Philosophy for Children, again

It's been about 4 months since the last blog entry, and the only thing worth blogging about at this point is Philosophy for Children (P4C) and getting this implemented ASAFP, ffs already.  I will say it yet again: this is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all-time, the most humane and cost-effective solution to humanity's solvable problems.

(The only rule I would impose on this is: steelman (the opposite of strawman) or penalty.  Synonyms for steelmanning include: Ideological Turing Test; Rapoport-Dennett Rules; Mill's learning the other side - all necessary for doing dialectic well.  About damn time that Ayn Rand got fair treatment from the next generation of philosophers, amiright?)  Perhaps a fun and compelling mantra might be developed, such as: All Steelmanning All the Time.

I'm an imperfect researcher.  I've posted numerous links to many resources on this before - but not perhaps the best resource of all, direct video evidence of children involved in philosophy discussions.  So here is the search link: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=philosophy+for+children%2Clong .  Here are the top results:

Aiming higher: Aristotle for kids?  After all, the better the philosophy, the better the living.

[Addendum: Again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on P4C: "Nevertheless, because they lack background in the formal study of philosophy, many teachers are reluctant to encourage the philosophical thinking of their students. Their fears, however, are exaggerated. Familiarity with some of the standard philosophical literature might be desirable, but it is not necessary for bringing Philosophy for Children into the classroom. What is required is the ability to facilitate philosophical discussion. For this, it is much more important that teachers have some philosophical curiosity themselves than a familiarity with academic philosophical literature. Like their students, teachers unfamiliar with the discipline of philosophy may nevertheless have an aptitude for philosophical thinking—or at least a knack for recognizing when others are engaged in philosophical thought." UP comments: And if both teachers and kids are capable of such thought, then why not Philosophy for Everyone? It only stands to reason.]

How everyone needs philosophy: a proof

A standard hierarchy of needs. Where does philosophy fit in?

It seems like this may involve belaboring what is obvious (to some), but I can't say I've seen the case presented quite like this before.

Pictured above is a rendition of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs (hereafter "the hierarchy").  I've indicated in a number of places that "Better Living" can be understood in these terms.  I've indicated in my book (see 'About Me') that a (hopefully careful and thorough) inductive grounding of the concept "good" - along with "right" the most important concept in the field of metaethics - points toward good being synonymous with (the fulfillment of) a need.  An overly reductionist and biologistic rendering of "need" or "good" based on some concept of a telos understood in terms of natural functions seems to wind up explaining many of the needs at or toward the bottom or middle of the Maslow-hierarchy but not so much those at and towards the top; while the explanation of our origins is usually rendered in terms of the concept of 'inclusive fitness' - we're genetic preservation and replication machines (crudely, "the four Fs") - it turns out that the distinctively human cognitive makeup comes with ends/goals/purposes like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, aesthetic appreciation, etc.  Questions that arise: How does human appreciation of music arise within an evolutionary context?  How do we treat of (genuine) needs toward the top of the hierarchy that don't seem to have played nearly the role for prehistoric humans that they do for us moderns?

Additionally, thinkers like David L. Norton have noted the deep if not exact similarity between the hierarchy and the ancient concept of eudaimonia (rough synonyms are flourishing, well-being, happiness, living well, a complete life).  The terms "eudaimonia" and "self-actualization" appear to be synonymous here.  (Noted ethicist Alan Gewirth takes the idea a step further with his concept of self-fulfillment.)  (One really should do some mental integration and follow these links where they lead; the wikipedia entry for "self-fulfillment" prominently references Gewirth, for instance.)  Now, it may turn out that one partly fulfills needs at different levels of the hierarchy, but the ideal of perfection is a complete (teleios) fulfillment of needs.

I plan to have more to say in a future posting or book or more about the concept of ethical perfectionism as a complete fulfillment of the aspirations of common sense morality (inasmuch as we would say that there are inchoate or implicit aspirations in common sense morality).  Moral theories that involve revisions to common sense morality are dubbed revisionary (aha, Huemer now appears!); "revisionary" seems to be a charge leveled more toward utilitarianism than to competing theories since it involves such a revision or departure from how humans historically have thought about the good and the right-and-wrong.  (See, e.g.: trolley problems.)  That usually has been a charge against utilitarianism because of the apparently or genuinely counter-intuitive (roughly, counter-common-sense-morality) prescriptions, motivations, etc., that people would have to adopt to fit the demands of the theory.  I don't think ethical perfectionism - the most perfect version we can formulate, that is; I nominate an Aristotelian or intellectual perfectionism (as do Hurka, the Dougs, and others) - succumbs to this problem.

