The "bad guys" in the Wikileaks saga

UPDATE: There's a necessary edit below, which I'll re-state in slightly different form here: [EDIT: A better google search than the one I conducted before brings these results.  The March 2006 military incident in Iraq highlighted below was investigated by the Pentagon, which in June 2006 cleared U.S. soldiers of wrongdoing.  So, um, I fucked up.  Lesson to be learned here.  I figure I'll leave this posting up for now, as an example of how fuck-ups can happen.  I mean, how plausible is it that both (a) the incident happened as Iraqi police claimed and (b) the alleged perpetrators got away with it?  More epistemic discipline is called for.  Still, the rest is at least very nearly spot-on.]

Our federal government - the same entity that granted final immunity to CIA personnel who tortured two detainees (Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi) to death, the same entity that a human rights court determined had tortured and sodomized another detainee (Khaled el-Masri), the same entity that has conducted a well-known extrajudicial assassination of at least one American citizen - has charged Pfc. Bradley Manning with, among other things, "aiding the enemy," when he released classified documents to Wikileaks.  Many people in a complacent and complicit American lamestream media have echoed the government's claims in this instance.  How much credibility does this government have, though, really?

One of the documents leaked by Wikileaks concerns this incident:

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says

[Original photo caption] This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006, of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops after a night raid there. Here, the bodies of the five children are wrapped in blankets and laid in a pickup bed to be taken for burial. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head, including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the photo from a resident when the incident occurred. |

(h/t: Matt Taibbi)

What has the federal government's response to inquiries about this episode been?

Silence.  [EDIT: A better google search than the one I conducted before brings these results.  This March 2006 incident was investigated by the Pentagon, which in June 2006 cleared the soldiers of wrongdoing.  So, um, I fucked up above.  Lesson to be learned here.  I figure I'll leave this posting up for now, as an example of how fuck-ups can happen.  I mean, how plausible is it that both (a) the incident happened as Iraqi police claimed and (b) the alleged perpetrators got away with it?  More epistemic discipline is called for.  And, now, how about Matt Taibbi's dropping that link the way he did? ;-) ]

Now, who is the bad guy (or guys) here again?

Who's the one (or ones) being targeted by the federal government for punishment?  Who's the one (or ones) being held to the accountability of the rule of law?

And all those lapdog media outlets accusing Bradley Manning of treason -- what have they said, if anything, about the CIA's acts of torture and sodomy (sodomy - a moral crime in itself according to many of the very same pseudo-patriots who've cheered our government on), or about the un-responded-to claims concerning execution of Iraqi children and air-raid coverup?

Jack shit, that's what.

(Apparently, since the rights of American citizens are at issue in the case of extrajudicial assassinations, these people are "concerned" all of a sudden; this one hits too close to home, apparently.)

How can these people display such righteous outrage (or, in the case of the fedgov, vindictiveness) about Bradley Manning's supposedly horrific transgressions - which are, arguably, by a sensible analysis, roughly comparable to the "transgressions" involved in the leaking of the Pentagon Papers - but remain so tight-lipped or willfully ignorant of these activities carried out by the federal government, the very sorts of activities Bradley Manning believed needed to be brought out into the open?

What kind of credibility, moral or intellectual, can these individuals claim?

Along these lines, individuals in our political discourse who are ignorant of (or choose not to mentally integrate) Glenn Greenwald's column can claim no intellectual credibility, either.  And that goes for just about all our political "leaders."  That goes for the so-called constitutional lawyer whose main prima facie credential for the presidency was that Harvard-cultivated legal expertise.

What would Thomas Jefferson think about all this?  Patriots and tyrants and all that....

P.S. Reminder: 29 days left....

Brian Leiter and Ayn Rand

This oughtta show up plenty high in the relevant Google search results.  Ain't the budding information age fun? :-D

(It's a bit unfortunate that I have to push yesterday's inauguration day / Ultimate Cliff countdown post downward in order to undertake today's trash-disposal responsibilities, but that's life.)

For those of you possibly out of the loop: Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago, blogs at Leiter Reports, the most widely-viewed philosophy blog on the internets.  (He bragged recently about getting some 11,000 hits a day there - a total that well exceeds what this here measly blog gets, although the audience for this one has been growing at a very fast exponential pace in recent months.  Gee, I wonder why?)  More than any other philosophy blog on the internet, Prof. Leiter's blog propagates news, information and opinion of interest to the nation's (and the world's) ideas-merchants and their students, which impacts the future course of the intelligentsia, which in turn impacts the direction of society-at-large.  How well does Prof. Leiter fulfill his obligations in this regard, as a public-intellectual figure?

For those who follow his blog - for me, it's a necessary part of keeping tabs on the goings-on in the intellectual world, although more on the order of janitorial duty (cleaning out the toilet, say) - he has only nasty things to say about Ayn Rand, a figure who - 30 years after her passing - continues to exercise a growing influence on American public life.  The latest incident, posted earlier today, continues that pattern, this time linking to that amateurish Salon piece which I discussed a couple days ago.  Now, I don't really know how much Prof. Leiter keeps up on this here blog if at all (although if he doesn't, that would indicate a failure to fulfill his intellectual obligations, given that the highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge).  His one public acknowledgment of this here philosopher was nearly two years ago in the comments section of another philosophy blog, referring to this here philosopher as "a deranged Ayn Rand fanatic," with no supporting evidence or argument - just a flat one-sentence assertion.  I say all this because I am in no position to divine whether or not Prof. Leiter is trolling yours truly with the latest bit of anti-Rand nastiness.  Whether he is or not, he only digs himself deeper in the eyes of history.

