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Ayn Rand on Immanuel Kant: Part III
A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.
No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.
If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.
It’s True: Democrats Have Court-Packing on the Menu
News broke on Wednesday that Democrats have prepared bills for both the House and the Senate aimed at increasing the Supreme Court from the current nine justices to thirteen. Were this to pass and new justices to be added, the Supreme Court would cease to be a body that reflects the back and forth of elections, with presidents of one party or another getting the opportunity to add new justices as old ones leave. Instead, it would simply become an unelected quasi-legislative body that pretends every item on the leftist wish list is encompassed in a “living” Constitution.
The Intercept reports that, in the House, the legislators behind the bill are Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.). Just to give a sense of the IQ behind this trio, Johnson thinks islands, if their population becomes too great, can tip over. (And no, his retrofitted excuse did not remove the stain of that idiotic statement.) Nadler is the shriveled gnome who insisted that Antifa violence in Portland is a myth. (The myth just burned a federal building.) Jones is the generic new Democrat: Stanford and Harvard Law grad, black, gay, demanding Sen. Josh Hawley’s expulsion, refusing to work with Republicans, etc. (And no, his “elite” credentials do not impress me since the odor of affirmative action hangs heavily around him. He’s also graduated so recently that both of those institutions were focused more on indoctrination than education.)
In the Senate, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) supported the bill. Markey is to the left of left. In addition to sponsoring the Green New Deal that morphed into Biden’s fake “stimulus” plan, here are just some of the things he’s said: Thanksgiving is about “atrocities” against Native Americans; we should take all “weapons of war” from police; and Trump’s nominating Amy Coney Barrett, which was consistent with the Constitution and historic precedent, was “illegitimate.”
Court-packing is nothing but a raw power play. Currently, the Court commands a certain level of respect. The justices represent the kind of ideologically mixed bag one gets when alternating Republican and Democrat presidents have the opportunity to appoint new justices. Because the balance of power goes back and forth, the justices must have a working relationship. Famously, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were genuinely good friends.
This will all change if the Democrats do away with the filibuster and pack the Court. The four new justices will not have any hint of moderation about them. They will be hardcore leftists who may not even pretend to any respect for the Constitution. Currently, the activist justices consider the Constitution a “living” document that can be bent and stretched to meet their ends. With a packed Court, the justices could easily announce that it’s a dead document and conclude, ironically as a constitutional matter, that it’s no longer applicable to modern issues.
If the Democrats can pack the Court, they’ll also add Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as new states, which will create a permanent Democrat majority in Congress. Once that happens, this is how things will play out:
Democrats will pass wish-list bills. These might include formally and completely socializing medicine, granting amnesty and citizenship to all illegal aliens, and declaring the Republican Party an insurrectionist organization, with all current and past members subject to immediate arrest. Or perhaps the administration will announce that it will seize all privately held guns or that, in the future, China will have a place at the Joint Chiefs of Staff table.
Horrified citizens will sue. However, no matter how the lower courts decide the case, once they get to the Supreme Court, the packed Court will rubber-stamp all congressional and legislative acts. In other words, despite the fact that the justices are appointed, not elected, they will be a super-legislature. At first, these decisions will come dressed in constitutional garb. Soon, though, the justices will abandon that pretense.
At that point, America, as a constitutional democratic republic, will cease to exist. It’s that simple. We won’t even be a soft democratic socialist country like many in Europe. We will, instead, be a fascist dictatorship, led by a cabal of corporations and politicians.
And here’s the really scary thing: currently, the only thing stopping this from happening is the promise that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) made to refuse to go along with their fellow Democrats’ demand to do away with the filibuster. That’s because, even if the bill passes the House (and it presumably will), the filibuster means that it will take 60 senators to vote yes on court-packing, and that’s not going to happen. Without the filibuster, only 50 Senators, plus Kamala Harris, are required to destroy America.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. And for goodness’s sake, contact your representatives and politely but firmly tell them that the Court is perfectly constituted with nine members.
Andrea Widburg, American Thinker
America’s Government is Now the Enemy
Someone asked a good question: What does the Biden regime have in store for us, given its open intent to stack the Supreme Court with a left-wing majority, permanently?
It’s not hard to imagine. We’re not living in anything like the United States of America any longer. Living today is like living after World War II — had the Japanese and Nazis won. There would have been some going through the motions at first, on the pretense we still lived in a free society, as the way was cleared for a total dictatorship.
You have to stop referring to “the Biden administration” or “President Biden.” These people are dictators. It’s a regime. The people capable of the things they’re openly doing now are capable of far worse horrors — concentration camps, gulags, or whatever suits their whim for power. They are getting away with EVERYTHING with nobody other than hapless Republicans — most of them paid off traitors — to stop them.