(Hopefully an intellectual perfectionism avoids problems of circularity, viz.: when we fill in the concept of intellectual perfection, does it lead to adoption of, say, utilitarianism (and then when we fill in the best version of utilitarianism or consequentialism more broadly speaking, in order to (e.g.) account for Mill's highly plausible distinction between higher and lower pleasures or goods, do we end up with intellectual perfectionism)?  Well, in line with what intellectual perfection involves, in a sense yes, at least in part, via the procedures of dialectic. (Blog tag for dialectic.)  Utilitarianism's appeal comes from having grains of truth, even if it ends up being a one-sided theory that excludes the grains of truth in other theories, e.g., Kantian-style deontology associated with (e.g.) rights-talk that is ethically foundational enough not to be reducible to utilitarian guidelines.  Or so I and numerous ethical theorists claim.)

Somehow all of the preceding is deeply relevant to the promised proof to which I now come, about the need for philosophy.  (I'm trying not to leave loose ends, you see.)

Two of the needs listed at the top of the hierarchy - morality and problem-solving - are centrally specific concerns to philosophy, and uniquely to the discipline of philosophy.  Problem-solving comes under the head of "epistemology" or theory of knowledge, and it's that issue which I seek to address here.

What is the main problem that epistemology is trying to solve?  Well, it's a rather obvious problem: while there isn't really any serious dispute about the general reliability of the deliverance of sense-perception, which humans all share in common (and with the other animals), humans come to many varied systems of belief.  (The Greek term for belief is endoxa.  Consider the relation to terms you already know such as "orthodox" or "paradox.")  Sometimes these systems of belief are wildly at variance with one another.  It's hard to see how (e.g.) socialism and capitalism are in any serious way reconcilable with one another.  And yet different humans, with access to the same sensory evidence, end up thinking very different things about these isms.

Since advocates of capitalism and of socialism can't both be right, we run into the very serious (indeed, life-and-death, if you look at the the 20th century) possibility of doxastic error.  And if one is in serious doxastic error, it's hard to reconcile this condition with being (completely) eudaimonic.  To put the issue into greater relief: what about the irreconcilability of theism and naturalism?  How does that affect how one ought to fashion one's life?  To live a good life do we need to prepare for an afterlife?  Do we need to attend church on Sundays?  Do we need to adhere strictly to what's in Scriptures?  Which set of Scriptures - the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads?

What's the proper ethical treatment of animals?  Are current industrial farming practices abominable?  (There is something approaching a philosophical consensus, if ever there was any, that indeed it is.  I can think of a lot of arguments in the literature that it is, but I can't think of a single argument in the literature that it isn't.  This has hardly affected social or government policy in the main, however.  This in itself is a philosophical problem.)  Are meat-eating practices of any kind wrong?  (The jury appears to be out on that one.)

Is healthcare a basic and universal human right?  (Note that quality healthcare is pricey, beyond the reach of many of the world's inhabitants.)  If so, how does that square with the right to liberty?  Doesn't the latter preclude being forced into service to provide for others' healthcare?  Isn't taxation of earnings on par with forced labor?  Isn't sending one's earnings to third-world relief funds akin to getting one's work clothing wet to save a baby from drowning in a shallow pond on one's way to work?  (You've never encountered that situation?  Is that relevant to the comparison?  What about trolley problems?)  If you should donate some of your earnings to third-world relief, just how much of your earnings?  What are proper procedures, if any, for quarantining individuals who are infected with a highly contagious virus?  These are life and death questions, and there's no broad agreement on them.

So isn't it really important, if we want to get things right about such questions, and we find that - based on the fact of disagreement alone - that not everyone is getting it right despite their sincerely-held beliefs (endoxa), that we would want to be really rigorous about our belief-formation processes?  Shouldn't we want to learn, rigorously, about the rules of formal logic?  (Should(n't) I present this whole proof of the need for philosophy in numbered-premise-and-conclusion format?  But what is the fun in that?  Have you ever seen me do such a thing in this blog?)  Shouldn't we all want to learn about bending over backwards to avoid committing informal fallacies, which are widespread if not rampant in at least some areas of discourse?  Shouldn't we all heed to the best of our abilities Mill's advice (there's Mill again...) about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form?  Wouldn't you prefer that your adversaries know your opinions as you actually hold them before they criticize them?

