Poor Sully (poor America!)

[Okay, so America isn't quite as poor as Sully's place in the current discourse would indicate.  But if that status quo were to continue, with the likes of Sully giving away the case for what made America great, we might well end up in deep poop.]

So I was doing an Ayn Rand search in the "Blogs" tab of Google search, and this link by Sully appears, which references Boston U. Professor of Political Science Alan Wolfe's piece-of-shit article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education last year (which I briefly touch upon here).

(Just for once, will there ever be an interwebbed critical article on Rand by a professor of philosophy, conversant with the other side?  There is critical discussion by Swanton and Cullyer in that recent book on Rand's ethics and in the brand-new book by James P. Sterba, long-time proponent of a "from liberty to welfare" argument which I've somehow managed not to address in this blog - yet.  From the available Amazon.com "preview" feature, Sterba correctly identifies Rand's ethics as a version of Aristotelianism [Chapter 5] - now that's progress! - and given all the pages left out of the Amazon preview feature I can't yet adequately assess his arguments there regarding Rand or much of anything else.  Anyway, the Ayn Rand being discussed by these philosophical critics in these hard-copy books bears next to no resemblance to the "Ayn Rand" that Sully and many other fools on the interwebs speak of.  Okay, okay, so there are webbed articles criticizing Rand available here, including from Profs. Bass, Huemer, and Vallicella, which partly answers my question . . . and guess what, that Rand bears hardly any resemblance to the incompetently-depicted Rand appearing all over elsewhere on the interwebs, either.  There are other relevant distinctions pertaining to these articles to make as well, for another blog entry; one of them has to do with whether Randian egoism is indeed correctly interpreted as a version of Aristotelianism - i.e., of perfectivism. ;-) )

Anyway, this blog entry isn't (directly) about Rand, it's about the sad state of the political blogosphere as reflected by arguably its most representative figure, Andrew Sullivan.  (For the positive, the antidote to this sad state, try here for starters.)  The aforementioned Google search brought be to Sullivan's "Dish" (which I hardly read otherwise).

Speaking of sad states, how about The Dish's masthead, taking  pride (however ironically or humorously) in being "biased and balanced"?  The whole idea among philosophers, of course, is to fight like hell against any biasing influences - hence the whole goddamn enterprise of philosophy, to weed out bullshit and fallacies and wishful thinking and inexactness, so as to differentiate mere opinion from knowledge.  (The success of that very enterprise - reflected most smashingly by the success of modern science - gives lie to whatever thrust there might have been behind Plantinga's "evolutionary argument against naturalism," discussed here.  We can reason past initial biases which were selected for survival value, and that's all there is to it.  Also, how does Plantinga's free will theodicy account for the suffering of non-human animals?  Is their undeserved and morally-pointless suffering justified by the "greater good" of human freedom?  Is God a utilitarian?  Have I misunderstood the argument?  Have I seen anything by Plantinga to be all that impressed by?  Does the notion of a maximally excellent or perfect being, which is at the root of his modal-ontological argument, make any more sense than Anselm's original notion?  And why is it that, seemingly, the best philosophy of religion nowadays is associated with panentheism, of which Plantinga is not a known proponent?  How did I get off on this tangent?  Oh.  Bias.  It's like Sully takes pride in being a fool.)

So, Sully's "latest keepers" include these items:

Where Have You Gone,
Barack Obama?

Um, Sully is about five years late to asking this question.  Glenn Greenwald - one of the major redeeming figures of the blogosphere - asked this question at the time that Obama voted on the 2008 FISA bill to grant retroactive immunity to telecoms complicit in illegal eavesdropping.  One might well rationalize that breach of integrity as a necessary maneuver to secure establishment support so that the charismatic and very-ambitious ("Yes we can!") future head of state could then reform the establishment from within.  (Was it naivete to buy into that, or was it a last gasp of idealism in an age of cynicism?  Keep in mind that the only reason this asshole got re-elected was because the opposition party is half-nuts, the only viable candidate it offered being an out-of-touch, no-ideals-having, culturally-reactionary, personally-boring, retroactively-retiring plutocrat.)  Even then, the signs of unraveling were already there - as Greenwald was pointing out - in the presidential transition season between Nov. 2008 and Jan. 2009 when the future head of state brought onto his team scores of members of the very cynical, hypocritical establishment he had (fraudulently) rhetoricized against.  It was then that lingering sentiments of idealism about this future "leader" should have been seriously called into question or abandoned outright.  This "leader" is never going to do anything to seriously address the coming $107 trillion Social Security and Medicare cluster-fuck, is he.  None of the "leaders" in the District of Cynicism wants to even mention it.