Prof. Leiter already has a well-earned reputation for conducting himself in arrogant, abusive, bullying ways in his blog and perhaps elsewhere, but his treatment of Ayn Rand in particular is well beyond the pale of minimally decent discourse.  This is part and parcel of his characteristically nasty treatment of almost anything and anyone right-of-center politically, including conservatives, libertarians, the capitalist economic system, or proponents of Americanism.  (It's abundantly clear to regular watchers of his blog that Prof. Leiter does not particularly care for this country.)  In this respect, he's a virtual self-parody of the leftist, anti-American, anti-capitalist, young-mind-polluting academic of right-of-center lore.  Were this nation's right-wing media aware of this Leiter entity (as they should be, out of a commitment to journalistic excellence and responsibility to the viewer/listener), and of how he so clearly epitomizes such odious perspectives, they would not only be appalled but you'd probably never hear the end of it.  (As it is, not being all that well clued in to the role of the mind in human existence, they have been focusing on a chief symptom of the nation's ills - our head of state - rather than the root cause: the nature of the intellectuals.)

There is something about Ayn Rand that has the political Left in this country running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off.  It's like they simply cannot bring themselves to treat her ideas with the respect it in fact deserves, or with the fundamental fairness that ought to be accorded any thinker's ideas.  Their bad-faith (to put it lightly) smearing of Rand over her youthful "admiration" (if it could even be called that) for a certain facet of a murderer's personality, completely divorced from the context of her lifelong intellectual progression, should be a tip-off right there that not all is well in the intellectually-inclined ranks of the political Left when it comes to characterizing those they perceive to be on "the other side."  But that is only one incident among many.  It is a constant, pathological pattern of smears, outright lies, malice, bad faith, evasion, fear, hysteria, incomprehension (often obstinate), ignorance (often willful), mean-spiritedness, mockery, bigotry, hatred, disrespect, abuse, guilt-by-association, context-flouting, selective focus, and what have you.  And it appears to be Ayn Rand that brings out the worst in these people, in inverse proportion to the true value of the unknown ideal that resides within the grotesquely disfigured strawman they create.

If you want to get into something like the hermeneutics of suspicion here, to uncover the cognitive and psychological biases that underlie this despicable behavior even among "leading intellectuals," my best guess is that it is a subconscious defense mechanism against a perceived enemy who poses the most potent threat to their leftist paradigm.  (And they would be right about that.)  They might - and often do - consciously deny that Ayn Rand is much of a real threat in her own right - Leiter has referred to Ayn Rand on numerous occasions as "an intellectual lightweight" and "a pea-brain" - and instead focus on the threat that her influence on millions of readers poses to their leftist paradigm.  To rationalize away the merits behind her influence, they have to dig their heels in deeper and attribute that influence to intellectual shortcomings on the part of those millions of readers.  "It's a youthful phase" or "it's a justification for selfishness and feelings of superiority that the assholes in society find appealing," and other such worthless ad hominem attacks.  In typical partisan and psychologically-projective fashion, the leftists might try to justify their reaction to Rand on the grounds of her admittedly piss-poor attacks on the great majority of historically-significant philosophers (Kant especially).  This simply won't fly, because it's glass-house-dwellers hurling stones at a house that is only partially adorned by windows.  Polemics is a major blind spot in Rand's case (though the underlying causes of this can be understood if you look at her context - whom she had the opportunity to engage in discussions, the intellectual atmosphere of her time, and so forth; what's their excuse?).  But there's nothing in her polemics, save arguably for her analysis of Kant's alleged psychological techniques, that comes close to the outright viciousness that these leftist "intellectuals" engage in.  It's suspicious enough when so-called intellectuals ignore or casually dismiss Rand as not being worth their time, but otherwise have the good sense and decency to keep their yaps shut; it's a different level altogether when they behave exactly as hired partisan political goons do, and engage in the lowest of cheap shots and smear tactics.  I'm not talking gutter-low here, I'm talking sewer-low.  And these thugs have the nerve to call themselves philosophers?

I want to propose a thought experiment of a certain kind, as I conduct for myself on a regular basis.  It involves a hypothetical situation (not altogether different from Rawls's Original Position, although it involves actual historical figures) in which this or that set of historically-influential philosophers all gather in the same room (or on the same parapet) and hash things out.  The group could be as small or as large as imagination permits.  It could be limited only to philosophy's "Big Three" - Plato, Aristotle, and Kant - and the emerging consensus among them would be quite amazing, I should think - perfectivist, even.  (Did I mention that you can't refute perfectivism?  It would have to be invoked or implicitly relied upon in any attempt to trump it argumentatively.  It's no accident that this here philosopher is the one to discover this principle (inductively, of course, as you see by reviewing the array of contextually-fundamentally-similar individuals whom I list in my brief "Perfectivism: An Introduction" article.).  This here philosopher is not one to be fucked with, as the likes of Prof. Leiter will come to learn the hard way, in due course.)  Another thought experiment involves all those depicted in The School of Athens, although an updated version of that scenario would almost certainly include some ladies (Ayn Rand, for example).

Now, for this particular thought experiment, imagine Brian Leiter showing up at an annual meeting of the Ayn Rand Society.  He goes right up to Allan Gotthelf, James Lennox and Fred Miller - three leading scholars of Aristotle, two of them published by the top university press, Oxford (one of them by the ultimate in academic prestige, Oxford's Clarendon Press), and one of them on the faculty of the #2-ranked graduate philosophy program in America (#3 in the world when you include Oxford's) - and he says right to their faces, "Rand is such a lightweight who can't possibly compare to Aristotle, so why do you even bother with her?"  He'd be making fucking fool out of himself, would he not?  If he had a sense of honor, integrity, decency, and courage, he'd go up to such people (online or in person) and engage them in a mutually-respectful and truth-seeking dialogue.  But would he dare?  He'd have to clean his act way up first, else he'd look like a fucking fool.