(Apparently tons of haters of Ayn Rand "know" from afar that Rand admirers such as myself are empathy-lacking assholes, and that all we have to talk about is politics and not things like aesthetics or philosophic method.  I was not aware that all that time pondering the implications of the issue of (e.g.) Rand as a dialectical thinker, or (which comes roughly to the same thing) the thinking that went into my Journal of Ayn Rand Studies article, was the equivalent of staring into blank space, my life is so empty and lacking in experiential-background context!  The things the haters know about me that I don't, it's just effing great, I tell ya.  So, is Ayn Rand a philosopher, much less a good or serious one?  As long as we're going to issue forth with endoxa or opinions about that, we should want to be pretty careful and thorough about getting it right, because who or what counts as a (good or serious) philosopher is really quite important to all this.  And isn't issuing forth opinions lazily and recklessly about others' opinions almost the very definition of being an empathy-lacking asshole as opposed to a noble soul?  Not to name names, but is the opinion of a Rand-bashing Nietzsche scholar who runs the most popular philosophy blog worth anything in this context?  What does popularity or even "credentials" count for when it comes to truth and honesty, BTW?  Who runs a philosophy blog as good, overall, as this one?  Are any of the others talking explicitly, specifically, and with aspirations to systematicity about the topic of better living through philosophy?  About philosophy for children?  Like, sometimes?  Ever?  Is that 'Aristotle' on twitter running a sprawling enough research program like the original Aristotle to have the lay of the philosophy-blog land?  I know about that 'Aristotle' figure, does he know about me?  Why is 'Aristotle' on a known intellectual cesspool like twitter rather than running a philosophy blog, publishing books, etc.?  How did I find out about that 'Aristotle' if I spend little time on twitter, anyway?  What does a perfectionistic research program involve?  Why isn't twitter-'Aristotle' talking incessantly about better living through philosophy for children?  What does twitter-'Aristotle' have to say about a culturally-influential-and-polarizing figure like Ayn Rand and/or her associate and leading Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthelf?  If somehow hypothetically revived to the present day, would Aristotle specialize in Aristotle studies?  Could someone in the present day only specialize given the growth of specialized knowledge required for expertise in any field nowadays?  Would specialization explain why next to zero politicians today, who specialize in the art of persuasion, are anything close to experts in philosophy?  Etc.  As far as I know, only one philosopher is asking questions at this overall level of perceptiveness nowadays.  And only I can anticipate what my next blog post will be, and it should be pretty darn good.  [Edit: and here you go.]  BTW, I need to perfect my research program more, by homing in on state-of-the-art journals/articles in my own 'areas of specialization' [ethics, political philosophy].  I have good reasons for doing so, given the nature of the integration and transmission of knowledge/research....)

Have I made my point yet?

But just to state the conclusion succinctly: You need philosophy because at least some of your opinions are probably wrong, and better living for a human involves advanced cognition about morality and problem-solving.

To tie up any loose ends: Aristotle is known as the fountainhead of dialectic.  Dialectic has been described in the Oxford Handbook of Aristotle as his philosophical method.  The fruits of that method are well known for their explanatory power.  (He had wrong things to say about women and slavery.  His theories in physics have been superseded - after only about 1800 years or so of other thinkers doing natural philosophy, that is.  He has to be assessed on his overall merits.  His ethics are as canonical as ever, even in the demanding confines of analytic philosophy.)  T.H. Irwin has a whole book - the largest single-author book on Aristotle's philosophy that I know of - titled Aristotle's First Principles (1988) in which he investigates Aristotle's application of the method of dialectic (what Irwin terms 'strong dialectic').  Aristotle recognized the major issue raised above, the problem of opposing opinion or endoxa despite uniformity in human sensory experience.  Surely everyone has hit upon some grain(s) of truth or other in their opinion-formation processes, but clearly (given the fact of disagreement) they need to perfect those processes to the best of their abilities.  One way of doing so is engaging in dialectic, the art of context-keeping in the most fundamental explanatory sense, but the art, more popularly understood, of seeking reconciliation among opposing ideas.  (That is the art of context-keeping applied, in the sense that we seek to establish the cognitive contexts within opposing belief-formation processes occur, so as to better understand how opposing opinions were arrived at, and therefore how to apply needed fixes.)  So dialectic and intellectual perfection(ism), which may well come to the same thing, are fundamental to philosophical activity.  Now, Aristotle didn't say that (strong) dialectic was merely about treating the contexts opposing opinions, since he was also a realist in the sense that an independent reality (the one we commonly access through sense-experience) is the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity.  This explains the grain(s) of truth in opposing opinions even though, for all we know, opposing opinions taken on the whole are false.  Point being, it's not opinions all the way down.