The story of this "leader's" initial appeal - his stated vision in 2008 - and of his cowardly betrayal of that vision is told in summary essence in this NPR interview with Harvard Law (the irony!) professor Lawrence Lessig.

Sully pleads:
"Come back, Mr Obama. The nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak (and 72 games out of 73) and hit 361 career home runs with a homer-killing deep left field in Yankee stadium, along with three prime ballplaying years away for military service.  What's-his-face was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing, and then later killed U.S. citizens with no judicial oversight.  What the fuck is the comparison supposed to be here?  I mean, Joe D. wasn't the hitter that Ted Williams was, and neither does the current head of state merit mention in the same breath as the guys depicted on Mt. Rushmore, but c'mon.  Joe D.'s highest similarity score through age 27 was Hank Aaron, for crying out loud.  Who tops the current hypocrite-in-chief's similarity score chart?  I'll let you, the reader, guess who the Babe Ruth of American presidents was.  Babe Ruth was on his way to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher, keep in mind, before going on to slug .690 lifetime.

Hitch And Sully: Is Religion Fossilized Philosophy?

There are various gems from Sully in that exchange; a sampling:

A: But the kind of Christianity that Jefferson espoused—

---
A: No, because philosophy doesn’t help you live.

---
A: Religion is the practical impulse, it is how do we live, how do we get through the day knowing that we could die tomorrow, knowing that we are mortally—

H: But how does the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin help you to do that?

A: That particular belief may not.

Sully, of course, has no idea just how embarrassing his performance in that debate really is.

Your New Dish

Oh.  Enhancing the blog in the cosmetic dept., not in the dept. it needs real enhancing ("philosophy doesn't help you live" - this sonofabitch taught at Harvard for Prof. Sandel????).  Gee, thanks.

For insight and edification on the nature of today's political-cultural scene, read Greenwald and the other blogs listed in the column to your right, instead.

"Checkmate, asshole."

Establishment Philosophy vs. individualism

An exercise in the spiral:

If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics).  This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals.  My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.

I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?

There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).

What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.

I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.

Do you?

As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way.  One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one.  I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it.  Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders.  The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.

All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation.  As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.

Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?

It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.

It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article.  That's just a fact.  While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process.  (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected.  That's just a fact.)

Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum".  Just a hunch.

Am I wrong?

(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel?  Is it supposed to feel that way?  Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too?  Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand?  A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either.  These aren't worthy fucking adversaries.  [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005).  Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])

P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit.  That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else.  (See item #9 here.)  One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't.  Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace.  Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process.  The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress.  Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection.  Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that?  [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same.  Maybe that's why?]  He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers.  Fuck 'em!)

P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby!  Woo!!!

The Jerkoff-in-Chief

(and his intellectual enablers)

The stated policy of the current President on "marijuana" (cannabis) legalization can be found here.  If you want an Official Government line that uses every lawyerly (actually, outright dishonest) weasel-worded tactic available to justify the unjustifiable, it can be found there.  (The Catch-22 type of argumentation is the best part! :-)  At this point in history, a point-by-point refutation of this garbage would be kind of pointless seeing as nobody outside the beltway with a lick of common sense buys into this horseshit - certainly not as sufficient grounds to deny consenting adults their nature/God-given rights to toke up seeing as it's they as individuals (and certainly not the fuckers in D.C.) who are in the best position to decide for themselves whether cannabis use is for them.  See?  Common sense.  (The point-by-point refutations have already been done hundreds if not thousands of times already, so I won't waste my precious time reiterating them all when it's the reader's responsibility to be aware of the myriad refutations available by now.)  The President's point-by-point excuse for justifying a continued War on Weed flies right in the face of common sense by obfuscating the real issue, which is freedom, goddammit.

