Note that the so-called black book of capitalism the leftists imagine there to be is a reaction to the damning evidence (namely, 100 million dead and millions brutalized/demoralized) presented in the Black Book of Communism.
I've taken the loathsome Leiter to task before on his anticapitalist/leftist intellectual sloth, his one-sided cherry-picking of the evidence, etc. But this just about takes the cake. As against all the data available at ourworldindata.org, Leiter cherry-picks this one article about suicide rates in the USA as evidence of capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to imagine some causal connection) - or the global neoliberal juggernaut, if you will - making life simply unbearable for ever more people.
I mean, why now, all of a sudden, did capitalism get around to upping the despair/suicide rates? Globalization and/or automation outsourced their jobs and so it's capitalism's fault that the mostly-public, mostly-Demo-rat-run education (sic) system was too piss-poor to prepare people for the transition? You basically are in mindless doubling-down territory if you try to keep up a leftist narrative. You'll notice that the 3.5% unemployment rate gets no mention, capitalism gets no credit for that. The number just isn't all that important; by definition . . . let me try to mimic leftist thought processes here for a moment, and tell me if you haven't seen it a thousand times . . . the unemployment rate only includes eligible labor force, those seeking work vs, those who have work, which excludes those who've given up perhaps in hopelessness and despair which is due to the private ownership of the means of production because . . . this is where it gets really tricky and I don't claim to know where it might go from here. One thing's for sure, if they didn't choose to learn from Mises and Rand and the 100 million killed by Reds when they had ample opportunity to do so, then they're probably never going to learn.
Shouldn't these nitwits just stick to the climate-change-discredits-capitalism narrative? It's a lot less difficult to keep a plausible story straight there - that is, until you dialectically/contextually/hierarchically, if you will (considering both presuppositions and implications, etc.) bring in the role of future tech (AI, etc.), in which case it looks like the leftists are losers there, too. Yes, indeed, the age of the neoliberal global juggernaut has brought with it one of the greatest things the world has yet seen - the Internet - and it is true, despite the benefits of all that, despite all the raw data/info it makes available to your average inquirer, it hasn't resulted in particularly improved integrators of data on average across the population.
If anything, given the tendencies of the left-run education (sic) institutions - the case of Leiter being representative of the intellectual rot smugly trying to pass as sophisticated and superior - it has produced inferior information-integrators. What else is the notoriously toxic twitter sewer but a bunch of inferior info-integrators sucking each others dicks (or using mouth on whatever of each others' genitalia) and imagining Trump/America to be racist and everything is getting worse because of capitalism stuff. No, it couldn't be because the education (sic) system is failing to meet expectations, it gets a C-minus or so in the cognitive-skills-value-added dept. despite all the extra dough poured in there, and the taxpayers' patience is wearing thin (advantage: Trump/GOP). No, the thing for the (loathsome) leftist and twitter spittler to do is to double down and blame capitalism (private property), somehow.
But getting back to the real world here: the primary causal factor in human affairs, if you examine it thoroughly and carefully, is the mental and intellectual, with material production value-added a subordinate causal consequence (i.e., historical materialism is conceptually untrue). And something something the fundamental role of philosophy in human intellectual life (and implications for educating children [a proven success wherever tried] as well as everyone else who's eligible in the ways of philosophic inquiry), a point I've been making a lot over the course of this blog (see, e.g., the 'Intro' link, "Better Living Through Philosophy, in broad outline," at the top of this blog posting).
And it'd sure be damn nice if the leftist losers would stop smearing Ayn Rand at every opportunity and actually make an effort to grasp her point (about, e.g., "the role of the mind in man's existence"). The "best" that the academic left has come up with these days is a hit-and-run smear piece by the intellectual thug Scumbag Lisa Duggan, saying that Rand's point is something about being a "mean girl" - that this "mean girl" thing is more centrally and fundamentally connected to Rand's worldview than (say) the role of the mind in human existence or the Benevolent Universe Premise or heroic sense of life. Nope, it's not about any of that; it's about Rand having this chip on her shoulder about those folks who proclaim that man's life is the state's to dispose of; this makes her the mean one here, you see.
