Democrats support sex discrimination

Groping for a running mate? (Imagine the Democrat reaction if Trump did this.)

One nice thing about philosophy is how it exposes bad ideas for what they are, irrespective of their popularity or trendiness.

At last night's Democratic debate, front-runner Joe Biden made explicit that he will only consider a woman for a running mate.  His opponent, Bernie Sanders, wouldn't commit outright to that position, but he's leaning heavily in that direction.

Proposition: The person most qualified for the job is the one who should get that job.

Democrats, the people who supposedly represent the progressive and enlightened mindset in America, now deny this Proposition.  (Or at least some trendily large majority now denies it.  How much stink are they raising about Biden denying the VP opportunity to any men?)

Now, common sense and justice say that to deny the Proposition, one should come up with a really compelling overriding reason, because otherwise the Proposition is eminently plausible, so much so that it should serve as a basis for social policy - the reason being that common sense and justice find (in application to employment policies) discrimination against people on the basis of characteristics other than their qualifications for the job, to be repugnant, the sort of thing that a country such as ours (the United States) is supposed to have gotten away from.  Only reactionaries or some such deplorables would favor non-merit-based employment discrimination.  Right?

Well, apparently, it is now the reactionary position (if you listen to Joe Biden and his supporters and enablers and fellow-travelers) to oppose the kind of sex discrimination that Biden & co. now explicitly support!  Apparently the default view is that opposing sex discrimination is now a sexist position itself, and that perhaps intellectual resources need to be marshaled to use misrepresentation and shaming tactics against such opposition.  I wish I weren't exaggerating the nature of the moral absurdity going on here.

You don't have to ask what I think about this.  Just ask what an established, high-reputation sage like Socrates or Aristotle would say about this.  At the very least they would (I think) say that there had damn well be really good reasons why employment discrimination on the basis of sex should be reintroduced after supposedly having been widely repudiated in the USA and other nations.

So what would those really compelling reasons be?

I can't think of a single one.

I can think of reasons that would weigh in the consideration of candidates for employment - the standard 'diversity'-based reasons pertaining to what can be gained from differences in perspectives and background or life experience.  But I can't think of any reason whatsoever that should be categorically overriding.  Biden has said that being a woman is, in itself, a categorically overriding reason.

He has categorically ruled out considering a man as a running mate.  This is equivalent to an employer saying "men need not apply."  (I was going to say, it's the equivalent of an employer tossing the applications from men into the trash bin immediately, but by the principle of interpretive charity we cannot assume that Biden is being that dishonest, deceptive, and dastardly.  He's openly advertising his sex discrimination so that no men need waste their time presenting their credentials to him for consideration.)  Does that seem reasonable, something possibly endorsed by justice and common sense?

Why on earth should anyone even have to spend their time asking these questions?  Philosopher's question: how much more of a departure from common sense and justice does this stuff have to be, before Democrats & co. raise a stink?  (As Dennett would say, better pump those intuitions, turn the intuition knobs up to 11 if you have to.  The Democrats/Biden are at a 10, it looks like.)

But again, don't consider what this here blogger has to say, because what the hell do I know.  Just imagine instead an Aristotle bringing all his analytical weight to bear on this kind of question, and/or use your conscience (which should come to the same thing).  I don't know what language an Aristotle would use, but I think it's fucking ridiculous, what the Demo-rats have become after decades of intellectual atrophy and hubris.  'Philosophers' in the academy should be all over this kind of thing, but I'm not expecting that to happen because they're mostly 'politically correct' Democrats and politics tends to compromise intellectual integrity (hence the boldfaced hypocrisy of the 'academic freedom' rationale for tenure).

[Addendum 3/17/20: Turley appears to be among the few within the commentariat with the integrity/honesty to call out Biden's blatantly discriminatory pledge for what it is.  Has the pandemic news been distracting the rest of them, or something?  Not likely.  Biden's moral offense here is red-flag obvious to anyone who pays attention to politics.  If this isn't a no-brainer, then what is?  How is this possibly anything other than Biden being caught dead to rights?  (Note that the most upvoted anti-Turley comments below his article offer nothing of substance.  So much for the credibility of "likes"/upvotes as a gauge of quality or honesty.)  I think intellectual dishonesty can take various forms.  I don't think it's rampant, but I don't think it's rare, either.  In politics especially, lots of people quite lazily (i.e., dishonestly) if not recklessly caricature and smear adversaries' positions (contrary to Mill's advice about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form), and they give their own side a pass for bad things, quite a lot.  (So, well, yeah, in politics, dishonesty is kinda rampant.)  And I think those who are readily in a position to call out Biden for his pledge, and yet fail to do so, are being dishonest.]

Impeachment and philosophy: addenda

Following up the earlier post.

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

A 79-year-old, heart-attack-having socialist...