Except that he makes himself a fucking fool doing what he's doing now, on his widely-disseminated blog, by belittling and bashing Ayn Rand in terms that would get him squashed like a cockroach at an Ayn Rand Society meeting, by people who actually know what Ayn Rand really advocated - people who understand Rand in terms she herself would recognize, the way Brian Leiter presumably understands Nietzsche in terms Nietzsche himself would recognize, as against so many ignorant caricatures.  (For a sizable list of such Rand scholars, see the literature I list here.)

Brian Leiter is a coward, not a worthy fucking adversary.  He might be all great when it comes to Nietzsche or philosophy of law or what have you, but he shits his credibility away when he doesn't consistently integrate his careful scholarly interpretative methods into all his "philosophic" endeavors.  A self-styled "philosopher" bashing that which he's too lazy to even try to understand, is a fool.  The only question now is who among his professional colleagues has the guts and the wisdom to call him out on his cognitive vice.  Who out there does care about her or his intellectual reputation and is willing to do the right thing by speaking up?

"Checkmate, asshole."

Ayn Rand vs. ignorant "liberal" idiots

When it comes to Ayn Rand, the self-styled open-minded more-enlightened-than-thou "liberals" in the country today show their true colors, and they aren't pretty.

The latest case in point:
"Ayn Rand is for Children" at Salon.com, dated today.

It's the usual (childish!) silliness passing for hard-hitting analysis, nothing that us veterans of internet culture-wars haven't seen recycled ignorantly thousands of times already and upvoted by the reddiotic circlejerk to the point of self-parody.  That link points to the /r/politics subreddit, which is filled to the brim with intellectually-lazy partisans who give not the slightest shit about truth or justice but about what's popular, and reddiot's social-metaphysical upvote/downvote format only encourages it.  But wait until you see the /r/"philosophy" subreddit, where there's no excuse whatsoever for this kind of ignoble/vicious behavior.  But it gets worse: Even the leading "philosophy" blogger in the academic profession, Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago, and scores of vile little like-minded leftist cronies in that very profession, get in on the disgraceful, shameful act.  I think of these particular academic-world assholes as the Lance Armstrongs of the philosophical profession: they have managed successfully to keep up the illusion of objectivity and integrity, but it won't last; it can't last, not as long as the truth can get out and justice prevails in this world.  (If they are forward-looking enough, as they're supposed to be as philosophers, they cannot fail to recognize that in the extra-advanced information age that is the coming generation, all their public evasions can and will be fully exposed and assessed, as is happening right here, a good deal ahead of the curve.  I can't think of any way around that eventuality short of species-wide technological collapse and/or extinction - and I've been giving this subject a reasonably good deal of thought.)

It's not even like these "liberal" intellectual thugs care about a fair fight.  Cowards!  Weaklings!  BUMS!  What psychological syndrome might explain this pathological pattern of behavior?  One libertarian philosophy professor with a great deal of affinity toward Rand once explained to me that it pretty much boils down to politics: if Rand had (incomprehensibly) somehow been on the left politically while everything else about her remained the same, the academy and the rest of the Left would have welcomed her with open arms, especially given her demonstrable intellectual prowess (to anyone who'll look with an open mind - the "workshop" appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology being a nice readily-accessible example if it in action).  I'm about 98% sure this professor has it right.  (Yet another instance highlighting the sorry state of affairs here appears in a 2012 piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Being the kind-hearted, take-no-prisoners, suffers-no-fools-gladly gentleman that I am, I contacted the author of this piece a few days back (under a real-nym) to correct him on his errors by providing abundant contrary evidence; the response so far has been, shall we say, unsatisfactory, yes? - to put it mildly.  Maybe he's too busy; I don't know.  But that published piece sucks swamp ass regardless.)

I mean, c'mon: Jimmy Wales is a child, as today's Salon article unequivocally implies?

That these kinds of articles continue to flow even to this day from supposedly enlightened liberal news-and-opinion websites, in light of the growing academic/professional literature on Rand (see the Ayn Rand Society for example - lots of adults there, some of them leading Aristotle scholars, several of them on the faculty of highly-ranked philosophy programs), says a lot more about these so-called liberals than they do about Rand.

About this author:

"David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future.""

Oh, he sounds like he's really got some philosophical chops.  Chances are 0% that he so much as emailed or called someone up at the Ayn Rand Institute for comment.  These "liberal" pieces of shit never do.

Such so-called liberals' constant hysterical strawman reactions to Rand have gotten to the point of being comical (among those with a clue, or among those who don't evade stone-cold facts). Do they really have nothing better to offer than what the university professors seriously studying Rand have been offering, which has been overwhelmingly positive?

It's too bad Ayn Rand isn't still around, because there's no way these people would would be getting away with this blatant idiocy.  How does it happen as it is?  It's because of the intellectuals.  As they go, so goes the nation.  No wonder the public discourse in this country is so fucked up.  I'll supplement this supremely judicious rant by quoting Rand from that link about the intellectuals, as it is way too good not to:

[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.

The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society’s unemployed and unemployable.

From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals—with very rare exceptions—were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.

The intellectual Establishment of today isn't dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, although it is dominated by a number of bad trends that undercut its usefulness to the society-at-large and its progress toward better conditions.  Aside from the ugly political aspect of things, there's that thing about the American intellectuals having been unduly influenced by European philosophy when Aristotelian philosophy has always been the best intellectual paradigm in terms of the health of societies (and home-grown pragmatism hasn't been cutting it - not when it fails to identify eudaimonic self-actualization as the primary aim of ethical conduct and intellectual excellence as the key to all of human virtues).  Added to that is the trend among intellectuals to oppose capitalism as if out psychological and sociological instinct.  That ties in with Rand's observation that this nation's so-called intellectuals were unable to deal with or grasp the nature of this country.  Hell, take a look at prevailing contemporary constitutional jurisprudence in contrast to a commonsense Jeffersonian-Paineist-Spoonerite-Barnettian natural-rights jurisprudence for a sign of the intellectual corruption involved.