The loser-left argues against capitalism pretty much as, well, as dishonestly as it argues against its various lame caricatures of Rand. There pretty much had to be a convergence of both methods and subject matter here (and to a lesser extent this applies to the left's non-response to Mises), since Rand made the fundamental-level identification about the role of the mind/reason/intellect in the capitalistic production process and how that had to lead to the huge advances in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (and the founding of America the nation, as Rand is quick to point out is pivotal to human progress pace the ignorant anti-America leftists smears). As long as the left refuses to engage reality and/or Rand on this point - about the effectiveness of capitalism at bringing out elite intellectual contributions of economic producers (and this may have something to do with yet another interesting cognitive principle Rand identified: unit-economy) - they will continue to fail in their smear campaigns. If they engage Rand/reality on this fundamental point (no thanks to the likes of Scumbag Duggan or Comrade Leiter, who actively destructively interfere with doing so), it will be a win-win.
Showing posts with label america. Show all posts
Showing posts with label america. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Thursday, January 9, 2020
How does the left have any perceived credibility among reasonable people?
The American left today is dialectically estranged from the American mainstream and America's founding principles, although it still has the run of the education (sic) system (while missing the best tree to bark up, the philosophy one). Almost surely the very best minds among the public-intellectuals have gravitated over time to the Right (while the very best minds among the academic, non-public-intellectual population contains a mixture of increasingly-libertarian Rawls-ish liberals and the libertarians, with Tomasi representating a state-of-the-art attempt at synthesis of the two). [*]
So what sustains any impression among reasonable, decent people that the left has quality ideas and intellectual and moral credibility any longer? Some ideas:
(1) See above about the left's control of the bulk of the education (sic) institutions, a great many of them funded in whole or part by taxpayers. (Before one rationalizes like a leftist that this points to the intellectual superiority of leftism/leftists, see Nozick for a alternative explanation.) Lots of narrative-shaping going on there for many a captive audience, many of whom go out into the real world afterward rather than pursue (e.g.) state-of-the-art debates between Rawlsians and libertarians, so they don't have all that good an idea of how Rawlsians might not have any clear upper-hand despite left-wing dominance of the academy.
(2) The left is riding past successes in the areas of civil rights and LGBT+ equality. Even until very recently the American cultural Right has been hostile to progress in the latter idea, much to its motherfucking shame. The Blue States (not synonymous with the left, but a close approximation) have been making progress in the area of cannabis legalization, while outlets such as the otherwise-respectable Wall Street Journal continue to this very day to peddle bullshitted-up numbers and narratives supposedly showing how destructive cannabis and its legalization are. (The fucking least they could do is acknowledge the testimony of cannabis-users like Carl Sagan, which they don't.) What's not at all clear to me is that the Blue States are legalizing weed on the grounds of individual freedom as distinct from equitable treatment of minorities (who suffer disproportionately from the failed big-government War on Drugs) or the Blue States' greed for always-more tax revenues. And even there, the state of CA has been shitting the bed in its efforts to reconcile its big-government ethos with a free-market one.
But weed legalization is a present-day trend with the merits still to be assessed over time by the American mainstream. I don't fault the WSJ and other conservatives for having suspicions about its wisdom/merits when it's the Blue States (by and large - see Alaska for an exception) spearheading the effort.
Back to LGBT+ equality: The Civil Rights movement was over half a century ago now; the LGBT+ equality movement has been a recent thing where we can get a better sense of where the left has gone in more recent times. The usually faulty and often downright awful arguments by the cultural Right (such as illogically linking acceptance of homosexuality to the questionable aspects of the Sexual Revolution generally and their implications for (namely) widespread abandonment of the nuclear family) would lend credence to the impression that the left has the upper hand intellectually. (Note that on this and other issues the libertarians, who by default tend to end up on the "Right" side of the spectrum - especially nowadays - haven't usually been in the business of offering shitty arguments on this, cannabis, or other issues.)
(Note also that leading proponents of marriage equality include conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Ted Olson. What would really be nice is a well-publicized debate between Olson and Princeton's Robert George, but national intellectual bankruptcy seems to preclude interest in and calls for such. No reasonable person respects the nincompoopery of the slippery-slope arguments from politicians like Santorum, after all.)
