elevating one-sided propaganda over genuine dialogue, and squandering any remaining benefit of the doubt?

One thing the likes of CNN could do to restore at least a shred of credibility is to hire Republican fact-checkers on stories they publish that might so much as remotely suggest President Trump is saying something racist.  (The Academy and Academic Left could take similar measures in relevantly similar contexts, if credibility, contrition and honor are their concern.)  At this point the likes of CNN should want to bend over backwards to remove doubts about their honor and credibility, or else they deserve every negative tweet the president and others direct their way.  At this point, anything less from them suggests ongoing scumminess.

Politics vs. honesty?

Based on a mound of evidence culminating in the shitshow going on these past few days, I think I can safely conclude that American politics right now is too far gone beyond the point of intellectual discipline and honor for anyone reasonably to expect an honest debate about impeachment and other Trump-related matters.  The partisan excuse-making (for their own) and vilifications (of their opponents) pretty much preclude and honest debate at this point.  This is the wages of a national intellectual and moral bankruptcy, becoming more and more distilled over time.

The only main question remaining now, is whether Americans should simply drop the pretense of honesty, respect for the rule of law, extending the benefit of the doubt to opponents, and so forth, and simply admit that their opponents are or must be up to such bad, hypocritical, etc. activities that extraordinary (by moral standards) measures must be taken to stop them.  It's obvious the Democrats and Republicans think these things about one another today; those who don't think it are being drowned out in the media circus.

The people heavily involved in the political process especially should come right out and admit that we've come to the point that politics is akin enough to war by other means, that the normal rules just don't apply any more.

Is this recommendation for transparency of motive a satirical one?  How would one be able to tell, given what a shitshow things have become?

I'm one of those who find the Demorats in particular to be especially vile and dangerous and socialistic and intellectually and morally bankrupt.  (As I've pointed out, gone are the days of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent figure of intellectual seriousness and moral decency, in the Demorat Party.  It makes me fucking angry that I can't think of a Demorat politician today anywhere close to Moynihan's level.  The current political "team" fielded by the American Left is the best that all of its supposed intellectual prowess and university provenance could cultivate?  That should make anyone pissed.)  I think for doing what they did to Brett Kavanaugh, they deserve to lose at least one more SCOTUS seat until they learn a little decency.

If Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the Court in calendar year 2020, I expect Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans (there was a time - during the waning years of the GWB administration and culminating in the nomination of the dolt Sarah Palin for Vice President - when I held Republicans in such low esteem that I adopted the term "Refucklican" to express my disgust, and I may well have to return to using it) to move ahead with confirming another Trump appointee to the Court.  This despite McConnell & Co. saying (when the president was Obama and the nominee was Merrick Garland) that SCOTUS confirmations shouldn't happen during a presidential election year.  (McConnell used this reasoning in 2016, citing Demorats from 1992 [including Uncle Joe Biden] making the same assertions).

So we pit Demorat intellectual and moral bankruptcy as evidenced by (e.g.) their treatment of Kavanaugh, against the expected partisan hypocrisy of McConnell et al.  I'm conflicted about it.  On the one hand, Demorats deserve to lose at least one more SCOTUS seat; on the other, it would be hypocritical Refucklicans lowering themselves closer to the level of the Demorats, squandering what intellectual and moral credibility they have remaining.

At the very least, couldn't McConnell & Co. admit that the moral rules against hypocrisy no longer apply, and that they're basically forced to be partisan pieces of shit in order to prevent Demorats from inflicting even more destruction on the nation's intellectual and moral fabric than they already have (which I, for one, believe they would do if given the chance to run amok; see, for instance, the bang-up job Demorat-dominated universities are doing to destroy good-faith debate).  They might credibly rationalize their hypocrisy by saying that run-amok Demorats would be even worse in the hypocrisy department.

You have Demorats 100% convinced that Trump is some kind of racist, on the basis of obviously suspect lines of reasoning, and this has them believing (if their words and behavior are any sign) that the normal rules have to be bent or broken to keep Trump & Co. from running amok and making America more racist again.  (Any number of Demorats have suggested that by "MAGA" Trump means to return the country to a past involving racial segregation and other evils; obviously this is a suspect line of reasoning to say the least.)