(I mean, shit! - Congress could prohibit alcohol if it wanted to, on the very same grounds that the Supreme Court upheld cannabis prohibition in Gonzalez v. Raich (which built upon the bullshitty Wickard decision covering what's-not-interstate-commerce) - even though Prohibition was repealed once already (prior to Wickard, that is)!  That's ass-u-ming that SCOTUS wouldn't bullshit its way into some squaring of this screwy circle in order to keep Congress from doing that.  This absurd state of affairs could be cleared up quickly and easily on Jeffersonian grounds.  But wtf do I know, I'm not a lawyer, just a measly philosopher whose chief credential is a non-peer-reviewed blog.  Speaking of "peers," is Scumbag Leiter one of them?  Derek Parfit, perhaps?  Who "peer-reviewed" Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, anyway?  I'm just asking questions here.)

Signs of health in the intellectual community would include the re-emergence of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in the academy (some decades after Rand had been on the cutting edge in this area, mind you) and the decline of Marxism into near-irrelevance.  These are no-brainers, however.  A chief indicator of dysfunction, on the other hand, I pointed to in a very recent posting: the most-unfortunate failure by the academy to connect with and make itself relevant to the People.  The People desperately need education in philosophy - in critical thinking, in intellectual curiosity, and not only Aristotelianism or Randism in particular (although Aristotle and Rand would be the first to do all in their power to mobilize the intellectuals into relevance) - else the populace becomes anti-intellectual and public discourse suffers accordingly.

And that is how widely-viewed websites like Salon.com end up publishing idiotic commentaries on one of the nation's most influential and controversial thinkers of the day, and who knows what else.  It is also how our current Head of State comes not understand jack shit about Ayn Rand (although I'm sure he could recite Rawls chapter and verse based on what he absorbed there at Hahhhvuhd).   The people all across the fruited plain deserve a decent, fair, well-informed discussion among its leading ideas-merchants - especially those in academe - about societally-influential and controversial ideas that inform their lives and political trends.  When the academy fails miserably - and I mean miserably - to deliver on their implicit and explicit promises to fulfill their professional and human obligations in this regard, righteous anger on the People's behalf is a perfectly normal and completely justified response.

This stuff should be a no-brainer.  Scholars at the Ayn Rand Society have figured this stuff out.  (Rand had it figured out more than 50 years ago, for crying out loud!)  Why can't the rest of the intelligentsia?  The sooner they get their act together, the sooner we all reach the cultural, technological and whatever other Singularities.  Foot-dragging is not an acceptable option.  It's not some goddamn mistake that ultimatephilosopher.com points right to this here expletive-filled blog, which has "ayn rand" and "integration" as the largest-lettered labels in the sidebar and a link to incestuous lesbians in the "about me" section, not to mention a treasure-trove of wisdom spread out over some 250ish blog entries now.  Now how about getting fucking clue, any of you professional intellectuals reading this - and that goes especially for you so-called high-minded liberals among you - and get your asses in gear for the sake of the future well-being of humanity.  At the very least, think of the children! ;-)

What would Aristotle do (aside from wiping the floor with Rand-bashing idiots and himself-point-missers)?  (Remember, kids: boundless intellectual curiosity as the root source of great-souledness.)

Now go, go, for the good of the city!

("Yes, UP, for the thousandth time, integration is fun. :-|")

P.S. For an example of an honorable leftish-liberal media figure, try Glenn Greenwald.  He's had the very good sense (as is standard for him) not to enter the Rand-criticism fray or to so much as mention Rand beyond his demolition of Paul Ryan, a politician (ew!) and Romney-sidekick (yuck!) who, as Greenwald correctly mentions, bears little resemblance to a Randian hero.  Greenwald was the primary draw, for me, to Salon's website on a regular basis, before he moved over to the UK Guardian.  For anyone who has observed Good Guy Glenn in action, he never loses an argument.  Why?  Because when he speaks on a subject, he knows what the fuck he's talking about.  There's a key rule for how to win arguments: know more about the issue than your opponent does.  It's worked for me: I've never lost an argument about Rand, for instance.  Something something impossible to refute perfectivism....

Adam Lanza = Randian Hero?

[In the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel department...]

Adam Lanza, heroic Randian-egoist?

It might appear so, according to result No. 2 here.[*]

Checkmate, asshole.

(Some of my commentary regarding the unbelievably malicious, way-beyond-the-pale "William Edward Hickman" smear can be found here.)

So, what's the over/under on when this Leiter fuck gets his comeuppance?  Not if, but when.  I suppose it depends on the degree of psychological evasion and malice of which even so-called philosophers are capable.  All that scholarly excellence and reputation means only so much when the scholar in question takes a big fat dump all over intellectual integrity.  I'll be ramping up, by a few hundred percent, my campaign to checkmate various and sundry progress-obstructing scumbags in the coming days/weeks/months.  This unjustice will not stand, man.  I'm the motherfucking Django of the philosophical world and these slimy bastards are going DOWN.

[*] Copied and pasted should it ever happen to disappear from publication at 'Leiter Reports':

Ayn Rand's Early Inspiration: A Child Killer

This certainly belongs in the "you can't make this stuff up" category.  As J. Brendan Ritchie, who flagged it for me, wrote:  "Apparently Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by (and admired) a psychopath. Incidently, objectivism now makes a lot more sense to me."