So far I've been pointing to what are broadly termed "cultural" and "personal freedoms" issues, not economic issues. This ties into the next point:
(3) The placement of figures like Rawls and Keynes somewhere near the center-left of American opinion lends credence to the notion that there are still quality ideas on "the left" generally speaking, in the smeary ways many people often think of these things (my differentiation here is one of a continuum starting with the likes of Rawls on one end and the total commies on the other, with egalitarian commitments of varying strengths uniting them under the "left" umbrella). But as with the lively Rawlsians vs. libertarians debates, there is a lively dialectic between Keynesians and more staunchly free-market positions (e.g., Hayek and Friedman, with Mises still regarded as more out on the "fringes" of free-market thought despite all his vastly learned/sage insights - a situation similar to that of Rand). With the likes of Keynes and Rawls pushing sophisticated arguments for government interventions or a large public sector generally, further-left folks like Elizabeth Warren and Obama (who's definitely well to the left ideologically despite his more pragmatic-realpolitik presidency) feel more of a license to take this further with notions about the overwhelming role of state-provided infrastructure in individual success (for which see Krauthammer's rebuttal).
Points (1-3) may not individually explain how the left maintains such a degree of (real or perceived) cultural and political respectability today, but together they may explain quite a lot. There may be other factors I can't think of right off. The values-priorities that Haidt's research points to may also explain quite a lot. Values are fundamental and prior to debates about whether this or that economic/fiscal policy is desirable; people's policy preferences are basically shaped by the values over and above whether they achieve some outcome (about which there are plenty of social-science disagreements, besides - measurement issues, replicability issues, causal understandings, etc.). This would help explain why conservatives tend to oppose efforts at drug legalization irrespective of the awful outcomes: "do we want to send the wrong message (to young people)?" (What if they applied this reasoning consistently across all policy issues? Don't lefties say that tax cuts for the wealthy "send the message" that a fifth mansion for the wealthy is preferable to ringworm medication for the destitute, whatever the actual marginal propensity to consume at the high end?) Much of political discourse comes down to signaling of virtues considered high-priority by one's favored group/party.
(There also, perceptions of value-priorities also come into play. Lots of folks - left and right - seem to get a bunch of mileage out of caricaturing libertarians as being focused on only one moral value - individual liberty - and Haidt's categorizing of libertarians in these terms plays right into this perception. Of course, libertarians are very minimalistic about the role of the state which severely constrains what they think political institutions ought to be doing to putatively achieve moral aims. I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting a shit-ton of libertarians - if there even are that many - to sign on explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity which nearly everyone ought to know more about. Anyway, caricaturing libertarians as being only freedom-focused just because their political priorities are so narrowly freedom-focused looks like a way for many non-libertarians to lazily avoid confronting the core libertarian 'self-ownership' thesis or discovering more about virtue-based libertarian thought, e.g., the Dougs or LeBar.)
Guess I might go smoke a bowl and see what else comes to mind?
[*] - Further differentiation: those I'll call the 'self-ownership' or hardcore rights-based libertarians on the one hand - Rand, Hospers and Nozick being leading examples - and the more consequences-oriented ones (Mises, Hayek, Friedman) on the other. Tomasi seeks a synthesis between these two strains of libertarian thought as well as the broader synthesis. Broadly speaking I like the idea of synthesis or dialectic, although my context (ahem) here is much more Sciabarra than Tomasi and hence probably more 'radical' in its libertarian sensibilities (within an 'Aristotelian/Randian-intellectualist' epistemological-ethical totality).
So what sustains any impression among reasonable, decent people that the left has quality ideas and intellectual and moral credibility any longer? Some ideas:
(1) See above about the left's control of the bulk of the education (sic) institutions, a great many of them funded in whole or part by taxpayers. (Before one rationalizes like a leftist that this points to the intellectual superiority of leftism/leftists, see Nozick for a alternative explanation.) Lots of narrative-shaping going on there for many a captive audience, many of whom go out into the real world afterward rather than pursue (e.g.) state-of-the-art debates between Rawlsians and libertarians, so they don't have all that good an idea of how Rawlsians might not have any clear upper-hand despite left-wing dominance of the academy.