Now, what makes this even more infuriating is the current President's pathetic attempt to Please Everyone as usual.  (Worked out really nicely for his "look forward, not backward" approach to accountability for this government's acts of torture, hasn't it?  [Read: no accountability.])  This is his standard tactic of Leading from Behind because he doesn't have the nuts to take a clear stand at this time so that his positions and policies can be pummeled into the ground.  He has (apparently) adopted a "wait and see" approach to the new Washington and Colorado state laws aiming to end the insanity.  Well, that's only a Jerkoff move; is he going to enforce the "marijuana" policy stated on his website, or not?  Are we in some kind of postmodernist legal limbo, or what?  What the fuck is going on here, and what the fuck does the President/Jerkoff intend to do?  If he's got the nuts, why doesn't he stick to his federal enforcement powers in adherence to his oath of office, rather than send mixed signals like this?

This is a political maneuver in which the Jerkoff is trying to have it both A and not-A at the same time and in the same respect.  Legally, he's still within his ostensible constitutional authority to enforce the ridiculously insane federal drug laws.  (The term "ostensible" triggered in my mind an association with Orson Welles's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, where the court painter Titarelli (sp?) explains to Joseph K. in classic Trial fashion how an acquittal from the unknown charges leveled against him would make him only "ostensibly free," as he could come home only to be arrested and processed all over again.)  Politically, his game-playing - the result of which is that we don't really know at this time what policy he intends to enforce - has succeeded so far in distracting the public from his officially-stated policy.  Looks like a state of A-and-not-A jerkoff limbo to this here philosopher if there ever was such a thing; how about for you, reader?

What this President hasn't done, is to do the courageous thing, i.e., what a President Jefferson would have done, and that's to speak out clearly against the madness that is the drug war, and propose serious revisions if not downright legalization (for cannabis, at the very least).  That's what common sense and backbone would dictate.  Instead, we have a "leader" more in the mold of a Mr. Thompson, the Head of State in Atlas Shrugged: a pathological pragmatist engulfed in a "Heraclitean Flux" of Non-Principle.  The President pulled this same shit with his transparently dishonest "evolving views on same-sex marriage" shtick, when he could have nutted up like a real leader and stood up all along for what he knew to be right and just.  (Miss Rand's comment on the character of Mr. Thompson as described here is precious.)  Meanwhile, intellectually-deficient but influential pundits such as our fellow blogger Andrew Sullivan are reduced to groveling before the President, entreating him to "please not use your ostensibly-duly-established constitutional powers to interfere with States' Rights, and follow reason instead," or some such A-and-not-A excuse for an argument that hardly even merit the status of a fallback.  Do recall that this very same Andrew Sullivan said not more than two weeks ago that, quote, "the public has every right to legislate morals," unquote.  (That's why, apparently, he thinks cannabis policy is a matter for States' Rights rather than individual, Ninth-Amendment-style rights.)  Do keep in mind that the federal government's executive branch has the power to enforce laws enacted by Congress, to crack down on any and all pot whether it's legal under a given state's laws or not.  Is the federal government going to be treating citizens of the different states differently just because majorities in some states enacted legalization initiatives?  We just don't know right now.

Sullivan's weary and ineffectual last appeal for the President not to enforce the federal drug laws amounts to nothing more than, quote, "...if they [i.e., the current Administration] decide that opposing a near majority of Americans in continuing to prosecute the drug war on marijuana, even when the core of their own supporters want an end to Prohibition, and even when that Prohibition makes no sense ... then we will give them hell."  Say what?  You mean, the American people aren't giving them hell already?  What makes anyone think that continuing the status quo at the federal level will change anything?  Then again, maybe it would be some sort of last straw for the People.  How do we know at this point?

You begin to see the problem when objectivity and identity are replaced in the public discourse by ambiguity, obfuscation, limbo, flux and short, non-integrative attention spans.  Where are the Professional Philosophers in all this?  Why is the task of pleading before the President in the mainstream media left to some intellectually-muddled blogger who gives away the case in the very act of presenting it?