...is apparently who the Demo-rats would most prefer as the candidate to end up in the White House come 2021, based on betting markets.  (He's about 18 or 19 percentage points ahead of the next candidate as of today.)  That's: (1) 79 years old; (2) an avowed socialist; (3) who recently had a heart attack.  This combination should tell you something about just how off-the-rails this party has become.  They don't appear interested much these days in listening to reason.

He and the party don't seem all that interested in a serious discussion about how globalization - the greater spreading out of capital flows from the first-world to the poorer world - is a key driver of greater economic inequality in the USA (the capital goes, the returns come to those still in residence); instead, increasingly, they (e.g., AOC) prefer to attribute this trend to some inherent dynamic in capitalism toward greater inequality (universally or globally, full-stop).

He says that no one really knows how much his bigger-govt schemes might cost, so he won't even bother to provide projections.  He recently tweeted, "Abortion is healthcare."  Anyone who listened carefully to the last 2020 Demo-ratic debate could notice that his proposals and style are pie-in-the-sky; how do he and his supporters expect his pretty-transformative proposals to get past a GOP-majority Senate, for one thing?

As a piece yesterday in the WSJ points out, Sanders was in favor of nationalization of industry in the 1970s, and defended Ortega and Cuba in the 1980s.  He's now more of a staunchly "progressive" 'New Dealer' and/or Scandinavian welfarist type with an agenda of generous economic 'rights' (education, housing, healthcare, etc.) and lessening the influence of money in politics.  But if the one not-bullshitty piece of evidence of racism on Trump's part - his company's housing policies from nearly 50 years ago (for which it/he didn't admit wrongdoing, etc.) - can be held against him today, so can Bernie's hardcore-socialist politics from 40 years ago.  If.  Right?

But even take out the socialism part, however one defines 'socialism,' as though that's not troubling enough.  There's still the heart-attack-having 79-year-old part.  What are these people thinking?  They want to get rid of the "corrupt, racist, trillion-dollar-deficit-making, etc." president so badly that they can't accept any other outcome with a semblance of equanimity or proportion, and yet this is the alternative they most prefer to present to the swing voters of PA, MI, and WI?

And why can't they come up with a seriously viable candidate who isn't over 70 or under 40?  (I think Plato might have something to say about putting people under 40 in charge of things political; do these politically-oriented lightweights care?)

[Addendum: to get some idea of how clueless these people can be, lefty Robert Reich asks why America is so divided now, and then proceeds to explain: "Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos...".  Can it be that part of the division is attributable to people like Reich insisting on dubiously, one-sidedly framing things this way, without any sense of irony, and that those on the right are sick and tired of it?]

[Addendum 2/21: I'm somewhat amazed that, all my attention-paying so far notwithstanding, I've not seen Bernie being called to explain his supposed ideological transition from hardcore communist to 'Denmawk'-style social democracy.  How lazy/incompetent do his debate opponents and the media have to be for this not to have happened yet?  You'd think we'd all like to have an explanation, lest we possibly end up handing over the nuclear codes to a crypto-commie or something?  Am I the crazy one here?]

[Addendum 2/22: It should be noted that from polling averages the definitely-leftist Sanders + Warren numbers come to about 40%, while the more moderate Biden + Pete + Klobuchar + Bloomberg numbers come to about 50%.  This raises the good question as to why on earth a not-very-convincing plurality of support should vault someone into a nomination - not altogether dissimilar from how Trump managed to get the '16 GOP nomination in the face of quality competition from at least 5 other candidates.  IIRC he didn't poll much above 35% until all but a few other candidates dropped out.  Still, he did win the general election by appealing to enough swing voters, and there is much talk of a contested '20 Demo-rat convention.  The betting markets (now putting Sanders at nearly 50% and about 30 points above the next candidate) don't seem too deterred.]

Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Planned Parenthood and NARAL: "Believe Swetnick"

This is absolutely beyond the pale of honest discourse:

Planned Parenthood Action‏Verified account @PPact

We still believe Julie Swetnick. #BelieveSurvivors

1:14 PM - 25 Oct 2018

NARAL retweeted this.

All evidence points to Julie Swetnick being a fucking liar and her story on its face not being believable.  There were serial drugged gang rapes and she just got around to reporting them nearly 4 decades later?  And no one else managed to report it?  This is believable even after she fell apart in TV interviews (as any reasonable person should have suspected if not expected outright would happen)?  Even after Kavanaugh presented what is prima facie exculpatory evidence with his calendar?  Note that Oct 25, 2018, is nearly a month after the Ford & Kavanaugh testimonies, so there was time to mull it over responsibly.