(A note about Irwin: he's a good man, and thurrah.  I may have mentioned before that his massive, 3-volume The Development of Ethics (2007) contains the largest bibliography that I know of -  approximately 1600 references, even more than the 1300 or so of Sciabarra's Total Freedom (2000).  (While I haven't read it, I am aware that Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) also has a massive bibliography, around 1100 references IIRC.  Any deep tie-in between the themes covered in these three books?  How much and against what odds should one bet that there is?)  Irwin is the main source of my awareness of discussions about an ethical theory being revisionary.  For point of reference, the 5 thinkers to whom Irwin devotes more than 100 pages of coverage each are Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant and Sidgwick (the revisionary utilitarian guy).  Now, while if you took only these 5 thinkers and 'dialecticized' them, you'd probably come up with an intellectual and ethical framework that, practiced by all humans, would lead to a really decent and enlightened society, despite differences about "the foundations."  Aristotle and Aquinas in particular are perfectionists - intellectual perfectionists to be exact - and the clear sense from Irwin's exhaustively comprehensive treatment of the history of ethics is that their 'Aristotelian naturalism' offers the strongest resources overall for ethical theory.  In fact, Irwin's coverage of Aquinas is the most extensive of any other figure in his Development, at over 200 pages.  I'm close to finishing the final, third volume of the series.  The last 300 densely-packed pages cover the 20th century from Moore onward.  Up until that point, Irwin's coverage was quite lucid, easy (enough) to follow.  But then 20th century ethics comes around, and it becomes almost excruciatingly technical and focused on the difficult subject matter of metaethics.  The likes of Ayn Rand had no time for this stuff, as she was focused on the life-and-death importance of ethics whereas the relevance for ethical practice of any number of the proliferating 20th-century isms (expressivism, cognitivism, emotivism, error theory, internalism, subjectivism, realism, quasi-realism, etc. etc.) is not exactly clear.  The frustration of non-academics/specialists about this situation is expressed in such articles as this one.  Still, you have a (the?) leading Aristotle scholar in W. D. Ross heavily involved in these discussions, so they're still in some way very important.  The question is, can their importance be conveyed to a lay-audience?  Or is the subject matter inherently too difficult?  I remember a claim to the effect that Heidegger's subject matter is inherently too difficult for lay-translation, although Irwin's chapter on Existentialist ethics, which is pretty much all about Heidegger, is easily the clearest of his 20th-century chapters so far, so I doubt such a claim in Heidegger's case.  Also, while Irwin's prose when it comes to 20th-century meteathics is difficult, the treatment of the metaethical subject matter in fellow Oxford scholar Derek Parfit's On What Matters (2011), volume 2, is actually quite accessible, breezy almost.  What's missing in On What Matters is coverage of the Aristotelian naturalist tradition so favorably treated by Irwin.  Is a (dialectical) synthesis of Irwin and Parfit possible, or does specialization preclude that, dammit?  [Edit: On the topic of good and thurrah men, Mortimer Adler's compilation, Great Treasury of Western Thought, is some 1770 pages, 1430 of which are the main textual extracts, in double columns, in tiny print.  I'm about halfway through it, and based on the pace of reading so far (roughly 12-14 pages an hour) I expect it will take over 100 hours, probably around 120 hours, to get all the way through.  Likewise, Irwin's Development is some 2800 large-size pages, with small print, and at my pace of reading of about 22-25 pages an hour, the time to completion would be over 100 hours as well.  Both good and thurrah men are Aristotelian researchers - and so is Sciabarra - so is there something more than a coinkydink there?  What other works from a single author/editor take over 100 hours to get through?  I want to know, dammit.  I don't remember Copleston's History, with its relatively short pages, taking nearly as long.])

[Addendum: the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary definition of "self-actualize" is "to reach one's full potential."  So now we have another conceptual tie-in, between goods, needs, and potentialities, yes?  (Actuality or energeia being synonymous with entelechy.... ain't making connections fun?)]

The academy: structurally dishonest?

The latest from the shitshow that the leftist-infested academy has been turning into more and more. (h/t Maverick Philosopher, additional related link there)  Aside from the obviously suspicious circumstances of this tenure-track person's firing, and the obviously credible depiction of all-too-familiar "woke" smear tactics involved, there is an entirely valid point the author raises:

I did not enjoy the protection of tenure (I was, however, tenure-track), but we should not rely upon tenure to uphold free inquiry. Academic health is not served by a message that tenure can only be secured by those prepared to embrace political orthodoxies. After all, if tenure is intended to protect people who challenge dogmas and orthodoxies, why would we support a system that punishes non-conformists and that sieves them out before they are capable of safely challenging prevailing views?