I think what particularly disgusts me about Demorats a lot more than with Republicans, is the thoroughly, utterly discreditable and disgraceful way they (and their allies, enablers, leftist fellow travelers, etc.) attack, belittle, ignore, and smear an intellectual figure whose ideas I've studied in-depth over a long period of time: Ayn Rand.  Here I happen to know pretty much all the ways Demorats are willing to be intellectually lazy and/or reckless, apparently (if their words and behavior are any sign) out of the belief that less- or un-regulated capitalism is evil and dangerous, that the precious welfare state has to be preserved (because of all it's done to reduce poverty levels, right?), that the universities as we know them must be integral institutions of learning (justifying a neglect of the likes of Rand, and a discounting of pro-capitalism arguments generally), and perhaps a number of related ideas and themes within their precious worldview.  So it doesn't really matter to them what Rand actually said about, e.g., the virtue of selfishness; it's the fact that she supports laissez-faire capitalism on such a grounds that motivates how they have chosen to (mis)represent Rand's views on selfishness.  It's not exactly complicated; it's intellectual dishonesty with a lot of clever but twisted rationalizations and a compliant community of university professors.

(Unless one finds a higher road to take, there is no win-win in an Ayn Rand vs. Mainstream Academy face-off.  Either she is (basically) correct that the university culture is corrupted by leftism and bad ethical theories to justify it, and needs some serious overhaul, or the Mainstream Academy is (basically) correct that a figure like Rand is a crank who merits no serious attention/study [except perhaps as a "cultural phenomenon," a "study" about which was published earlier this year under a patently dishonest title, Mean Girl, by a thoroughly dishonest "researcher," and loathsome leftist loser, Scumbag Lisa Duggan].  One side of this Rand/Academy divide can win only by (basically) discrediting the other.  I've already blogged about how the Academy is fast in the process of discrediting itself at least in the eyes of mainstream producing/taxpaying America.  This also goes for perhaps quite a lot of so-called philosophers I simply cannot trust not to be selective about which facts to acknowledge and admit into evidence; in this they are little better than your typical partisan and most likely leftist asshole you'd find in lots of university departments [such as the ones that Scumbags Duggan and Nancy MacLean are in].)

Anyway, I'm one of those who do happen to value (however imperfect the result) intellectual honesty and consistency, and who are disgusted by obvious partisanship.  (Can we at least admit that the partisan hackery going on right now in Congress is obviously partisan?  Is anyone but True Believers in either tribe somehow fooled that it's not obvious, perhaps blatantly so?)  And I happen to have enough experience and examples on hand to spot such blatant hypocrisy when I see it -- and the present political scene is fucking chock full of it.  Nor - absent an overhaul of the nation's current "educational" infrastructure - do I see things improving here.  The "education" system has churned out a shit-ton of people who can't or won't think carefully, thoroughly, or consistently.

I've been proposing philosophical education, beginning at a young age (and with helpful pointers in the Aristotelian, intellectual-perfectionist direction so that they might learn the art of dialectic as an ethical imperative) as a remedy for this situation, for the better part of a year now on this blog.  Not that it really affects my long-term outlook (for which I believe this blog will become legendary, whatever its flaws), but short-term-wise I consider it a major indictment of our nation's media infrastructure that such kick-ass, commonsense-on-steroids recommendations, and this blog generally, have gone almost entirely unnoticed.  I place part of the blame on the authors of (evidently inferior) philosophy blogs who do or should know about this kick-ass remedy and yet fail to act accordingly by speaking out and promoting this epic no-brainer.

To reformulate a point Rand made about the role of philosophy in society/culture/politics:

A nation's culture is, on the most thorough analysis, the result of the state of the nation's philosophy profession.  We have come to the nakedly partisan shitshow we are currently witnessing because of what the philosophers have done or failed to do.  There's only one philosopher I know of currently who is working on a book project with the theme and working title of 'Better Living Through Philosophy,' and this philosopher has been rigorously and self-consciously pursuing a policy of intellectual perfectionism (inspired by the examples of Aristotle and Rand) long enough for 'Better Living Through Philosophy' to be a more or less natural and inevitable thematic outcome of that pursuit.  Pulled off right, it will be revolutionary.  Pitting the greatest ancient Greek philosophers against (the anthropological "truths" of) Christianity in what may very well be a kick-ass way, is a pretty big fucking deal IMO (whether or not anyone else ever gives due credit for doing so).  There isn't academic hyper-specialization here, as that is described by one of the better philosophy blogs besides this one.