Had enough yet?  I haven't.  (This is Philosophical Boot Camp and I'm the senior drill instructor; we haven't had enough until I say we've had enough.)  In his groveling appeal to the President, Sullivan writes that "the federal War on Marijuana is racist in its enforcement."  Certainly it is de facto and substantively if not procedurally racist in its enforcement, one of the eminently sensible reasons to end this War.  One might think that this President would be responsive to this, or that he should be given his race.  (Meanwhile, Sullivan quotes another author, Pete Guither, who makes the sensible matter-of-fact observation that the President appears to have floated a "blatant political trial balloon using the New York Times."  See?  Leadership.)  Anyway, that the Drug War is de facto racist is one of the several matters of fact that Sullivan gets right, and proud we are of all of him for that, but in missing the real point and target, he essentially gives away the case to the goddamned statists.  To wit:

Let's have this debate openly and honestly. Let the government prove that marijuana is as dangerous as heroin and should be treated as such. The very process will reveal the anachronism of the provision itself and the racial and cultural panic that created it. The very discussion will point to an inevitable, scientific conclusion that the current federal policy is based on nothing. 

So do nothing, Mr president, with respect to these states and their legitimate decisions. Set the DEA's priorities so that this trivial, medically useful, pleasure is not in any way a priority for law enforcement. Let the states figure this out, as they are on marriage equality. 

Lead from behind. An entire generation is ahead of you.

Yes, the mainstream national discourse has fallen just this low, given oh-so-much intellectual bankruptcy as its background context.  (Isn't this what Miss Rand would say about the present situation were she around now?  Something tells me that were she around now and commanding national attention as she did in her prime, things would be getting shaken up a lot more.  So I can only do my best to emulate her style of cultural and political commentary in my own unique way.)  We have Andrew Sullivan, the nation's leading political blogger, asking the President to "lead from behind" and "do nothing" even though the White House's official statement of drug policy indicates that it doesn't accept that "doing nothing" is the right thing to be doing.  (To reiterate: we're getting mixed signals on this from the White House and its political trial balloons.)  In addition, Sullivan didn't waste an opportunity to leave the matter of marriage equality up to the states rather than up to sound interpretation of the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.

With "friends of freedom" like this, who needs enemies?  If this is the best critical voice out there in Mainstream Public Opinion today, this President needn't worry about truly serious challenges to his doings.  (Actually, the best critical voices in that context would be Greenwald and Chomsky, but as long as the Public remains largely ignorant of what these two are saying, the President still needn't worry.  My point is, even if/though the public isn't largely ignorant of Sullivan, the President needn't have much to worry about in the way of intellectually serious and credible opposition.  After all, the public has "every right" to legislate morals 'n' all that, and decent and intelligent Catholics and others can find only "puerile cruelty" in the works of Ayn Rand.  The President himself, in typically un-Jefferson-like, philosophically-vacant fashion, doesn't understand jackshit about Rand, either, so the circle of ignorance [EDIT: or, how about . . . epistemic closure?  Booyah, score one for the UP!] is complete.)  And as long as the public remains largely ignorant of philosophy - thanks in part to the failure of the Professional Philosophers to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge - we will continue to get lousy, non-identity, Orwellian "leadership" like this.

This feels like shooting fish in a barrel, a task for which Perfectivism seems particularly well-suited, I'll point out.  (Praise due to Ayn Rand for establishing precedent in this area with her Objectivism.)  So you're welcome, or something.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