Gee, ya think?

The blatant hypocrisy of the tenure system, from an academic-freedom standpoint at any rate, is now laid bare.  Not just a system of tenure under the currently prevailing leftist-scum-infested shitshow, but any system of tenure whatsoever: from a intellectual-freedom-loving standpoint, what legitimate function does it serve?  Why in the everloving fuck should anyone, anywhere be made to feel afraid to speak their minds?

Not just in the academy, but corporations, or . . . anywhere.  It's an unphilosophical world where there are punishments for intellectual honesty.  I don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuck if intellectual honesty makes someone annoying, unpopular, or "uncomfortable" for others to be around.  (Why can't these others fucking deal with it?  What the fuck is their problem?  [Note: this is not to say that other factors besides intellectual honesty can make someone annoying, unpopular, etc.  But that's not the issue here.  All too many people don't value intellectual honesty or intellectualism very highly, and they are annoyed or made uncomfortable in its presence, and that's a problem with them.])  Intellectual honesty is the one paramount value I embrace, and intellectual dishonesty (among the kinds of which is intellectual laziness) the one thing that really grinds my gears; it is the #1 cause of the world's avoidable problems.

What the fuck, is the idea of a free and fair marketplace of ideas utopian, or something?

Do I even need to ask what sages like Socrates (who was sentenced to death for being honest/"annoying", for godsakes...), Plato, Aristotle, et al, were they revived to speak authoritatively today, would say in response to such questions?

What a fucking joke.

[Addendum: Is social media structurally dishonest?  Consider: "likes" are what drive social media, but "likes" entail a popularity contest, not the encouragement of honesty and truth.  Of course social media is structurally dishonest, and that's the #1 cause of why social media is such a widely reviled toxic shitshow.  The old discussion formats - listservs, Usenet - didn't have this problem.  Fuckerberg, Dorsey, Huffman and the other war-profiteers of "likes" can stuff it.]

[Addendum #2 (3/11/2020): Leiter quotes Kathleen Stock on twitter: "The problem with academic feminist philosophy is that it’s run like a fiefdom, not like a normal open philosophical discussion. There are things you are just not allowed to say, and people you are not allowed to offend. Quality suffers, and to [the] rest of [the] world, it shows."  (Fucking twitter and its cognition-diminishing character limits, huh?)  Now, just replace "academic feminist philosophy" with "academia today," and definitely keep the "to the rest of the world" part, and you might see just what a fucking joke this all is.  This is sickness, folks.]

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.]

Intellectual bankruptcy and climate change

Some blog-context: How is a layperson to assess climate change? and Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps) and the intellectual bankruptcy tag

My original idea for this post's title was something along the lines of, "Willfully blind climate change deniers," or perhaps even "Willfully blind climate change denying motherfuckers," either of which followed by an introduction of the following image with something like, "For instance, this motherfucker right here":

But I'm gonna try my best to write this without a bunch of expletives - I've been told it puts off potential readers, as though they couldn't handle expletives, or they look for whatever piss-poor excuse not to read well-argued points, or whatever, I just about don't gaf at this point; the fact that the intellectually-bankrupt twitter gets tons of attention while philosophy blogs in general (irrespective of expletive-to-reasoning ratios) do not, speaks plenty of volumes already (about the intellectual bankruptcy about which I will be speaking here).

I'm gonna try to write this without expletives even though the topic of intellectual bankruptcy generally makes me hopping mad.  And I use the image of the current President because the very fact that he ever became president is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy.  The Framers of the country weren't intellectually bankrupt, but their legacy has been squandered.  If the country weren't so intellectually bankrupt (and as a dialectician/context-keeper one has to imagine the not just the implications of this conditional but also the presuppositions, which I'll get to as well), we'd have had good enough elected leaders (actual leaders, not the fake kind) that no one would feel the need to turn to a Donald Trump in desperation.

Despite a recent about-face (of the Trump kind, which we have every reason to discount), Trump has a long, exhaustively documented history of intellectually-reckless climate change denial.

The number of man-hours of time and attention wasted on shit garbage like "it's cold here in January, so much for climate change" is probably so off-the-charts as to disgust any decent person.  (Meanwhile, it's summertime in the southern hemisphere/Australia.)