How fucked-up does someone's belief-formation processes have to be in order to find Swetnick believable?  What's particularly dishonest about PP's tweet is that it's a statement with no support, just an assertion that we're also just supposed to have belief-formation processes fucked-up enough to believe as well, I guess.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

And if anyone believes Dr. Ford's accusation, even after Leland Keyser's refutation of it; even after Kavanaugh's calendar was presented; even after it was made evident that the two simply didn't travel in the same social circles - then such believers, too, have belief-formation processes that are FUBAR enough that they shouldn't be taken seriously when they assert their beliefs.  This includes the three leading '20 Demo-rat candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren; presumably Buttigieg as well considering he called for Kavanaugh's impeachment last October along with Sanders, Warren, and other pusbags).  One of those candidates - Sen. Warren - claimed to find Swetnick believable as well.  (I've provided links to these candidates' beyond-the-pale assertions time and time again and I'm growing sick and tired of doing so; anyone can do their own fucking homework on this pretty easily.)

The Kavanaugh hearings were nothing more than politically-motivated #MeToo abuse by Demo-rats and their allies/enablers.

This is no brainer stuff.

So, again: what the fuck is wrong with these people?

And what the fuck is wrong with those who could call out these fucks for what they are and yet fail to do so?

Latest on the cancerous Academic Left run amok

Surprise, surprise - lots of obvious race and sex discrimination has resulted from the UC's "diversity statement" protocol.

Given the demographics involved - women and many of the favored minorities are more likely to be politically on the left - the so-called required diversity statements at Berkley/UC are veritably designed (in an evolutionary-mutation sort of way) to increase the presence of leftists on campus.  I mean, it was fucking obvious from the get-go what the agenda is here.  This is the Academic Left doing what it does - enforcing ideological conformity by whatever means it can get away with.  They're commies at heart, purging the impure elements to get down to a hard core of the ideologically inbred, research quality be damned.  (Their own versions of Lysenkoism couldn't be far behind - could it?)

And without legalities getting in the way - as is likely to occur under our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (these pathetic fucks would call that a racist dog whistle, or something) - they would keep on doing it more and more until they've created a completely discredited intellectual trainwreck.  They just can't help themselves, can they.

If you don't see a connection between this trainwreck-in-the-making and the scummy history-rewriting (currently in the process of being discredited by appalled historians) going on at the NYT, then maybe you suck at pattern recognition.  This is the same shit being played out in (only slightly?) superficially different ways.

This is what happens when American leftists as we now know them have the run of the place.  Ultimately it'd be all AOCs all the time, a thorough brainwashing with all opposition dismissed as racist/fascist/sexist/capitalist/imperialist.

For fuck's sake, like there wasn't a nonstop avalanche of evidence of this meltdown already?  Just watch - if/when the UC ideological-conformity statements run into too many legal challenges, the ideological-conformity motherfuckers will do what they can to weasel around them with something even more outrageous, offensive, and twisted.  It's what they do.

This cancer has taken over and just about destroyed the Demo-rat Party and the moderates don't know what to do; they've all been schooled in America-is-racist and capitalism-is-evil memes by the Academic Left and that's what contextualizes their areas of disagreement.  Just how much wealth and privilege of white males needs to be expropriated, exactly?  Exactly how much do corporations exploit the non-CEO workers who create all the value?  Exactly how flimsy do sexual assault allegations against white males have to be before they can be disbelieved at long last?  That kind of shit, not the stuff that middle-Americans disagree about.

The Dems' least-unqualified candidate at this point, the least ridiculous-looking when put up against the Racist Power-Abusing Sitting President, is an old, white male.  The presumptive future of the party is AOC, an obvious trainwreck situation; I'm not sure even Mayor Pete can stem the far-left tide here.

The Blue States' public-union-controlled budgets and always-escalating minimum wages are being sustained by prolonged and solid economic growth; what's their backup plan for if/when the shit hits the fan there?  Blame capitalism/Republicans/white privilege yet some more and hope/pray swing-state voters and not just Academic Leftists will find them credible?

Lastly: Is there any prominent, outspoken figure on the Academic Left these days who isn't a piece of shit?  Because if he/she is not calling out the Academic Left for being the giant cancerous mound of shit that it clearly is, then he/she is part of the problem.

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.

Trump impeachment thoughts/questions

I wasn't around for the impeachment inquiry into President Nixon, but from all I've seen/heard about it, there was clear an overwhelming evidence that Nixon displayed what might be called a blatant disregard for the rule of law (and there were some 18 minutes of recordings which put him dead to rights on that), enough so that the effort to remove him from office was bipartisan and Nixon saw no alternative but to resign.  I'm not seeing that in President Trump's case.

A couple thoughts/questions re: "Treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors" and the specifics of Trump's case:

Assume you're not a partisan piece of shit; reverse the party affiliations if necessary and see if you come out with the same answer in either case:

Are treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors sufficient grounds for impeachment, or or only necessary or potential grounds?  Of course, the Framers sought to have some mechanism by which a sitting President could be removed.