(2) The left is riding past successes in the areas of civil rights and LGBT+ equality. Even until very recently the American cultural Right has been hostile to progress in the latter idea, much to its motherfucking shame. The Blue States (not synonymous with the left, but a close approximation) have been making progress in the area of cannabis legalization, while outlets such as the otherwise-respectable Wall Street Journal continue to this very day to peddle bullshitted-up numbers and narratives supposedly showing how destructive cannabis and its legalization are. (The fucking least they could do is acknowledge the testimony of cannabis-users like Carl Sagan, which they don't.) What's not at all clear to me is that the Blue States are legalizing weed on the grounds of individual freedom as distinct from equitable treatment of minorities (who suffer disproportionately from the failed big-government War on Drugs) or the Blue States' greed for always-more tax revenues. And even there, the state of CA has been shitting the bed in its efforts to reconcile its big-government ethos with a free-market one.
But weed legalization is a present-day trend with the merits still to be assessed over time by the American mainstream. I don't fault the WSJ and other conservatives for having suspicions about its wisdom/merits when it's the Blue States (by and large - see Alaska for an exception) spearheading the effort.
Back to LGBT+ equality: The Civil Rights movement was over half a century ago now; the LGBT+ equality movement has been a recent thing where we can get a better sense of where the left has gone in more recent times. The usually faulty and often downright awful arguments by the cultural Right (such as illogically linking acceptance of homosexuality to the questionable aspects of the Sexual Revolution generally and their implications for (namely) widespread abandonment of the nuclear family) would lend credence to the impression that the left has the upper hand intellectually. (Note that on this and other issues the libertarians, who by default tend to end up on the "Right" side of the spectrum - especially nowadays - haven't usually been in the business of offering shitty arguments on this, cannabis, or other issues.)
(Note also that leading proponents of marriage equality include conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Ted Olson. What would really be nice is a well-publicized debate between Olson and Princeton's Robert George, but national intellectual bankruptcy seems to preclude interest in and calls for such. No reasonable person respects the nincompoopery of the slippery-slope arguments from politicians like Santorum, after all.)
So far I've been pointing to what are broadly termed "cultural" and "personal freedoms" issues, not economic issues. This ties into the next point:
(3) The placement of figures like Rawls and Keynes somewhere near the center-left of American opinion lends credence to the notion that there are still quality ideas on "the left" generally speaking, in the smeary ways many people often think of these things (my differentiation here is one of a continuum starting with the likes of Rawls on one end and the total commies on the other, with egalitarian commitments of varying strengths uniting them under the "left" umbrella). But as with the lively Rawlsians vs. libertarians debates, there is a lively dialectic between Keynesians and more staunchly free-market positions (e.g., Hayek and Friedman, with Mises still regarded as more out on the "fringes" of free-market thought despite all his vastly learned/sage insights - a situation similar to that of Rand). With the likes of Keynes and Rawls pushing sophisticated arguments for government interventions or a large public sector generally, further-left folks like Elizabeth Warren and Obama (who's definitely well to the left ideologically despite his more pragmatic-realpolitik presidency) feel more of a license to take this further with notions about the overwhelming role of state-provided infrastructure in individual success (for which see Krauthammer's rebuttal).
Points (1-3) may not individually explain how the left maintains such a degree of (real or perceived) cultural and political respectability today, but together they may explain quite a lot. There may be other factors I can't think of right off. The values-priorities that Haidt's research points to may also explain quite a lot. Values are fundamental and prior to debates about whether this or that economic/fiscal policy is desirable; people's policy preferences are basically shaped by the values over and above whether they achieve some outcome (about which there are plenty of social-science disagreements, besides - measurement issues, replicability issues, causal understandings, etc.). This would help explain why conservatives tend to oppose efforts at drug legalization irrespective of the awful outcomes: "do we want to send the wrong message (to young people)?" (What if they applied this reasoning consistently across all policy issues? Don't lefties say that tax cuts for the wealthy "send the message" that a fifth mansion for the wealthy is preferable to ringworm medication for the destitute, whatever the actual marginal propensity to consume at the high end?) Much of political discourse comes down to signaling of virtues considered high-priority by one's favored group/party.
(There also, perceptions of value-priorities also come into play. Lots of folks - left and right - seem to get a bunch of mileage out of caricaturing libertarians as being focused on only one moral value - individual liberty - and Haidt's categorizing of libertarians in these terms plays right into this perception. Of course, libertarians are very minimalistic about the role of the state which severely constrains what they think political institutions ought to be doing to putatively achieve moral aims. I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting a shit-ton of libertarians - if there even are that many - to sign on explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity which nearly everyone ought to know more about. Anyway, caricaturing libertarians as being only freedom-focused just because their political priorities are so narrowly freedom-focused looks like a way for many non-libertarians to lazily avoid confronting the core libertarian 'self-ownership' thesis or discovering more about virtue-based libertarian thought, e.g., the Dougs or LeBar.)