(In some way this here blog is pitted against the Academic-Philosophy model.  Isn't it?  As with the Rand vs. Mainstream Academy dichotomy, is there no win-win to be had here?  Or . . . are we each just taking different specialized-expertise paths, each with their own useful fruits?  I'm no polymath, and have next to no expertise (yet) in such areas as metaphysics, and yet I don't see any other philosophers out there calling out the nation's evident intellectual bankruptcy and political shitshow for what it is.  If the collected wisdom of the Academic Experts can't bring about such an uncompromising, chock-full-of-evidence call-out, then someone has to step in to do the job, right?)

So here we are, headed into Impeachment Season, with an angst-ridden populace ill-equipped to resolve crucial key issues and where so many cannot even get on the same page when it comes to basic facts.  (See the comment thread here, for example.  I discovered this link via a left-Dem facebook friend [somehow I still manage to have one or two of these :-o ] who I don't have any good reason to think had ever consulted or referenced the American Conservative website on any other topic, ever.  See the problem?)  At some point I might end up having to experiment with "channeling" Rand given what I know about her style of cultural and political commentary.  Certain phrases she would use, such as "I told you so," come readily to mind.  The root cause of this shitshow is intellectual bankruptcy, and the root cause of that is the collective output of the community of philosophers.  This, Rand already told America decades ago when she went out to diagnose the intellectual bankruptcy that resulted in her novel Atlas Shrugged being so badly smeared.  (Few of the nation's intellectuals were of the caliber of Hospers, apparently.)  That Rand's root-level diagnosis has gone disregarded by those very intellectuals for decades only reinforces her point.  Again, it's hard to see a win-win here.  (The higher road would be for the Academy to improve its practices to avoid such obvious fuck-ups as Rand and Mises going so badly disregarded, and also for Randians to clean up their own double-standard polemical practices so that we stop getting such obvious, gone-off-the-rails-somewhere horseshit as Kant being "evil.")

I really don't see anyway around this.  There wouldn't be a partisan shitshow populated by obvious scumbags if genuine philosophical practices (the most reliably productive being Aristotelian-style dialectic, according to both my well-honed hunches and apparent historical application) were to become widespread.  Barring that, we can't rationally expect the upcoming Impeachment Season to be much of anything but destructive.

An "optimistic" take on all this dishonest-shitshow stuff is that we're at a point in human historical development somewhere between primitive ignorance and brutishness and the end-of-history ideal alluded to by the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Rand in which unbreached excellence of mind (and body and spirit) is the cultural norm.  And we'd have to also concede that there can be stalls, regressions, and other failures along this path of big-history-scale development.  And so we can have such phenomena as the United States of America being founded by seriously philosophical people, followed some 240 years later by a shitshow run by philosophically-vacuous people (remember the point above about Moynihan), where dolts like Palin and AOC have dedicated and fierce defenders and critics, all depending on party affiliation.

The 2020 election year is shaping up quite nicely to be a fucking circus.  More and more people caught in the abject fools' partisan crossfire will become dismayed and disgusted by what their fellow humans are willing to reduce themselves to, the policy preferences which these fools seek to force on everyone (none of which include philosophical education, BTW) being so preciously important to them that all considerations of honor, decency and dignity must go by the wayside.  We will be hearing a lot about how saving the country from immanent destruction requires their own side to win this next election cycle.  (No matter how what they're willing to do for such short-term political advantage stands a good chance of making things worse long-term.)  You will surely see a lot of political operatives behaving one minute as we might expect normal, decent, likeable people to behave, only to turn around and - shouting all along about their righteousness - partake in the most despicable behaviors.  (See, again: Kavanaugh confirmation/smear process.  Sen. Hirono pretends at the "Ford" portion of the hearing to be interested in the truth, playing nice with Kavanaugh, perhaps smiling and cracking a joke, just days after wickedly and maliciously telling America that Ford is to be believed automatically.  Actually, there is a term for such "nice and decent one day and scumbag the next" behavior: scumbag behavior.)