I’m not trying to be negative. I’m simply giving you the truth. Find one shred of evidence to the contrary. EVERYTHING these dictators are seeking to do, they are doing. They are doing it unblinkingly and, so far, with no real opposition. Republicans talk about a “red wave” in the Congressional elections of November 2022. Like that will matter? If these Communists/fascists achieve even one-tenth of what they’re proposing — and right now they’re achieving 100 percent of it, with far worse to come — then no election will matter by that time. Let’s be real. If elections still mattered, Donald Trump would still be sitting in the White House. We know that — and, more importantly, our enemies know that. They also know what they’re getting away with, which gives them unlimited arrogance and makes them incredibly dangerous.
It’s every man and woman for him- or herself here. The government is officially the enemy. For 200-plus years, Americans relied on their government to protect them from enemies — British royal tyrants, National Socialists, Communists. Today, OUR own government is now the enemy. And, you will discover, this regime is at least as bad as any enemy Americans faced in past generations. And if you think Joe Biden is bad … just wait for Kamala.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Global Taxation–Global Stagnation
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed that governments around the world require payment of at least a uniform “global minimum corporate tax.” A motivation for Yellen’s push for a global minimum corporate tax is fear that the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the US corporate tax will cause some American corporations to flee the US for countries with lower corporate taxes.
President Biden wants to increase corporate taxes to help pay for his so-called infrastructure plan. The plan actually spends more on “progressive” priorities, including a down payment on the Green New Deal, than on infrastructure.
Much of the spending will benefit state-favored businesses. For example, the plan provides money to promote manufacturing and electric vehicles. So, the idea is to raise taxes on all corporations and then use some of the received tax payments to subsidize government-favored businesses and industries.
The only way to know the highest valued use of resources is by seeing what goods and services consumers voluntary choose to spend their money on. A system where the allocation of resources is based on the preferences of politicians and bureaucrats — who use force to get their way — will be less efficient than a system where consumers control the allocation of resources.
Thus, the greater role government plays in the economy the less prosperous the people will be — with the possible exception of the governing class and those who make their living currying favor with the rulers.
Yellen’s global corporate tax proposal will no doubt be supported by governments of many European Union (EU) countries, as well as the globalist bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For years, these governments and their power-hungry OECD allies have sought to create a global tax cartel.
The goal of those supporting global minimum taxes enforced by a global tax agency is to prevent countries from lowering their taxes. Lowering corporate and other taxes is one way countries are able to attract new businesses and grow their economies. For example, after Ireland lowered its corporate taxes, it moved from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to having one of the EU’s strongest economies. Also, American workers and investors benefited from the 2017 tax reform’s reduction of corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Yellen and her pro-global tax counterparts deride tax competition between countries as a “race to the bottom.” In fact, tax competition is a race to the top for the countries whose economies benefit from new investments, and for the workers and consumers who benefit from new job opportunities and new products. In contrast, a global minimum corporate tax will raise prices and lower wages, while incentivizing politicians to further increase the minimum.
A global minimum corporate tax will also set a precedent for imposition of other global minimum taxes on individuals. This scheme may even advance the old Keynesian dream of a global currency. The Biden administration is already taking steps toward a global currency by asking the International Monetary Fund to issue more special drawing rights (SDRs).
Global tax and fiat currency systems will only benefit the world’s political and financial elites. In contrast, regular people across the world benefit from limited government, free markets, sound money, and reduced or eliminated taxes.
Ron Paul, UNZ Review
Ayn Rand on Immanuel Kant: Part II
The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.
The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.
The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity. . . .
This is a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man’s, insect’s or God’s. (If one supposed the existence of God, the negation would still apply: either God perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no identity—or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that “to be, is to be perceived,” so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be. . . .
From primordial mysticism to this, its climax, the attack on man’s consciousness and particularly on his conceptual faculty has rested on the unchallenged premise that any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is “processed knowledge.”
Make no mistake about the actual meaning of that premise: it is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive—since in fact, in reality, on earth, every aspect of being alive involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. (This is an example of the fact that the revolt against identity is a revolt against existence. “The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be.” Atlas Shrugged.)
All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level. An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness . . . is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.
Watch “Ayn Rand and the Fight for Liberty | Exploring Objectivism with Gloria Álvarez Episode 1” on YouTube
Stupid is as Stupid Votes
If congressional resolutions had a voice, House Bill 1 (HB1), at 30 pounds a considerably obese tome, would let slip the parts usually kept at bay from the electorate. The For the People Act of 2021 is the antonymic title for the most openly unconstitutional and unpopular piece of legislation ever to pass muster in the House of Representatives. It is intended to destroy the process of fair elections in America, turn the watchdog Federal Election Commission into a partisan body, and forestall any state challenges by remanding them to the activist 9th District Court for the District of Columbia.