P.S. I've come to the realization that, his having put several decades of deeply-Rand-influenced thought into the subject, Leonard Peikoff is (in a just world) our current leading authority on the philosophy of history, his The DIM Hypothesis (2012) being the culmination of his investigations.  (Note that I say philosophy of history, not history of philosophy.  In the latter department, Peikoff suffers from many of the very same problems Rand had.  His latest statements about Kant in The DIM Hypothesis bear no resemblance to recent Kant scholarship, such as Korsgaard's.  You might as well have jerkoff academic "philosophy" bloggers commenting on Ayn Rand in complete obliviousness to, say, Peikoff's interpretive work, and get precisely the same embarrassing effect.  You have to have the analytical skills - as Aristotle did - to separate out the wheat from the chaff in Peikoff and Rand's expositions, or you're going to fail miserably at getting their essential core message, something about focus vs. evasion and the role of the mind in human existence [EDIT: and the vital importance of mental integration], I believe.)  Few people alive are as keenly aware as Peikoff is, of the central role of integration (or lack thereof, or misapplication thereof) in the course of human life and history.  His latest work requires serious attention from philosophers of history, if any (besides Peikoff and those on his wavelength) are even around today.  I mean, if I were asked where serious philosophy of history is being done these days, the only name that pops into mind is Peikoff's - and there's no good reason to think anyone has put in nearly the kind and level of analysis that he has put in over some 60 years of thought and study, half of them under the tutelage of a fucking grandmaster of integration.  The Professional Philosophers ignore Peikoff's work in this area (as well as his two books on Objectivism now in publication) at their own peril.  Arguably, they've done so for so long as it is that a Point of No Return has been passed, probably in the last decade or so.  They can ignore the well-researched Rand scholarship for only so long before their intellectual credibility begins swirling around toward the bottom of the shitter.  Tara Smith's 2006 book was the final litmus test of what these so-called philosophers are really made of, and of whether they could make themselves useful to the public discourse for a change; many of them failed that test miserably.  So fuck 'em.  Let their departmental funding get cut and market principles encroach further into their insulated bubble of security, and let them whine incessantly about capitalism in their blogs.  The whiners had their final opportunity in 2006 to close the massive gap between themselves and the Real World (where Ayn Rand matters - a lot), and they blew it big-time; the more ignoble bastards among them have resorted instead to vicious, savage, smears pertaining to Rand's youthful (and irrelevant, and not-admiring) comments about a serial killer, and other such intellectually-reckless or negligent tactics for which their pathological groupie-colleague-enablers hold them not at all accountable.  To see these fucks get their comeuppance - it's not a matter of if, but when - will be a particular pleasure of mine to behold.  So the current situation is that we have this national discourse where Rand looms as a major presence and influence on people's ideas, and instead of participating in that national dialogue on a level field of play the Professional Philosophers gratuitously dropped the ball and retreated ever-further into their Ivory Towers.  ("Cowards!  Weaklings!  Bums!")  So, again, until they get their act together: Fuck 'em.  In the meantime, I'll be reading DIM, and integrating, of course.

P.P.S. Sign of a/the verbal river of gold to come?  Merry Fucking Christmas. :-)

Sullivan (and broken culture) again

[For some context, the last blog entry about Sullivan is here.  One could alternately refer to this here blog entry as Exhibit B.]

So, the subject of Justice (sic) Scalia's very recent bout of imbecility regarding gay rights came up on Andrew Sullivan's 'The Dish.'  Here's Sullivan's substantive take on the issue:

So lets challenge Scalia on "legislating morals". The public has every right to legislate morals but not to do so arbitrarily to punish and stigmatize a minority for doing the exact same things that the majority does all the time, i.e., sodomy. If the court has already determined that mass murderers have an inviolable right to marry, how is allowing gay people to marry somehow a sign of moral decline? If the court has already made non-procreative sex constitutionally protected for straight people, how is it that the very same thing, condemned for the very same reasons by Scalia's and my own hierarchy, is obviously immoral when it comes to homosexuals? 

It's that discrepancy that suggests that this argument is not about legislating morals, as Scalia insists. It is about legislating them unequally, and treating a tiny minority differently for no rational reason. This issue has been settled, as Scalia himself declared in his dissent in Lawrence vs Texas. He rightly said there that that decision essentially made gay marriage a constitutional inevitability. He was right. And he should uphold that precedent in these cases, if it comes to that. Or is he going to contradict himself?

Got all that?  Just in case you didn't:

He starts with, "So lets challenge Scalia on "legislating morals"."  Great!  After all, the whole notion of government "legislating morals" is so fucking offensive to genuine-liberal sensibilities that Scalia should be toast.  But wait!  Instead, Sullivan says:

The public has every right to legislate morals but not to do so arbitrarily to punish and stigmatize a minority for doing the exact same things that the majority does all the time, i.e., sodomy.