Guess I might go smoke a bowl and see what else comes to mind?
[*] - Further differentiation: those I'll call the 'self-ownership' or hardcore rights-based libertarians on the one hand - Rand, Hospers and Nozick being leading examples - and the more consequences-oriented ones (Mises, Hayek, Friedman) on the other. Tomasi seeks a synthesis between these two strains of libertarian thought as well as the broader synthesis. Broadly speaking I like the idea of synthesis or dialectic, although my context (ahem) here is much more Sciabarra than Tomasi and hence probably more 'radical' in its libertarian sensibilities (within an 'Aristotelian/Randian-intellectualist' epistemological-ethical totality).
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
A bit of good news on the Electoral College front
Recent net migration numbers to/from U.S. states
Blue States like CA are driving enough people away with "their high cost of living" (read: Demo-rats sucking every little bit they can out of producers who otherwise prefer to live at or near the coast/nice weather, not unlike how vast petroleum reserves prop up retrograde theocratic regimes) that CA is on its way to losing a seat in the House of Representatives and a vote in the electoral college. Red States are gaining in population.
Blue States like CA are driving enough people away with "their high cost of living" (read: Demo-rats sucking every little bit they can out of producers who otherwise prefer to live at or near the coast/nice weather, not unlike how vast petroleum reserves prop up retrograde theocratic regimes) that CA is on its way to losing a seat in the House of Representatives and a vote in the electoral college. Red States are gaining in population.
The very premise of "the 1619 project"
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| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve |
I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.
The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.
This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits. (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.) It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it. The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it). It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities. What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?
Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research. For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA? Is the DNA defined by the Constitution? Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good? Of course not. There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land. What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."
This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness. It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding. Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly). It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day. (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative). Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap. It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied. And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap. And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan. (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory." CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue. If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments. How is all this not obvious ffs?)
Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery? Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant? What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment? Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy. What's more or truly fundamental?
Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery? That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different. But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element. But again, how does one avoid triviality here?
Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery? That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different. But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element. But again, how does one avoid triviality here?
After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed. No one disputes this.
But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim? If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form. But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century). That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what? In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended. (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years. Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)
Maybe I've missed something here. As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so. But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.) And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists). (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond . How can capitalism as such be brutal? What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital? Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition? If so, I must have missed them doing so. Are markets inherently brutal? If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?) They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected). Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.
That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system. Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.
In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.
Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children? Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process. And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources? From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there. They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?
And where does the NYT go from here? Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next? Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model? (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)
What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters. It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually. That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.
I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist. But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright. That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again." It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville. (How could they not deliberately omit the context? The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all. Fucking liars, plain and simple.) And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars. And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors? How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?
More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes. (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned. It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]). It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems. I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.
[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe. (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.) In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...). (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith? Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.) As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other. A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production). I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving. Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.' (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]
In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.
Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children? Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process. And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources? From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there. They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?
And where does the NYT go from here? Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next? Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model? (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)
What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters. It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually. That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.
I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist. But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright. That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again." It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville. (How could they not deliberately omit the context? The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all. Fucking liars, plain and simple.) And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars. And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors? How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?
More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes. (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned. It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]). It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems. I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.
[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe. (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.) In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...). (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith? Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.) As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other. A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production). I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving. Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.' (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]
Sunday, December 15, 2019
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 ^_^ ]
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| "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 |
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| A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized |
Friday, December 13, 2019
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?
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?
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Leftism's reverse-Midas effect: toxicity (e.g., "white privilege")
Following up my recent post on the "educators" indoctrinating their impressionable captive audience about "white privilege":
"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us. I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained. From the introductory section:
In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly. No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...). It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se. It means a disadvantage inflicted on others. (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"? Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)
At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted. What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly. Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided thatbastardizing altering the language is a preferable move. (More examples of leftist language-alterations here.) And you'd better go along with this alteration pretty darn quickly, lest you be complicit in perpetuating "white privilege."
I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.
If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions. But that's not what this is.