Posted by Brian Leiter on April 15, 2011 at 09:29 AM in "The less they know, the less they know it",Of Cultural Interest | Permalink

Also, the "J. Brendan Ritchie" character who flagged the item for Prof. Leiter can be found in the Department of Philosophy at University of Maryland, College Park (tied at #31 in the latest Philosophical Gourmet Report rankings of graduate philosophy programs).  Prof. Leiter's credentials can, of course, be found here.  Some pretty pathological shit going on here in "higher ed," huh?

(Here is an example of what Randian heroes actually believe.  A true scholar of Rand, Allan Gotthelf - also a leading scholar of Aristotle - can be found in the Rutgers University Philosophy Department, which is ranked at #2 in the latest Philosophical Gourmet Report; he also serves as chairman of the American Philosophical Society-affiliated Ayn Rand Society.  Let the evasion commence/continue/snowball?)

Human rights court: CIA 'tortured, sodomized' terror suspect. Also: 4/20/2013, a Cannabis Cliff?

The CIA torture-'n'-sodomizing news item.

In a society where words and ideas get twisted in Orwellian ways, the term "terror suspect" is equated in the mind of the average sheep/boob with "terrorist."  What else could explain how the American People rationalize or plainly ignore morally outrageous actions committed by their own government?  There's a cognitive bias - I forget what it's called right off-hand - in which people will condone actions by their in-group which they condemn when committed by the out-group.  The psychologists apparently have a tendency to reduce massive cognitive deficits such as this to "cognitive bias," though as a philosopher and moralist I leave open the very real possibility that this can be reduced to willful evasion or malice in many instances.  Some of the more vile right-wing nationalist types will chant "American exceptionalism" and "God bless America!" while all this goes on; a God-blessed America wouldn't dare torture, now, would it?  Hence the (willful?) cognitive blinders when the evidence pops up and stares them right in the face.  Many others would rather just not be inconvenienced with facing up to this reality and doing something about it.

However you cut it, it's fucking disgusting.  What would Jefferson think?

On a related note, Greenwald breaks down the new film directed by Katheryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) about the CIA's (Orwellian obfuscation coming) Enhanced Interrogation Program.  What an inconvenient time for this human rights court to issue its ruling!  The fucks in Washington are thinking, "Okay, how do we go into damage control?" and not "How do we hold our leaders and officials accountable for their acts of torture?"  That's just how fucks in Washington think these days.

Meanwhile, the fucks in Congress keep cannabis illegal and DOMA the law of the land, for no good reason whatsoever in both instances.  We've got crazy ignorant fucks from a gerrymandered majority (of course, the honest and common sense thing to do about drawing up congressional districts would be to assign that responsibility to an independent entity) running the House science committee.  We've got yet another stupid "fiscal cliff" coming in good part because the Republicans are being dishonest fucks about the economic effects of their preferred tax policies, and refuse to take a hint from the fact that voters rejected the plutocrats' open and unabashed efforts to buy the presidency outright.  (Can you just imagine how fucks like Hannity and the rest of the talking heads at the official propaganda outlet of the GOP would react if Dems suppressed a study like that?)  Isn't it high time the fucks were run out of town, or something?  Who the fuck keeps electing these fucks, anyway?

Reader, what do you think?  What does your conscience tell you ought to be done?

Speaking of political cliffs, should 4/20/2013 be designated as the Cannabis Cliff, I wonder?  The scenario churning in my mind for a while now has involved massive crowd of stoners showing up at all the major monuments in D.C., paying tribute to the real patriots who founded this nation, and lighting up en masse.  Wouldn't fucking matter whether the rascals in Congress got around to doing the sensible thing by then, or not.  It would just be a deadline playing upon the Cliff theme - a favorite in D.C., as we know too well - and then, on 4/20, no matter what, a shit-ton of cannabis goes up in smoke right across the street from the rascals.  Maybe the cool political leaders would join their fellow patriots out on the smoking areas.  (An alternative scenario is playing upon that same Cliff theme by setting that as the legalization deadline and then let the political brinksmanship ensue; the threat to light up en masse would be the pro-freedom side's bargaining chip in that case.  But why not light up even if it's legalized, in celebration?  Yet another alternative scenario - if this idea cannot be implemented in that time - is for various people around the country to smoke out in front of their local federal courthouses and turn it into a legal spectacle in which the outrageous drug laws are challenged on Ninth Amendment grounds.  Then the drug laws can be unequivocally exposed as the travesty that they are in the full light and court of public opinion.)  Can you just imagine the glorious spectacle of a massive billowing cloud of fragrant, aromatic dank smoke engulfing the Washington Monument?  4/20/2013 is a weekend day, by the way.  And it could be observed and celebrated as a national holiday every 4/20 weekend thereafter (perhaps as an adults-only event since a sound legalization policy would involve a responsible-cannabis-use educational program; yes, one day out of 365 the kiddies wouldn't get to access the monuments but they would learn an unbelievably valuable lesson in freedom and citizen action, and they could always plan around that day; perhaps even better yet: leave it up to the parents whether to bring their kids along?).  National Dank Day it could be called.  Free fucking country and all that.  Now the question is whether Jon Stewart, the Hollywood Crowd, true 'tea party' patriots, and sympathetic supporters could get on board with arranging this very thing to happen.  The cynical cable news networks could make a huge theatrical production out of it, don't you think?  I think the scenario would be fucking AWESOME.  Anyway, just throwing some ideas out there for the time being.  Maybe the good guys in the game of 4/20 chicken could throw in other eminently reasonable demands, like having CIA torturers and sodomizers, and their enablers, actually being held accountable for their actions.  Nice idea regardless, innit?

(Obviously I have way too much time on my hands sitting around and thinking up shit like this.  The availability of trees doesn't help any, either.)