Is this what Jefferson had in mind when authoring the Declaration of Independence?  Is this what Thomas Paine had in mind when writing The Rights of Man?  Where does a supposed right of the public to do this-and-that come from?  Does "the public" have rights, or is it only individuals that have them?  If the public has rights, can they not be only the rights delegated to it by individuals?  That's the whole idea of civil government in Lockean-liberal terms: the individuals give up to the government rights of enforcement of the Law of Nature, in exchange for a much more effective, just, and stable system of securing and protecting their rights.  This is a goddamned no-brainer if you just read the opening part of the Declaration.

What is the just exchange of rights and responsibilities, benefits and burdens, involved when "the public" decides to punish a victimless crime?  The peaceful people doing their private consensual things give up their freedom to do so in exchange for . . . what?  Jack shit, that's what.

Let's call "legislating morals" that do not serve the end of protecting individual rights what it is: violations of individual rights by a majority that has no fucking business whatsoever interfering with victimless activity.  This whole notion of "legislating morals" is a "conservative" (read: right-wing) fantasy that may have held sway back in the day, but it's neanderthalism at this point in history.

And to be clear even further: "Legislating morals" and "protecting rights" cannot - in a rational system of government based on individual rights - be mashed together such that when government punishes a murderer, it is "legislating morals."  Only imbeciles - Justice (sic!) Scalia, for example - would run them together like that.  (See, once again, Spooner.)  (Here's Spooner again.)  (Lysander Spooner, "Vices are not Crimes.")

Spooner already refuted this bullshit well over a century ago.  Why "the morals-legislating public" isn't intimately familiar with this essay is a very good question.  I'll provide some hints to an answer in just a moment.

(In case you missed it: Spooner.)

(And there's no good argument that homosexual sodomy per se is even a vice!  Double imbecility from Scalia!  You know what is a vice, a deficiency, in an objective, Aristotelian/perfectivist code of ethics?  Willful imbecility on the part of those who should goddamn well know better.  Plato wrote The Republic, after all, with the idea in mind that imbeciles shouldn't be in positions of political power.  Remember the Athenians' "right to legislate morality" by sentencing Socrates to death?  Q.E.D., motherfuckers.)

To continue: What Sullivan turns this into is a case for "legislating morals" but not to do so "arbitrarily" and "unequally."  So it comes down to a Fourteenth Amendment issue, which is the primary basis (under present, corrupted jurisprudence) on which to strike down sodomy laws as unconstitutional.  How exactly does one distinguish between equal protection and equal rights-violation given this framing of things, praytell?  (Anyone else think of this question before I did?  Of course, it came to me at mind at the very first but I just forgot to ask or mention it in first drafit; hadn't yet perfected this subject in my mind till now.  [UP asks: how exactly do you figure out what "now" this is referring to?  Did you think of the question for yourself before, or after, seeing UP ask it above?  If it's "before," you're in a small minority of intellectually-well-informed people who happened upon this blog "early," making you well ahead of the rest of internet users and the "general public" in a very significant sense.  What results this fact will have, sociologically speaking, I guess I have to predict via my understanding of praxeology, memetics, moral theory, and so forth, to come to some overhelmingly amazing conclusion I haven't reached yet?  Whoa. :-D  So, what is "now" in UP's context?  In yours?  In the minds of those you love?  An exercise not just for present readers but for all of us, it appears....] serious and pensive Sagan face.)

Sullivan is correct that Scalia was not such an imbecile as to fail to recognize that striking down laws against sodomy would pave the way for marriage equality.  (He was an imbecile for being concerned about striking down sodomy laws on that basis, hence his morally obscene dissent in Lawrence.)  But all this misses the point, given Spooner.