Or how about: "the climate has always been changing, how is this any different?"  Just about as low as it gets by any respectable standards of belief-formation.

Anyone with belief-formation processes so screwed-up as to produce the gobs of Trumpian climate-denial tweets, cannot be trusted to form any credible beliefs (outside of their area of expertise, that is; I'm sure Trump had to have some pretty decent belief-formation processes when it comes to which real estate deal is worthwhile, although even there I "somehow" manage to have some doubt).

Here's a big, probably the biggest part of the problem: climate change being an unavoidably political subject, people from all over the political spectrum have every good reason to distrust the belief-formation processes of those they disagree with.  Political discussion is especially intellectually-bankrupt given that it involves decisions about how to coerce other people (irrespective of or against their considered independent judgment, etc.).  So naturally that's going to encourage a lot of bad-faith arguments for one's policy preferences (a nice euphemism for coercion).

One should probably expect about as much intellectual bankruptcy in a politics-related discussion as just about anything else, save perhaps for religion-related discussions where the canons of logic and evidence espoused by philosophers and/or scientists are routinely flouted.

(People tend to seek meaning in a silent universe, see - and that gives rise to an excrement-ton of wishful thinking.  You'd probably have to consult the philosophy of religion literature for the least-toxic treatments of the subject, and there you are likely to find a whole lot of uncertainty at best, a lot of maybe-not-successful attempts at conceptual clarification, a lot of speculation, etc.  In my personal context the most advanced treatment is the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, where my pretty-reliable ring-of-truth heuristics have told me that it ultimately most likely comes down to a matter of faith that a trio-omni god would create a world like this one containing an excrement-ton of morally-pointless animal suffering in addition to this or that facet of what is now being termed the human predicament [about which I'll have more to say in another post], all of which a trio-omni god would have sufficient reason for creating but which reasons are mysterious and inaccessible to us.  I thought the treatment of the problem of suffering in the Oxford Handbook was close to deplorable, BTW, particularly in its taking seriously the notion that human corruption would be a reason even for animal suffering.  But you should read it for yourself to see if I'm off-base.)

Getting back to the main problem: many people have good reasons to distrust the values and epistemic practices of a great many of their political (and/or religious) Others.

And the main cause for people having such good reasons is that all too few people habitually internalize the canons of reason and evidence espoused by philosophers and scientists.

I've written about all the deplorable practices (leading, not surprisingly, to a wide range of deplorable beliefs) of political leftists who squander whatever credibility they might have had on climate change and other issues with their approach to the subject of capitalism.  (If you want my hunch about this, it has basically to do with rationalization for envy of those with superior talents; when capitalism led to a ballooning both of population and of living standards across the board, what really ticked off the enemies of capitalism is that all the abundance wasn't "shared" more equally.  Nozick also offers pointers in the direction of a psychologically-based diagnosis of anticapitalist pathology.)  The worst offenders in this anticapitalism bunch would be the Rand-bashers, those who willfully refuse to have a fair dialogue about Rand's philosophy.  (See the excremental "scholarship" of Scumbag Duggan for the "state of the art" in this loser genre.)

So when you have rabidly, dishonestly anti-capitalist folks crying wolf about (how capitalism is causing) climate change, many others have abundant reason to discount or ignore their latest wolf-crying.  And as the crying-wolf fable shows, it's kind of a goddamn shame that the boy is ignored when a real wolf is around.

As for the Climate Change Issue, it's one I've followed as a layperson for close to 30 years now; it became something of considerable interest when Rush Limbaugh in his early books would say how it's, well, a hoax, along with the ozone hole (now not really an issue - once governments implemented policies opposed by Rush & Co.).  I still listen to Rush semi-frequently, and he's still pushing the it's-a-hoax line, mixed in (unfortunately and toxically) with other useful insights he has about the bias and corruption of the "drive-by media" to name a major example of what he actually does build his credibility profile upon.  (See, as one glaringly obvious instance of the bias/corruption, the context-erasing "fine people on both sides" hoax that CNN et al peddled to its audience and for which CNN has refused to demonstrate any accountability.  Or how about the New York Times' ill-fated 1619 Project.  Or how these peddlers of fake news twisted Trump's criticism of fake news into a criticism of a free press. And people are now supposed to trust these media sources when it comes to climate change or anything else?)

(Also, Rush has built what credibility he has upon his championing of the American (and capitalist) values such as "rugged individualism," family values, limited government, etc., that the left, with its march through the institutions, is making every effort to pervert or destroy.  As with pretty much anything political, media figures such as Rush get a lot more mileage out of the values they espouse than about what factual or scientific claims they make.)