In the case of President Clinton, he committed perjury in a deposition and perhaps before a grand jury as well.  He tried to influence the testimony of his assistant Betty Currie.  For such actions this national chief law-enforcement official was deemed by the Arkansas State Bar unfit to practice law.  Is this sufficient to warrant impeachment and/or removal?  Does it make a difference if these actions fall under the heading of "high crimes and misdemeanors"?  Was Clinton displaying a blatant disregard for the rule of law?  (Should blatant disregard for the rule of law suffice as an impeachable/removable offense?  I would think so; if that doesn't suffice, then what does?)

As for the specifics of Trump's case: Some reasoning I've heard for why his payoffs to Stormy Daniels weren't a violation of campaign finance laws is that he could have other, legitimate reasons for such a payoff (e.g., to avoid personal embarrassment).  So we might call this a dual-motivation excuse.  Does such a dual motivation exist in the case of Trump's pressuring Ukraine to announce  investigations of the Bidens?  Supposedly Ukraine announcing/initiating investigations would benefit Trump and hurt Biden politically, but Trump has said that his concern isn't political but is about corruption (particularly if there is probable cause to think corruption might have taken place).

Was there probable cause to suspect corruption by either of the Bidens?  Trump told Zelensky that Biden using monetary pressure against Ukraine to get a prosecutor not to investigate Burisma "sounds terrible to me [Trump]."  What now?

Supposedly, a foreign country (or whomever!...) announcing an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up.  Well, gee.  What do you think the Demo-rats & allies/enablers were up to when it came to the Mueller investigation that had been hanging over the Trump presidency some two years?  What was their intent other than to go after something that "sounds terrible to [them]" when there was nothing there?  What the fuck else were the likes of Adam Schiff doing those two years other than casting baseless suspicions on the Trump presidency?

On a matter of broader political interest: how much cynicism does it take to assume - as apparently is assumed inside the Beltway - that so much as an announcement of an investigation of X tends to be politically harmful to X, whether or not anything is ever actually dug up?  Wherever did they get that idea?  How does the Demo-rat complaint about Trump pressuring someone to investigate his political opponent not amount to the ultimate in cynicsm if not blatant hypocrisy?  (Keep in mind that as far as I am concerned, the Demo-rats have squandered all credibility and grounds for good will; a number of their top "leaders" in Congress and on the '20 campaign trail have claimed that there are sufficient grounds to impeach Brett Kavanaugh, for example - not a position an honest and informed person would take.  They've recklessly smeared Trump and his supporters as racists, for another example.  If you're looking for honest and credible arguments for whether Trump should be impeached/removed, the Demo-rats cannot be considered a reliable source.  Any reasonable observer should also note the Demo-rats' years-long effort to run interference and make excuses for Obama/Comey's FISA-abusing FBI.)

As for Trump, if he really thinks he did noting wrong, then I don't see any excuse whatsoever for him to hide behind anyone or anything when it comes to his (presumed) Senate trial.  He should get his fat fucking ass up there to Capitol Hill to testify in person (under oath, etc.) and clear his name.  He should face the adversarial grilling of Senators.  Likewise, Joe Biden should also stop being an evader and explain just what the fuck his unqualified, black-sheep son was doing drawing some $50k a month from a company (for doing what?) that apparently plays a key role in the Ukraine narrative (enough so to draw his intervention as VP and Ukraine point-man...).

For reasons apparent to most any honest and attentive observer, this impeachment process has been and is expected to continue being a blatantly partisan event that probably serves to illustrate Beltway intellectual and moral bankruptcy and cynicism than anything else, with the impeaching party having squandered all credibility/trust on tons of matters.  Trump was elected for, among other things, being as credible a vehicle as anyone - as a take-no-prisoners outsider - to clean up the Beltway swamp.  (If he doesn't do it, who credibly could?  I already know what happened in the case of Obama.  Ironically, his original "clean up Washington" persona was starting to crack when as Senator he voted back in '08 for FISA powers, as the likes of Glenn Greenwald would surely not overlook...)

Well, that's why Trump should testify and clear up just why it was within his constitutional powers to pressure Ukraine as he did, and released the funds when he did (i.e., two days after word of the whistleblower got out).  And since the Demo-rats have no reputation left over to salvage, it's up to the GOP to honorably follow the evidence where it leads, and weigh the input of Dershowitz (e.g.) alongside that of the law professors who testified to the House Judiciary committee.  Such dialectically responsible behavior is a requirement of basic epistemic justice.

The American people (the ones with a clue, that is) are fucking sick and tired of being subjected to much less from their "leaders," and thereby having their intelligence and character routinely insulted.

Some obviously scummily unfair process from House Demo-rats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scumbag Comey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scumbag so-called philosopher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlottesville fake news, 2+ years later

Scumbag CNN

CONTEXT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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