Aristotle and Modern Philosophy

Before Aristotle's complete works were translated into English in the early 20th century, the dominant trends in European and American philosophy were various offshoots of Kantianism and Humeanism, with a big smelly dose of Marxism thrown into the mix. There was logical positivism, existentialism, pragmatism, and, in ethics, utilitarianism.

Let's say that Kant didn't even live to present his developed system, but that the other players, in the hypothetical new context, remained more or less the same in their basic intellectual personalities. I think this still means we'd have had the massive movement among intellectuals toward socialism and pretty much the same disastrous consequences of such in the infamous experiments in Russia and elsewhere. What might have happened in America? Would the basic character of the Pragmatist movement be the same without Kant? The Rand-Peikoff analysis attributes much Kantian influence to Pragmatism, which supposedly adds to the villainy of Kant, but without Kant there would still have been Hume and Mill, and simple common sense tells you that, given the geographical and other limitations, American philosophy was more swiftly and directly influenced by English philosophy than by German philosophy. From Hume you get just as much a pragmatist mindset - arguably more - than you would from Kant. With Hume, there is just as much agnosticism about the "underlying character of reality" as there is in Kant. (This is one aspect in which Kantianism doesn't really even answer the Humean challenge; the concept of causation in the sense we really find interesting - i.e., an Aristotelian sense of human-independent natural necessity - is dispensed with by both thinkers.)

Kantianism never really caught on in America aside from ethics. (The leading "Kantian" of today in America is an ethicist, Harvard's Christine Korsgaard, and even she's not really a Kantian proper. There's too much Aristotelianism going on there keeping her basic moral picture sane, even if still deficient.) Humeanism, however, seems to be absolutely ingrained and dominant in the way recent academic philosophizing has been conducted in America. One thing I can say in Hume's defense is that at least he recognized what a dead-end his style of doing philosophy was, and that there was an irreconcilable gap between his philosophizing and his practical daily routine.

The mainstream American inherits this gap by dispensing with philosophy in favor of practicality. The mainstream of the academy has done extremely little to reconcile their style of doing philosophy with the concerns of the ordinary American. This has nothing to do with the fact of "specialization by experts" that ordinary Americans aren't equipped to be conversant with; rather, it is an extreme rift between the prevailing style of analytic philosophy and the needs of practical life. A certain novelist-philosopher did her damnedest to show that philosophy can be practical, and how it can be, with the academy doing just what by its nature would do - ignore, dismiss, scoff at, etc., this very attempt. It's "popular philosophy" and serious philosophy "is only done in journals." (How many people read philosophy journals? Why should they give a shit?) If "serious philosophy," meanwhile, is philosophy done in the manner of Hume and Kant, our culture faces grave perils.

Thank god, then, for Aristotle.

Were Aristotle around today (how many times will that phrase be used before this blog reaches its terminus?), he'd be conversant with the current mainstream - and he'd also overcome its limitations with his characteristic dialectical skill. So: How does Aristotle compare with Hume? Well, let's at least note this: Aristotle's approach to integration was such that he'd recognize the need to make philosophy practical, to go out of his way to align philosophy with the needs and concerns of the ordinary people. Maybe back in Greece, given its cultural and technological limitations, philosophy was effectively only for a relatively well-to-do or dedicated few. There is no such excuse for exclusivity in modern industrial society. A certain novelist-philosopher figured that out; an Aristotle today would do likewise, and applaud the efforts of that novelist-philosopher.

This raises a pretty striking point: Aristotle's response to Ayn Rand would be way, way different from what the Academy's response has been. An Aristotle worthy of his reputation would also be a staunch advocate of capitalism. That's prima facie evidence that the Academy has yet to come fully to grips with Aristotle's import to philosophy. (Sorry, being "one of the Big Three" is a deficient characterization. In the canon, there's the Philosopher, and then there's everyone else.) So, to answer the question: I don't think Aristotle would have been impressed much by Hume. He already contended with Hume-type foils back in his day.

To illustrate: Hume's dichotomous approach leads to an is-ought gap in meta-ethics. Aristotle would readily recognize the is-ought gap as based on a deficient or incomplete understanding of the facts. An Aristotelian - and commonsensical - understanding of goodness derives from the needs of living things, which are distinctively characterized by being "teleologically-ordered" systems, and which, by definition, meet those needs through the actualization of potentialities. It's quite irrelevant here what the original, ancient Aristotle had to say about the scope of teleology - and it's a base and ignoble response to Aristotle to criticize his conclusions while ignoring his methods. But that's exactly what countless people are conditioned to think when it comes to Aristotle. Time and time again I've personally touted the virtues of Aristotle, only to be met with the equation of Aristotle with his positions rather than his methods. This is quite pathological, and it would be interesting to come up with a complete accounting for this tendency, this awe-inspiring capacity for missing a point. (Or, if you like: "Awesomely committed to misconception," a phrase used by Michael Herr in reference to the clueless critics' and philistines' responses to Stanley Kubrick's cinematic genius.)

At least some academic philosophers haven't been so amateurish and point-missing, and, in fact, I find it plainly evident that the best and most sensible philosophers in the academy have strong Aristotelian (if not Randian) tendencies. It's the ones who take their methodological cues from the likes of Hume and Kant who are the problem. Even taking Rand out of the equation, the present situation in regard to Aristotle is pretty bad. Hell, anything short of full-on Aristotelian dominance in the Academy is bad. If/when empiricism can be reclaimed by Aristotelians from Hume and his descendents, and if/when eudaemonism rightly trounces its competitors in the field of ethics, some real progress might be made. That would necessarily bring Rand to greater prominence for those paying any attention to the true playing field, which would still leave the really obvious sick shit that's in need of fixing: the pervasive bias in political philosophy against the manifestly beneficial system of capitalism. I don't think Aristotle would approve of the vice going on there. Hell, even Hume and Kant would be appalled by it. Time for an overhaul there.