Passed by the 117th House on March 3, 2021, all 800-plus pages of HB1, redesignated Senate Bill 1 (SB1), made a hard landing in the well of the Senate on St. Patrick’s Day, where it is now being reviewed in hearings before the Committee on Rules and Administration. So long as the Republicans hang tough, it gridlocks and falls upon the sword of the filibuster.
During the Trump presidency, there were five Republican wings within the House and Senate, ranging from those loyal to Trumpism, such as Jordan and Gaetz, to the most Trump-skeptical, Murkowski, Collins, and Romney. Diverse allegiances and stylistic differences with the chief executive encouraged bickering, internecine rivalries, and splintering on issues that demanded consensus. Cloistering in blocs and factions kept them from uniting in the interest of their constituents.
Since the Dems assumed control of the three branches, the Constitution has been repeatedly annotated by presidential executive orders. Paper-thin congressional majorities are breaking the back of the Treasury and indenturing generations through the process of budget reconciliation. The extremism of the Biden regime now appears to have accomplished that which the Trump presidency could not — unanimity among Republicans and an opportunity to repatriate the working class.
In a refreshing turn of events, Chuck Schumer is now the majority leader suffering dissension within his own ranks. Obstructing the partisan path to passage of SB1 are two Democrat holdouts, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Both senators have vowed that they will not cast their lot behind any motion or process that will erode the filibuster or stonewall debate.
The 2016 election of Trump confirmed a decades-long trend and bared an Achilles Heel for the Democrats. The Dems have slowly isolated and have eventually dispossessed their blue-collar base, installing a loyal corporatocracy in its place. These boardroom types with Ivy League pedigrees are all in with the Machiavellian maneuvers of the Democrat regime, throwing bags of money at their campaigns, conspiring to influence election outcomes, and imposing woke practices on their employees and customers in the hope of dodging boycotts, disapproving media, and rabid street militias.
Energized Republican voters returned to the ballot box with a vengeance in 2020, including increased support from Black and Hispanic voters. Simple mathematics exposed incidents of massive fraud in swing states, yet legal challenges to the count were brushed aside by the high courts, ignoring the merits and evidence in plain view. For Republicans and their constituents, it was a familiar obstructive pattern. With Democrats holding a two to one advantage in appointed judges in the most influential federal court districts, Trump administration initiatives concerning immigration, health care, sanctuary cities, and the census, were stopped in their tracks in seventy different rulings over four years.
If the cabal succeeded in handing number 45 his hat, it couldn’t conceal a 2020 red wave that nearly overtook the Congress and gave rise to an angered voter base who believed themselves and their vote ill-treated. As the Biden administration continues to spend money willy-nilly with an economically destructive and globalist wish list driven by Sanders’ Marxists, Republican chances are looking better and better to take back the House in 2022.
If the cabal succeeded in handing number 45 his hat, it couldn’t conceal a 2020 red wave that nearly overtook the Congress and gave rise to an angered voter base who believed themselves and their vote ill-treated. As the Biden administration continues to spend money willy-nilly with an economically destructive and globalist wish list driven by Sanders’ Marxists, Republican chances are looking better and better to take back the House in 2022.
Democrats have placed their stock in SB1 as the only means to avoid the upcoming rout. Without SB1, the current landscape of American elections could do much harm to their party. Moreover, there is a trend in key states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York, and Georgia to come to grips with fraud by patching up the holes in loose voter practices in time for the next general election.
At present, thirty-two states, excluding the territorial possessions, still require photo or non-photo identification. Of the eighteen states that don’t require identification, eight are controlled entirely by Democrat executives and legislatures. Six states split party control of the executive and legislature, and four others have a Republican triumvirate.
For the Democrats, thirty-two voter ID states and ten others under split-party or Republican control leaves far too much to chance, not only in a presidential election cycle, but in the state congressional races more specifically. Asserting federal control over state elections via SB1 hedges the bet that Democrats running against odds-on Republican favorites in red or purple states will be able to mount challenges and gain victories through fraud-prone practices such as mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and extended voting deadlines that allow collections and counts to continue until Democrat candidates prevail. Increasing Democrat margins in the states also assures less pushback or secession from Biden executive actions and regulatory controls that diminish constitutional protections.
Democrats rally around the idea that requiring identification invites voter suppression in that otherwise eligible minority voters do not possess drivers licenses, personally-addressed correspondence, or other free and available forms of government identification. It also presumes that they also don’t drive cars, fly in airplanes, open bank accounts, serve on juries, obtain library cards, book hotels, possess credit cards, or get COVID vaccines. Such straw arguments also conveniently ignore the historic minority voter turnout in the 2020 presidential election.
The rest of the free world appears to exert more common sense in preserving the integrity of their national elections.
Throughout the COVID epidemic, the French continued to traipse to their city halls to vote, with access to sanitizers, social distancing, and sporting their own stylos for signing a registry that required personal identification. They saw no logic in shutting down in-person voting while food market patrons down the boulevards of Paris backed up in the chute to the cashier.
Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, and Slovenia require photo IDs. So do Germany, Hungary, Canada, Israel, and Mexico. The entirety of the rest of Europe, throw in Iceland, all of Scandinavia, and the former Soviet states, the latter no strangers to past voter oppression and rigged elections, follow suit. George Soros, Hilary Clinton, and virtually every Congressional Democrat apparently believe that the world has it all wrong.
As written by Arthur Conan Doyle and stated by his protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. If you remove outright stupidity as a premise in the creation of SB1, you’re left with a nefarious intent to seize power in perpetuity.
In SB1, a free America is facing the Rubicon. For Republicans, this may be their finest hour. In unanimity they will prevail, as they now hold tight the cord upon which dangles a representative democracy.
Rick Fuentes, American Thinker
White American are Succumbing to Fierce Racial Attacks
Do white Americans have no will to resist their Demonization and Dehumanizatiom ?
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/02/14/americas-catastrophic-disintegration/
Death Camps on the Horizon
The New Untouchables
White Corporations Declare Election Integrity to be Racist
Western Man Now a Contradiction in Terms
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/03/25/the-feminization-of-western-man/
White Americans Are the Persecuted Untermensch
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/03/23/are-white-americans-privileged-or-persecuted/
White Liberals Resurrect Segregation As Black Privilege
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/519080-racial-segregation-progressives-white-supremacy/
White Americans Need to Realize that Their Enemies Are White Liberals, Not Russia and China
https://www.rt.com/usa/519611-virginia-school-race-theory/
https://www.rt.com/usa/520530-cdc-epidemic-racism-health/
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/520592-public-health-industry-medicalise-racism/
https://www.rt.com/usa/519206-california-city-low-income-white/
https://www.rt.com/usa/518873-evanston-black-reparations-first-city/
Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review
How the Nutjobs Took Over & the Best Way to Get Rid of Them
We’re told we can’t have police — not ANY police — because police are “systemically” racist. We’re told we can’t have guns because “guns kill people.” I’m still waiting to see how they enforce gun bans without police.
To say law and order is, by its nature, “systemically” racist means to claim that there’s a conspiracy. What’s the evidence for the conspiracy? None is given. Nor is there any apology for the lack of evidence. There’s only shaming. “If you don’t agree with me that everything is systemically racist, then this proves you are a racist. This makes you a monster, and likely a criminal.” In fact: “If you’re silent, that’s the same as disagreeing with me that there’s a conspiracy of racism. Your silence makes you a monster, and likely a criminal.”
That’s what passes for intellectual persuasion and discourse in America, in 2021. It’s beyond sickening. Talking about today’s society is like examining a corpse. Not just of a government — but an entire culture.
How did we get here? The insane idiots we today see in Congress and throughout the corporate world have been housed in universities for decades. Where do you think the insane idiots GOT their ideas? The insane idiots in academia played the long game. We laughed at their “political correctness” in the 1990s and early 2000s. Most of us said, “It will never happen here. They’ll never get out of the universities.” Well, they did. Their ideas did. Now they’re at your baseball games, they’re in your Coca Cola cans, they’re in your Nike products, they’re in your pancake syrup, they’re in your formerly beloved children’s books, they’re in all your movies and television shows. They’re at all of your kids’ schools, even most of the private ones. They’re in every election, which WILL go their way regardless, as we now know. They won the culture. They won the government, including the military. They got EVERYTHING in the divorce. It doesn’t matter how wrong they are, and it doesn’t matter if they’re the minority. They won, and they’re not letting their victories go. They’re tripling down on them.
Ideas have consequences. Ideas coming out of academia, from social scientists, sociologists, philosophers, feminist or racial studies gurus — these ideas do matter, no matter how insane they are. And if we let academia gain the upper hand, as we did, then eventually we get the psychological and cultural sewage that is today’s America.
Good ideas would be the cure. America was founded on brilliant, timeless ideas. Aristotle had brilliant, game changing ideas back in ancient Greece. More recently, Ayn Rand offered brilliant and transformative philosophical ideas, and pro-liberty thinkers such as Frederic Bastiant and economists Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt offer all of the solutions required to reverse course today. I am happy to provide any interested party with a reading list of good ideas.
But we’re going to have to shut down academia first. I don’t mean impose censorship. The left is already doing that, and will continue to do so. We must fight and defy their censorship. What we also have to do is 100 percent defund all colleges and universities. That will require these nutjobs running the culture to survive or flounder on their own. I know such a proposal has no chance of winning, at this point. But if you’re trying to figure out where to start, what to advocate, what to cheer for — defunding the evil nutjobs is the best place to start. Starve them of their funds. And watch what happens to them. I guarantee it will make a difference.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 