As I pointed out in my previous blog entry, all of this intellectual and jurisprudential corruption can be circumvented by appeal to the Ninth Amendment, that is, to natural law, or to what Paine termed common sense.  If we want to be "originalists" (as Scalia supposedly is) in our interpretation of the Constitution, which involves reference to the intent of the Framers, then what other intent is there behind the Ninth Amendment than just what Jefferson and Paine referred to as The Rights of Man?  We can prattle on all we like about the intent of the more statist Framers - like those, for instance, who never intended for African-American slaves to have rights - but that doesn't do a fucking thing to negate the meaning and intent of the Ninth Amendment (which could also have been invoked to strike down slavery as unconstitutional, under a rational jurisprudence).

Well, I've gone on at some length already here, and the gist of the matter is plenty clear.  Having once been an avid reader of Sullivan's 'Dish', I'm disgusted by him these days.  I don't know if his brand of so-called conservatism inspired by Hayek and Oakeshott is undermined by the 'British' way of approaching governance post-Locke (see: J.S. Mill and utilitarianism) with which he was bombarded as a youth in the UK, but it isn't what American originalists like Jefferson and Paine - and, later, Spooner, and later still, Rand, Rothbard and Nozick - had in mind.  (There is also the matter of Sullivan's "dialectical" sensibility in trying to carve out some territory of reconciliation between different factions in today's politics, to reach some ostensibly reasonable and practical common ground of overlapping consensus; the primary problem here is the underlying corruption of the whole discourse as such today, which Sullivan does not address at its core [a matter for the discipline of philosophy to address].  A better term for Sullivan's "dialectical" sensibility here is pragmatism, with all the baggage that carries.)  But more disgusting still is what is revealed by this paragraph of Sullivan's article:

But the exchange also brought back something in my own past. Well over a decade ago (I can't remember when), one of the professors I taught students for at Harvard, Michael Sandel, invited me to debate my former dissertation adviser, Harvey C Mansfield, on marriage equality. It was for Sandel's legendarily popular course, "Justice". The fact that Harvey and I both agreed to do it and debated with civility and mutual respect (I revere Harvey as a scholar and as a human being) was, for me, somewhat moving, if also a little personally awkward.

Cutting to the chase: what the fuck is going on at Harvard that someone who teaches for Prof. Sandel doesn't understand the principles of rights underlying the Declaration of Independence?  Moreover, how the fuck does it happen that a former teacher of students at Harvard can so ignorantly blast Ayn Rand in the most extreme of terms?  (For that matter, what the fuck is going on in academia generally that a leading academic "philosophy" blogger does the same thing?)  Is it any surprise that Harvard is turning out so many statists along with so many morally and aesthetically vacuous Wall Street financiers and intellectually vacuous politicians (see: 2012 presidential election)?  Just what the fuck does a credential from Harvard signify, anyway?  Raw smarts can go only so far, after all, and Gates and Zuckerberg didn't need the credential to prove their economic worth.

This former teacher of students for Michael Sandel at Harvard concludes by quoting without comment the following from another author, one Paul Campos:

Scalia’s tactless fulminations are, at bottom, a reminder of why life tenure for Supremes is a bad idea, the badness of which increases in direct proportion to our average life expectancy. Put another way, someone who was in law school at a time when 96 percent of the public disapproved of interracial marriage should be considered too old to sit on the Supreme Court.

How is this asinine and irrelevant opinion worthy of so much as a quotation in the given context?

Something something Jefferson, Franklin and Paine appalled and aghast, etc.  Q.E.F.D.

These are not worthy fucking adversaries

https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+romney+not+taking+questions+from+media

So Romney has gone 22 days at a time without taking any questions from the press, and Obama has gone six weeks at a time without doing so.  They do not want to be caught in any "gotcha" moments.

This is not accountability or transparency.  This is a sham.

Fuck it, dude, let's write in Glenn Greenwald.

(Oh, snap.)

Now there's a worthy fucking adversary.

I'm pretty Saganized at the moment. :-D

UPDATE: I've heard that the Romney/Ryan ticket is too odious even for some serious long-time students of Objectivism (SLSOs) despite Ryan's professed support for Ayn Rand.  When you get some of those SLSOs migrating to even the "subjectivist, anarchist, and nihilist" Libertarian Party candidate (ze nihilists [not an ethos], zay vote for CHONSON!!!), you know what a joke this whole election is. The serious change can only come intellectually/culturally, as the SLSOs know quite well.  This time around, I'm at least as "apathetic" about a presidential election as I've been since Bush/Gore 2000.