The left is selective about which experts to consult on which topics.  Like clockwork they'll cite the "97 percent of climate scientists agree" line, but then (also like clockwork) when it comes to minimum wages or rent control they ignore or discount the expert reasoning of economists, also often along with smears of free-market advocates along values-lines.  (If a libertarian says that it really isn't the business of the state to coerce people in their economic decisions, or that there is a principle of subsidiarity that directs people toward non-state remedies to social ills before turning to the force-wielding state only as a very last resort, the left translates that as being heartless, sociopathic - probably an admirer of Ayn Rand's fictional heroes.)

Now, as I've said, I've followed the climate-change issue as much as a layperson could, for nearly 3 decades, or pretty much the time that it's been a big political topic.  And I've heard every which argumentative fallacy coming from what for simplicity's sake I'll term the Right.  (After hearing Rush and consulting 'Conservative Book Club'-type recommended books on climate change and ozone depletion, it wasn't long before I figured out that unless I were to make these subjects a full-time study requiring PhD-level learning in the relevant science(s), this stuff was going to be well above my pay grade.  Cue STEM-lord chest-beating....)  For a great long while the main tactic of the political Right was to be "skeptical" about the climate prediction models.  Another tactic, after time went on, was to highlight the overreaching and alarmism of those who were saying that the polar ice caps could melt by the year 2000.  Another tactic was to be "skeptical" that humans are the primary contributors to present-day climate change.  ("The climate's always been changing....")  Then the tactic was to say that it wasn't warming as much as the 'scientific consensus' (really, a range of opinion widely accepted by the experts) was saying.  Then there was the so-called warming pause that lasted for all of maybe 2 decades (but which had a precedent some half a century earlier, amid an overall warming trend).  Then the tactic was the smear the "hockey stick" authors in what was termed the Climategate controversy.

The worst of this bunch of right-wingers might be the religious fundamentalists who deny that the tri-omni god would facilitate humans making the planet uninhabitable.  (They also have a cognitive bias about a wished-for afterlife, or even an End of Days, that would lead them to discount the importance of planet habitability.)  There is also an unequivocally terrible epistemic practice on the Right when it comes to the science of evolution, to the extent that some 2 out of 5 rightists will affirm that humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.  (Actually, it's roughly 2 in 5 Americans.  The numbers on the Right/GOP are even worse.)  The politicians of the Right enable and coddle this blatant epistemic malpractice, sometimes by directly engaging in it themselves.

So the way I'd put it is that there are plenty of huge trust and credibility deficits in politics to go around.  After all the lies and smears promoted by those on the left, why should those on the right believe them when it comes to climate change?  And after the lies and smears peddled by the Right (an obvious recent one being Obama-birtherism - also peddled by one Donald Trump in the early 2010s), what reason do leftists have for believing them on climate change or anything else?

I've already pointed out the solution to this whole trust-problem, which is philosophical education (i.e., education in the canons of logic and evidence traditionally espoused by philosophers, particularly standards of dialectic exemplified by the likes of the Rapoport/Dennett Rules, ffs already).  It doesn't mean the leftist take on doing philosophy, such as smearing Rand by claiming she's not taken seriously by the community of philosophers.  (The relevant criterion here would be what those who are actually experts in Rand's thought have to contribute to the philosophical discussion going forward, seeing as how Rand isn't around to speak for herself.  Anyway, the case of Hospers just on its own gives lie to the standard leftist smear, even before we take a look at the philosophy professors involved with the Ayn Rand Society.)  It doesn't mean a toxic take on philosophy and science that is widespread on the Right, which is to discount academics and experts in these fields.  (I do share their opinion when it comes to the systemic/structural dishonesty of the academic left, but it's a mistake to regard that crowd of losers as defining the academy as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against] - just as it is a mistake to regard the epistemic criminals of the Right as defining the Right as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against].)