I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:
The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power. The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation. (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)
A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America. There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics. A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right). How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand? I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there. (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states. Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream. Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective? And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)
Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand? My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message. ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf." And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate. The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice. That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)
Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand. [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.] But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion. The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc. What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?
The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.
Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?
Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right. The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently). By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc. Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.
I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.
I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't. If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts. This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is. (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.) Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently. If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.
As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.
"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us. I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained. From the introductory section:
White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. ...Writers have noted that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.[9] As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly-sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.[10]Again, I encourage a reading of the full wikipedia link, where what is explained as "white privilege" is advantages that whites (qua whites) experience relative to nonwhites in America. The "advantages" enjoyed by whites are actually the effect of (real or contrived-by-leftists) unfair and unjust treatment of nonwhites. In essence - and I'm doing my utmost to characterize this notion accurately - what the wikipedia link describes is a set of circumstances in which whites are not treated unfairly relative to nonwhites.
In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly. No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...). It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se. It means a disadvantage inflicted on others. (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"? Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)
At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted. What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly. Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided that
I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.
If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions. But that's not what this is.
I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:
The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power. The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation. (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)
A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America. There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics. A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right). How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand? I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there. (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states. Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream. Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective? And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)
Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand? My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message. ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf." And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate. The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice. That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)
Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand. [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.] But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion. The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc. What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?
The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.
Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?
Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right. The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently). By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc. Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.
I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.
I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't. If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts. This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is. (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.) Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently. If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.
As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
"Keep America Great"
I may be blogging less overall (trend-wise) as my 'Better Living Through Philosophy' research project kicks into higher gear. (Currently working through the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza and I have the Oxford Handbooks for Leibniz, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Virtue high on my reading list.) I intend to (by and large) avoid polemics going forward, and focus on development of the positive vision. (Maybe it's a coincidence that both "polemics" - a term with roots in reference to war, with Polemos as the divine personification of war - and "politics" both begin with "pol.")
For various reasons, politics is an arena in which humans' irrationality, mean-spiritedness, intellectual atrophy, etc., are on a pretty full and ugly display. Politics either helps make people uglier or reflects an ugliness looking for an outlet, or both, and it has a hell of a lot to do with the way of handling the fact of human disagreement - physical force - in a manner that falls short of war proper. But the activity of political polemics is called that for a reason; it resembles warfare in an arena where reasonable and good-faith disagreement are not to be had.
I would say Trump sets a pretty low bar for what counts as reasonable and good-faith in politics. It would be appalling were an entire political wing of the country double down on the things that elevated Trump to power - in other words, to go below the bar Trump sets. So as much as Trump might disgust one, there may well be other political actors and factions out there who have gone out of their way to be more disgusting, more irrational, more dishonest, more anti-America and anti-freedom.
Anyway, about Trump: his new '20 campaign slogan, "Keep America Great," makes the obvious assumption that within 3 years Trump has turned a 240 year old nation that wasn't great into a 243 year old nation that has attained greatness. The dishonesty of this should be so evident on its face as to not require explanation. It isn't even a question of whether his actual policy agenda has been good much less made America great "again," it's a question of whether it's even plausible that a country could go from not-great to great within 3 years. It's telltale evidence that hardcore Trump supporters are more akin to cultists than to rational interlocutors accountable to fellow citizens.
America's founding generation made a great nation (with major flaws), so we have some historical evidence of what it takes to make a country great. What would keep that country great is if its People do cultural maintenance, which requires (if nothing else) intellectual maintenance. To the men who founded America, the notion of a country going from great to not-great or vice versa, within a 3 year time span, would have been ludicrous. (Unless, that is, I'm thinking much too highly of the founding generation.)
I've pointed out numerous times that pretty much all the key figures of America's founding generation were members of the American Philosophical Society. One of them was president of the APS at the same time he was president of the USA. What work was done at the APS is less significant in this context than what membership in it reflected about the mindset of the key founders. Philosophy is (and there are different ways of making this same one point) about intellectual perfection, as an organizing principle of right human living. There is something about the philosophical disposition that has the philosopher being guided in life by a vision of the good, with a more thorough and systematic understanding of "good" that goes above and beyond the goals/aims of a less reflective life. (That life and especially human life is a goal-directed phenomenon doesn't tell us about what the standard of value is. If that standard is something like "life qua man, or the conditions of living proper to a rational being," then to fill that in with substantive content, you need philosophical study. At the very minimum, even so much as confronting and grappling with the standard-of-value subject is a gateway into thinking about life philosophically, which is (I think) to think about the good life. (In an unexamined life, the good might well be thought synonymous with, say, pleasure. In an examined life, the concept of virtue comes to the fore.)