When Geniuses Fuck Up

In rummaging around (in the spirit of perfective comprehensiveness) for anything Noam Chomsky said about Ayn Rand, the first and prominent result points to this. Chomsky said:

Rand in my view is one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history.

As a person fanatically prone to differentiation and integration, my mind went quite quickly to this statement by Ayn Rand:

Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history.

Both Chomsky and Rand fucked up here. The difference is that Chomsky is just way more clueless about Rand than Rand was about Kant. A further difference, one highlighting the intellectual corruption that pervades the American Left, is that Chomsky gets a free pass from them on fuck-ups like this, while Rand does not. (So much for any pretense by the American Left to an intellectual high-ground.)

To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?

Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).

What is, after all, each thinker's context?

At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.

From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.

Kudos Again to Greenwald

Greenwald picks apart a Nation article which cast doubts on the authenticity of the "don't touch my junk" guy.

It's almost like reading Ayn Rand dissecting all the conceptual evasions in a run-of-the-mill article of her day (most likely one attacking, undercutting, or impugning good things like capitalism). Outlets like The Nation are left-partisan to begin with, so already there's reason for suspicion, prima facie. Then come all the conceptually sloppy associations, "wonderment" passing as legitimate fact-based observation, etc. Hell, the Nation's smear-piece reads much like your typical hit-piece on Ayn Rand herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the history of the Nation is peppered with all kinds of sloppy, shoddy, awesomely-committed-to-misconception (h/t Michael Herr) references to Rand.

In fact, googling up "the nation ayn rand" brings up this incompetent pile of shit as the first result. See?

Peikoff vs. McCaskey

Well, I'm prepared to admit a bit of an egg-on-face problem in light of Peikoff's explanation for the "split" with McCaskey.

One thing to mention as a matter of my context, was the impression that his released email criticizing McCaskey was a "last word" type of thing on the subject - a policy he adopted with respect to David Kelley upon publishing "Fact and Value." (I'm still disappointed with how the Kelley-split thing was handled, probably by a good number of those involved.) I'd also like to mention how Peikoff's statements of this sort come off in sense-of-life terms: a sense of needlessly contemptuous tone. The same tone drags down the ability of his magnum opus, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, to engage most effectively with a normal reader. It comes across in Rand's writings at times as well. (I'm not yet through with my multi-part explanation of my sense-of-life differences with Atlas Shrugged.) But one thing I simply don't have is a personal acquaintance with Leonard Peikoff, and such a personal-level acquaintance tends to help in situations such as this.

Further, a general epistemic lesson to take away from this is to consider that a wider context may well exist where we haven't heard "definitively" from both sides of a dispute. Just imagine watching a court case and forming a judgment based only on what the prosecution said. This lesson is particularly crucial when applied to the Rand/Branden break, where all kinds of people (myself included) drew conclusions about Ayn Rand based on distorted and one-sided accounts from the Brandens themselves without having seen/read/heard Rand's side of things (again, having been under the impression that "To Whom it May Concern" was Rand's "final" statement on the matter . . . which actually meant Branden getting off easy considering that the truly reprehensible nature of his misdeeds remained hidden from the public until James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics).

Anyway, for what it's worth, before I (just now) became aware of Peikoff's statement on the McCaskey matter, I had already purchased David Harriman's The Logical Leap, and Peikoff's The Art of Thinking course (one of the lecture courses from Peikoff's age 50-60 prime-period I hadn't heard yet) is already on its way. The more I study these two individuals - Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff - the more it keeps coming together and making total sense. Still not sold on all the (ultra-contemptuous) "Kant is evil" polemics, but I'm almost grasping the full context in which some of these polemics were formed. And her theory of concepts as inductive generalizations - the center of it all, the thing that really matters most in the end, long-term - is effing brilliant and cements Rand's place alongside Aristotle as the greatest philosopher to date. When Rand commends Peikoff for his ability to communicate Objectivist ideas "superlatively" (her word), there's no shittin' about it: he knows his Objectivism pretty much as well as anyone alive. (For whatever reason, Branden pretty fell off the map in this area; his theory-practice integration dropped through the floor, he indicates a failure to understand Objectivism by projecting his own psychological issues onto Objectivism's theoretical structure, and he hasn't produced anything like Peikoff's lecture courses since the Break. Just as with his relation to Rand, the Philosopher outlasts the Psychotherapist.) (Meanwhile, I'm the leading authority on the next level/integration beyond Objectivism: Perfectionism.) As his Understanding Objectivism course essentially established, the Objectivist methodology - the center of it all - is pretty much invincible, having to be invoked in order to be attacked. Once you account for how concepts (our means of grasping reality) are formed objectively, the rest falls into place.

(Damn, if only an in-fashion socialist had come up with the measurement-omission account, the academy would have lapped it all up already. But then again, the kind of integration it took to arrive at the theory of concepts is the same kind of integration involved in recognizing the truth of the moral rightness of capitalism. Hell, just to recognize this point requires an appreciation of and good job integrating the method. I ask again, as I did the other day, do present-day mainstream academic philosophers even know what "integration" means? By the way, there is ample justification for Rand's contempt towards the "academic model," a model drenched in social metaphysics. The contempt here seems quite mutual; they don't like her and she didn't like them. Of course, by a number of indicators, the academy isn't stuck in quite as big a pile of shit as it was mid-20th-century; the ascendancy of Aristotle - kinda hard to stop that juggernaut, innit? - and the relative decline of assholes like Marx and other socialists has surely added to the conceptual clarity going on there. And Rand is getting some traction in the area of ethics without any meaningful criticism in opposition, as well. Let's not forget about that.)