You'll hear every which conspiracy theory about the other, "bad" side, every which effort to explain away malicious behavior by the "good" side, every which immediate hysterical reaction to some "fact" that common sense already suspects is fake news . . . in other words, what we're pretty much getting already, only more extreme and appalling.  I expect it to be bad enough that even a great many so-called philosophers will get it on the act.  Heck, just witnessing how Objectivists (Randians) - much better on average than the typical political arguers - argue with one another about Trump is enough to call into some question the abilities of humans to reliably meet a higher intellectual standard.  (Criticize Trump strongly enough and you're likely to be called an 'Obleftivist.'  I can't remember right off what happens if it's the other way around and it's someone bashing Demorats, perhaps strongly enough to be a Trump supporter by default.  Almost surely, whatever "side" you take in this shitshow, you will be accused of not having a true and proper grasp of Objectivist principles.)

From an Objectivist/Randian here is an interesting episode in American electoral history that may inform one's best analyses of 2020.  In 1972 - Nixon vs. McGovern - it was basically Rand supporting Nixon's reelection by default because the alternative (the far-left McGovern) was dreadful.  She saw Nixon as a "me-too" statist who grew the government at more or less the same pace as his Democratic predecessors - but in this case, she was an "anti-Nixonite for Nixon."  That's more or less my view of Trump vs. the Demorats, although it simply doesn't sit well with me to say that whatever Trump says or (much more importantly) does, he should get away with it if the alternative means Demorats getting back in power.  It would be a short-term patch with bad long-term consequences for such things as moral credibility and respect for the rule of law.  Whether it's Trump or Demorats winning in '20, neither will foster greater philosophical education for the republic, which is the long-term ball I have my eye on.  I was going to write, "I don't expect either Trumpists or Demorats to take loss well," but I can't truthfully say that; based on all I've been able to witness and determine, it's definitely the Demorats who won't take loss well by any stretch.  Politics is basically their substitute religion, after all.  Plus, they really haven't taken their 2016 loss well, either, have they.  Up until the aftermath of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone call, the shitshow was all on the Demorat side, with them basically getting nothing right about Trump.  And they're still untrustworthy, unscrupulous motherfuckers regardless of what you think about Trump's Ukraine actions.  (Again, see the Kavanaugh "confirmation"/smear process for incontrovertible evidence of their unscrupulousness and wickedness.)

I'll try to tone it down a bit for my next point, although I might not be able to do so given the facts.  But let's say that political cognition poisons the mind, destroys objectivity, etc.: you could have loving, decent people who, qua political thinkers/actors, turn into obvious scumbags.  (I've conceded such a point about those I term loathsome leftist losers - qua leftists, leftism being a thought-cancer overtaking otherwise honest and rational thinking.)  But how do I done my point down after the one I made above about behaving decently one day and like a scumbag the next?  How is that duality not itself scummy?  And what if it's not even true that political cognition per se poisons the mind, etc.?  I don't see Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls or Nozick getting all scummy once they move from non-political theory to political theory.

So what if the truth is more like the following instead: entering the realm of political activism, in an intellectually-bankrupt cultural-political environment, tends to stimulate scummy thought/speech/behavior.  This entails that heightened character-scrutiny of those drawn to political activism in such an environment is eminently warranted.  In such an environment, politics becomes more and more about how to force your preferences on others, not about how to rationally justify them.  This becomes a worse problem - Hayek's "why the worst get on top" phrasing comes to mind - in a polity infected by statism.  The politicians in the American Framers' day were at each other's throats a lot, with lots of slander and whatnot, in spite of the philosophical inclinations of the Framers.  But the government's share of GDP was a mere fraction of what it is today, so how much damage could possibly be inflicted on a people via the levers of power?  (Demorats on their better days are fine with people acting democratically to seize wealth created by others, as long as there's "checks and balances" that include a Court selectively reading into or out of the Constitution whatever it needs to in order to justify such legalized theft; see Wickard v Filburn for one such dubious legal interpretation - of the Interstate Commerce clause, in this case, and after Court-packing threats by FDR/Demorats - with its granting of nearly a blank check to the exercise of Federal power.)

So take an intellectually bankrupt culture and a statist mentality and you have a double-whammy of toxicity that leads the political participants inexorably to hate and distrust one another, and to behave in ugly/nasty ways considered by all of them to be beyond the pale in private life.  How can this not put current political practice fundamentally at odds with intellectual honesty?  Fuck, it's like a no-brainer at this point, with an obvious no-brainer solution in sight.  Right?