Is it possible for the public comprised mostly of laypersons to gave a serious, honest, informed, high-signal-to-noise-ratio discussion of climate change?  Perhaps it is - it would be greatly enhanced by the aforementioned suggested program of philosophical education (along with minimal scientific, historical and economic literacy) - but here's something that might really (ahem) light a fire under everyone's asses as it hits home more and more:

The concern, of course, is that the point at which these infernos hit closer and closer to more and more people's homes, it will be too late to do anything about it.  (If there's anything in your episteme that suggests that the billions of animals perishing horribly in these infernos is Divine Providence, chances are you are a culpable contributor to the problem.)  As the ignored-by-Trump-&-Co. scientists have been saying, some amount of future climate change is already locked in by the rising atmospheric CO2 levels, so chances are the infernos will get worse before we find any ways to make it better.  (And that warming pause that the deniers were touting?  The scientists have an explanation for that: the oceans as heat sinks - and the oceans can only absorb so much, and even if they do, the effects on ocean life are probably not good.)  Just how patient shall we be about AI and/or alternative energy sources for mitigating this problem?

A lot (but far from all) of the disagreements about climate change and other issues is attributable to human fallibility and uncertainty.  See for instance the comments section of that "Trump about-face" link at the top of this post.  (Here it is again.)  Aside from the standard deplorable and gutter-level stuff you might expect to find in a typical politically-charged comments section, you have "advocates" and "skeptics" alike pointing to sites with domain names like realclimatescience.org and realclimatechangescience.org, domain names which are of no use when they take opposite positions on the topic, whatever abundance of links and data appear at either.  Again, how is a layperson to sift through all that, to be able to distinguish the real science from the junk?  So many people on both sides are not only not equipped to deal with the subjects at the pay-grade level required, but they come to the discussion with their usual left- or right- biases that have them treating their own experts as definitive and the opposing ones as discount-able.

One of the few things an epistemically virtuous layperson can do, is to look at metadata about the state of the discussion or debate.  I take it that there is real debate among real experts about climate change, but that this debate bears little if any resemblance to the public/political "debates" (represented by the now-twice-linked comment thread, the basic form of which you probably have seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, so you may not really need the refresher since there really isn't anything to learn or observe in the comment thread other than about human cognitive behavior/biases).  From my experience, your typical leftist uses shitty lousy argumentation tactics because the ideas/positions they're defending are typically lousy, but that may not be an infallible heuristic.  (There are plenty of folks offering lousy arguments for libertarianism, capitalism, Objectivism/Randism, all of which I take seriously.  [Are there lousy arguments for a basically Aristotelian episteme or dialectic?  I'm not used to seeing such things, and not even clear on what they would look like.  The first thing that pops to mind is arguments by Thomists employing - well, probably abusing - Aristotelian concepts to rationalize dubious sexuality-related positions in Christianity.  Tossing off is contrary to your telos, you see.])

[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters.  In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist).  I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell.  (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before.  This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty.  It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.)  So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters).  This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests....  I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]

"The climate's always been changing" is either a mechanism for shutting down honest inquiry in someone's mind, or a good-faith invitation in someone's mind to inquire into how it might be different this time.  (While you can't rule out the latter, usually it's the former.  After all, any reputable climate scientist already accepts that the climate's always been changing, so that can't be what's in contention.  The rate of change is actually relevant.)  That the warming theory adopted by the IPCC is probably the best explanation for a vast web of data should probably be taken by a layperson as the default position departures from which require a really good argument that takes into account all the data (i.e., not evading the whole of the context) as well any actual and anticipated objections/counter-arguments.

As I pointed out in my Jan. '19 blog post ("How is a layperson..."), it would really be nice if there were a highly-publicized debate between (say) Michael Mann and (say) Richard Lindzen, for the benefit of laypeople and policymakers.  Why hasn't this happened?  If the debate on its merits really is over - if the IPCC report is pretty much the most definitive context-keeping picture we have right now of the climate situation - then how hard could it possibly be to get the uncoerced agreement of advocates and "skeptics" alike?  While I've personally experienced on many occasions dishonest leftists closing off the possibility of fair debate about Rand or capitalism, how pray tell does this dynamic play out when it comes to climate discussions, exactly?  The Right/"skeptics" accuse the Left/warmers of using various tactics to shut down debate, but my ring-of-truth heuristics tell me that this doesn't ring true about the climate debate because the central claims being made aren't made by those in the social sciences and humanities - people who can be expected to be promoting a political agenda - but by those in the STEM disciplines (which are then seized upon and amplified by the leftists in their usual dishonest ways in order to promote the anti-capitalism policy framework/mentality they were dishonestly promoting already).  Fine, don't pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore - he's a messenger one might have any number of reasons to shoot - but how about a Michael Mann?  Is there something the "skeptics" have to employ against him other than dishonest/ context-disregarding smears?

So, to wrap up:  Yawning trust deficits.  Intellectual bankruptcy.  Philosophical literacy.

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

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

The data are all there at ourworldindata.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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