Speaking of integration, I'm still trying to integrate what Peikoff is doing bringing up his "stature" in the Objectivist movement in these kinds of disputes. Again, Peikoff does note that his comments in the email presupposed a context shared amongst all the recipients. Still, there's something "off" about it, perhaps part of the same tone that comes off (sense-of-life-wise) as so contemptuous. Anyway, I've got bigger fish to fry than spending a lot of time focusing on this stuff. I look forward to listening to his course, reading the Harriman book, and integrating it all as need be into my forthcoming treatise. This thing needs to come out of the starting gate full-speed with bases amply covered, see.

WTF Happened to Leonard Peikoff?

Diana and Paul Hsieh present an array of relevant facts relating to the recent silliness surrounding the "Peikoff-McCaskey schism" which threatens to splinter Objectivists into silly warring factions yet again. I'm ready to draw some conclusions here that are amply justified based on the available data.

First off, Peikoff has decided not to hold himself accountable for his behavior. The sum total of his "reasons" for issuing his "him or me" ultimatum are contained in an email which leaves a bunch of questions unanswered. McCaskey, for his part, is accountable for his doings and responds to inquiries. The fact that Peikoff would fail to respond to the Hshiehs' follow-up inquiries after maintaining a consistent correspondence with them prior to that is evidence of . . . well, what? Evasion? Arrogance? Incompetence? We just don't know. What we do know is that somehow Peikoff's "stature within Objectivism" is supposed to be some kind of undefined trump card he feels he can pull in any dispute.

Second, following Objectivist inductive method, what we have seen in this latest instance is an addition to previous behaviors on Peikoff's part that establish a pattern from which we can draw a generalization. For one thing, he pulled the same "I'm Ayn Rand's heir" card in the Peikoff-Kelley split of 1989. For another, Peikoff leaves questions unanswered but has decided that his judgment is final. Usually, when forming an objective judgment of something, you don't make a final determination while leaving questions hanging. That is the behavior of an authoritarian who expects people to go along or leave. How this is consonant with Objectivism, I haven't the faintest. This occurred not just with Peikoff-McCaskey and Peikoff-Kelley, but also with Peikoff-Reisman (1993). How many times do we need to see this pattern rear its ugly head before we conclude that Peikoff, for all his stature and accomplishments, isn't the be-all-and-end-all of the advancement of Objectivism today? (Besides, the be-all-and-end-all of Objectivism, the Prime Mover, remains Ayn Rand. It bears noting that the one great schism of which she was a part - the Rand-Branden split (1968) - was one where Rand was entirely justified given Branden's ghastly moral crimes against her and countless other Objectivists.)

Third, Peikoff's moral condemnation of McCaskey ("raises him one rung in Hell") is inexplicable based on every item of evidence that has come forth. There's no rationally-identified (or identifiable) context to this - for the simple reason that the judgment is contrary to the facts, i.e., false. But this appears to be a judgment for which Peikoff, again, has decided not to be accountable. The significant conclusion to draw from this is that this judgment-methodology (if there's even a methodology behind it) runs counter to the spirit and letter of Peikoff's own advice given in such outstanding courses as Understanding Objectivism.

There isn't room for agnosticism on this point: the facts establish that Peikoff has abdicated his credbility as a leader within the Objectivist movement. That may not come to much, considering how he has recently announced his official "retirement" from teaching Objectivism, but the fact that (due to his control over Ayn Rand's estate) he continues to hold sway over the ARI, self-described as the Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, shows that he continues to throw weight around in certain "Objectivist circles." Now, either he's "in retirement" or he isn't. This behavior resembles that of a diva who wants to have it his way or else, and expects everyone to simply understand, somehow.

Finally, this stuff is just all too silly considering how far removed it is from the spirit of Ayn Rand herself. The "Objectivist movement," whatever advances it has made in recent years (capped off most notably by Tara Smith's 2006 Cambridge-published book, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics), it's simply not up to the standards that Ayn Rand or I would have demanded. The intellectual-cultural revolution Rand had foreseen could have happened a generation ago had a lot more people had their acts together. (This is one reason why Nathaniel Branden was and is such a fuck: were it not for his massively anti-Objectivist behaviors, the Revolution might well have happened by the 1970s. That is the power that ideas have over a culture, and how the course of those ideas can be affected for better or worse by a mighty few.) Fortunately, there is at least one person ready, able and willing to take up the torch in ways the current mainstream Objectivist movement has yet to even foresee, but of which Ayn Rand herself would have been proud. Thankfully, for all concerned, this business of Peikoff and his schisms will be left in the dust.

Know hope.

[A follow-up post is here.]

Vileness in academia

The Distinguished Professor is just a vile human being. His latest cowardice involves this cheap shot that doesn't address any of the substance of any of the arguments.

I have experienced, first hand, the DP's closed-mindedness and/or dull-wittedness on the subject of Ayn Rand. One thing to keep in mind regarding his vile and vicious (and ignorant! let's not forget ignorant) attacks on Rand and Randians is that a former colleague of his at the University of Texas, Tara Smith, is one of those "lightweights" he implicitly insults, attacks, and slimes with his broad brush. I wonder, just what are the hiring standards at the University of Texas, anyway, and why does the DP impugn them so? This is especially odd considering that the University of Texas philosophy department is ranked No. 20 in the Leiter Report (the DP's long-running project of obsessively ranking things to satisfy his pathological narcissism and elitism).

The fact of the matter is, if it were Brian Leiter against any of the people on the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, he'd have his ass handed to him, and something tells me that he has an inkling of an awareness of this fact and decides to evade it mentally. How vile! What a creep!