What does any of this have to do with Trump's delusional/dishonest campaign slogan? (Again, an alternative political faction would have to be pretty darn disgusting, irrational, etc., for Trump to look preferable by contrast.) It seems kind of far removed.
Well, in a sense I guess it does. There certainly does look like a very large disconnect between philosophical talk of the good life and the act that Trump and his cult (and many of the rest of the political actors) are up to.
In another sense, it's not far removed. Because the connection here is that founding generation and APS thing. We have pretty good historical evidence that perhaps the most momentous founding of a nation in history was directed by a group of avowed wisdom-lovers.
It's not just about better living through philosophy. It's about better politics through philosophy (which may or may not turn out to be anarchistic - that has to be examined...). But it's not just about better politics. As I mentioned above, the irrationality, ugliness, injustice, etc., in human life comes to a head in politics (and whatever in politics that leads to war) but it makes about as much sense to think that this irrationality is confined to politics, as it is to think that a country's greatness can make a dramatic 3-year turnaround (absent a change in something really fundamental, such as, oh, the country taking as long as 3 years to adopt the no-brainer philosophy for children program). (The only thing that would keep philosophy for children from being by far the biggest no-brainer of all time is a philosophy-for-everyone program. As with new-language-acquisition, however, it may be more developmentally efficient to begin the program with kids.)
(And how many knockdown, drag-out no-brainers in life can you think of? Well, if you're having a hard time with that one, you can always compare/contrast with philosophy for children as a reference point.)
Back to the non-parenthetical line of reasoning: irrationality and injustice in human life stems from ancient programming; humans have a capacity for reasoning while at the same time having a ton of evolutionary baggage that - absent a program for putting this baggage in its proper place - impedes the pursuit of intellectual perfection. And all this baggage infiltrates all sorts of aspects of human life. (In psychology, this problem is referred to as cognitive bias, and these biases are rampant (and generally less so among philosophers worth anything).) Outside of politics, we have bad lifestyle choices, lack of organization, etc. Modern human life creates demands that weren't there in the primitive human condition. How are the homeless people in the big CA cities these days supposed to navigate the modern environment given its demands on cognition, effort, etc.? Not to say that human life in its primitive condition was easy, but it seems like it was simpler: the habituating/imprinting necessary for human life to happen in its primitive condition is not the same habituation/imprinting necessary to live in modern human society in, e.g., big-city CA.
America can be only as great as the people in it. Modern life introduces complexities that didn't exist in the primitive human condition, in which case humans need to adapt to function optimally today. The main locus of adaptation is within the human cognitive faculty, not the least important of which is the rational/intellectual center of thought. To make humans better enough to make America better enough, philosophy as an organizing discipline is key.
Hence, from this standpoint of understanding where we need to go, "Keep America Great" is a slogan-level red flag of intellectual bankruptcy and irrationality. Just in case you were wondering whether anything about Trump (qua political leader) was a red flag before, "Keep America Great" should remove any doubt. Once America again begins electing the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, then we talk about keeping America great.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Civic ignorance & jury nullification
"A man I found guilty of dealing drugs died in prison. I wish I could take that verdict back."
If you poll Americans on whether they know about jury nullification, the numbers would be appallingly, deplorably low.
Obvious question: why the appalling, deplorable ignorance? Levels of knowledge or ignorance of jury nullification should be a knock-down, no-brainer litmus test of the quality of civic education in this country. Someone has really fucked up there, and that someone is probably shifting blame for the problems in this country.
For fuck's sake, already.
If you poll Americans on whether they know about jury nullification, the numbers would be appallingly, deplorably low.
Obvious question: why the appalling, deplorable ignorance? Levels of knowledge or ignorance of jury nullification should be a knock-down, no-brainer litmus test of the quality of civic education in this country. Someone has really fucked up there, and that someone is probably shifting blame for the problems in this country.
For fuck's sake, already.
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