UPDATE: Miguel Cabrera - HOF or no?  (Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron are the most similar through age 29!)

UPDATE: Bigger circle-jerk: FOX News or /r/politics?  The FOX pundits are all working themselves up into a lather in expectation of a Romney upset.  I guess it just makes them and their audience feel better to ignore the statistically-best projections?

The science of dumbing-down politics (even further)

Steven Hill writes:

Veteran reporter Howard Kurtz reported how the Obama campaign extensively pre-tested the president's speech last Thursday night using a ghastly-sounding technology known as "dial metre groups". Dial metre groups also were used to pre-test Obama's "State of the Union" speech last January. What is a dial metre group? It's a type of focus group where voters twist dials to register approval or disapproval of specific passages in a speech.

You can imagine where it goes from there.  (The rest of the op-ed explains, if you couldn't already guess it.)  The messages that today's politicians formulate toward voters are based on this most cynical of stimulus-and-response technologies; soulless, corporatist, philistine-oriented advertising strategy has taken over politics to extremes not possible given earlier technologies.  But what else would you expect?  There almost surely has to be parallels between the stimulus-and-response-crafted, super-unhealthy Standard American Diet and Lifestyle with the resulting obesity epidemic on the one hand, and the ever-falling quality of the American intellectual diet with its inevitable consequences on the other.  This is some dystopian shit right here.  The American public's ignorance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle's recommendations for citizen-education is (of course) devolving into a vicious cycle.  Hell, take the ancient Greeks out of it, and just look at the United States's own founding generation to get an idea of what the American McCitizenry have methodically become oblivious to.  Franklin and Jefferson are rolling in their graves; they would be absolutely fucking disgusted by that which is the leading cause of empire-decline, metastasizing throughout this land of ours.

(Jefferson was well-versed in many of the ancient Greeks, by the way.  He was, after all, President of the American Philosophical Society.  It's a tad unfortunate that he hadn't been familiar with Aristotle, though.)

There's no way to sugar-coat what's going on here; given what American politics is now, it is "politically incorrect" to name and face these damning facts.  Right now, average American citizens are unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit, built like Private Pyle, and headed directly into a world of shit.  They have not been given the proper motivation.  Dial meters only feed into their bad cognitive habits; it is the habits that need to be changed.  That is all for now.

Sheesh!

Cultural Death Watch

This week a number of high-budget, special-effects-intensive, probably-yet-another-Hollywood-remake shit sandwiches will be released. Or a great number of such have been released recently. Unless you are lucky enough to live in a large enough metropolitan area, however, you will not be seeing a movie named Moonrise Kingdom, just like you never saw a movie named The Tree of Life in theaters last year (since it was a direct-to-DVD release, even though it has Brad Pitt in the leading role FFS).

If you've paid a reasonable amount of attention to the American film scene in, oh, the past decade or so - in other words, if you are culturally literate enough to name more than a few movies made by, say, David Lynch - you'd recognize the name Wes Anderson, he of Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Along with such names as Lynch, Scorsese, Coen, Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson, he is one of the most important cinema auteurs in the English-speaking world today. His latest effort, however, is not slated to be seen by more than some fraction of Americans. This new movie has received pretty much zilch by way of domestic publicity; being too busy on a number of matters to pay close attention to the movie releases around this time of year, I only happened to hear about it on a classical music / NPR radio station that devoted a segment to the music used in this and other Wes Anderson films. A song by Nico was used in The Royal Tenenbaums, for example. Who besides the minimally culturally literate have so much as heard of Nico? And who the fuck listens to these kinds of stations, anyway? Certainly not the ones shelling out good money for yet another predictable/formulaic Will Smith vehicle, or yet another Spiderman remake, or yet another rendition of 28 Days Later under a new title.

A people cannot survive on shit sandwiches.

On a completely unrelated matter, how's that 2012 presidential circus freakshow campaign working out for you so far?