Biden is our only hope, says Yaron Brook

Current Events Domestic United States Politics
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If anyone is still interested in the goings on at the Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook has come out strongly in support of Biden for President: 
Yaron Brook Show

The article “Biden is Our Only Hope” comments on this in detail.  You can find it by  searching on
biden yaron “christian right”
using Google (Bing and DuckDuckGo won’t work); “christian right” must be in quotes.

You will learn that after Brook’s comments it became known that Leonard Peikoff had donated $250 to Trump’s campaign.  So far Brook hasn’t commented on having once said that no “Trump apologist” should call himself an Objectivist.

 

2 Likes
Tim Pool and the Media
The Bobulinski angle on Biden
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More of Trump will make the Left “more radicalized”? That’s quite some reason. Rather furthers the case for Trump, imo. I detect a note of pragmatic appeasement from Yaron. Besides the suspect causality. Who “caused” what, and who is doing all the damage to the nation - right now - and are not going to be placated anytime soon, I ask? But - the Republicans in 4 years “will be beyond recognition”  - like the Democrats right now are … what? The same outfit who, at least, stood staunchly by the blue collar worker back with JFK? Allow them 4 years, the USA will not be recognizable and the slide to socialism will start in earnest. Since Elan Journo’s “a White House theocratic dictatorship” (anticipated in his article early after Trump’s inauguration) hasn’t come to pass, it appears ARI is doubling down instead of retracting the major error. Just wait, it’s coming next, apparently. Plenty of hand-waving and -wringing innuendo, name dropping, instead of seeing the reality. Do Objectivists not think in essential principles?

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I end up disagreeing with Yaron Brook here…

I was recently re-reading The DIM Hypothesis to help clarify my thinking about these issues. I did come up with a few ideas.

The famous quote from Kant, interpreted in DIM terms, is, “I find it necessary to deny reason” (D2) “to make room for faith” (M2)…

Interestingly, even though towards the end of The DIM Hypothesis, Peikoff is warning about the rising tide of religion, his big examples of modern M2 thought come from Communism. It is true that Christianity is M2, but so is Communism.

I think that Kant’s quote above is a roadmap, and the Democrats / Communists are following it. They have a playbook, after all, which has worked to establish Communism in other countries, and now they are merely using it in the USA. The general idea is, use the D2 people to smash the old system, and then establish a new M2 system.

Trump does not strike me as having the kind of personality necessary to establish a dictatorship. He is not really even religious. A while ago, when Iranians destroyed a drone and the U.S. military wanted to respond with force, Trump backed away from that because he didn’t want to kill Iranians over a drone. I suppose it could be argued that the religious people are in the background, trying to manipulate Trump into doing what they want, but he is not always cooperating (although he is sometimes), and this lack of cooperation is what is leading to books like The Room Where It Happened.

However, my experience is that the religious people are “mystics of spirit” and do not care much about the real world. The religious people I know (who, I admit, are not high-ranking government officials) are not saying “Let’s establish a dictatorship to get rid of these rioters” but rather are saying “There’s nothing we can do about this, it’s all part of God’s plan, and God will take care of us.” In a word, passivity.

Even in the more extreme cases, they do not seem to be willing to smash the current system. The Left, on the other hand, are “mystics of muscle” and have no qualms whatever about doing so. They want to smash, and establish a dictatorship afterward.

Giving the Left a victory in this election would only allow them to establish their dictatorship more quickly (even though it might quell the rioting in the short term). Biden is much more of a puppet than Trump, so he’ll be controlled by the far Left, or he might be removed via the 25th Amendment due to mental incompetency. He has pretty much committed to picking a far Leftist as a Vice President, and that person would then become President.

It would be much better if America effectively told the Left that their rioting and looting are useless and counter-productive. A Trump victory in the election, especially if it is decisive, would do that, and would buy a little more time. (The mainstream and social media won’t see it coming because they’ve basically created an echo chamber by “de-platforming” people who disagree. De-platformed people can still vote…)

If Trump does win, I think there will be another effort to impeach him (he may be vulnerable concerning the Emoluments Clause), and it may even be the case that some Republicans actually try to help an impeachment along. They will do it because they don’t think Trump is religious enough, but they probably won’t say that publicly. I wonder if Mike Pence would be an M2 dictator or not – but impeachments take time, and again, the Republican M2s don’t have an army of rioters ready to smash the current system, so they would end up working more slowly even if they won.

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3 hours ago, necrovore said:

However, my experience is that the religious people are “mystics of spirit” and do not care much about the real world. The religious people I know (who, I admit, are not high-ranking government officials) are not saying “Let’s establish a dictatorship to get rid of these rioters” but rather are saying “There’s nothing we can do about this, it’s all part of God’s plan, and God will take care of us.” In a word, passivity.

This is evidence that there is no immediate threat from the average religious person. However, that doesn’t help us recognize what kind of threat radicals pose these days! Big changes in politics don’t come from the average person, so if changes were to happen, it would not come from the people you are talking about. Even if you were to talk about the more radical religious people exclusively, Christians in particular,  I don’t think “not caring much about the real world” is any evidence of what someone would do in the real world. If somebody doesn’t care about the real world concretely, they might be apathetic, but they also might be willing to go to any extent to bring the world to its knees before God. Fine if you believe that this is a downstream threat. But your position seems be that there is not any meaningful threat whatsoever from religion these days. 

Leaving aside for a moment if religion is a threat, your position seems to amount to “smashing the system is worse than having a bad system that is the status quo, it should only be changed slowly!”. First off, America was founded because revolutionaries smashed the system, and since you are posting here, I don’t have any doubt you support the American Revolution. Smashing the system, on its own, is not necessarily right or wrong, it depends on why the system is smashed.

 If we are talking about big trends, the only system smashing that I see is being directed at misapplication of law enforcement (police brutality for example), and clamoring for enforcing racial equity. I believe that there are major issues of police brutality within the US, that part is valid. And as for wanting to enforce racial equity, while I don’t think that’s valid, I also don’t think it’s a truly substantial threat. So what I see about the system smashing going on, we shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste (although I would say it is being wasted).

Secondly, I don’t find that having a bad system of the status quo is always better than a smashed system. The status quo is oppressive in all kinds of ways that we would want smashed! The surveillance state we have in the US is quite awful and violates rights routinely. That is, when I see the status quo in some regards, or the system smashed in some regards, they are bad for different reasons. On top of this, there are already people who would want to expand this surveillance state we have - Obama being part of that reason, Biden would do more of it, and Trump would be more bombastic and direct about it. 

Going back to your idea about religious people in your experience being mostly apathetic on average, you could say that those people are a threat because they are not doing anything at all. They are as guilty as everyone propagating the surveillance state. They are guilty of laziness, guilty of not having any moral strength. The banality of evil. It doesn’t feel viscerally scary, but if you step back a moment, you realize that removing reason is horrifying. A mystic of muscle and a mystic of spirit are both glad to suspend the use of reason. 

3 hours ago, necrovore said:

Giving the Left a victory in this election would only allow them to establish their dictatorship more quickly (even though it might quell the rioting in the short term). Biden is much more of a puppet than Trump, so he’ll be controlled by the far Left, or he might be removed via the 25th Amendment due to mental incompetency. He has pretty much committed to picking a far Leftist as a Vice President, and that person would then become President.

I don’t see why you think that Biden is more of a puppet, let alone why Biden would be a victory to them. A leftist who is not a liberal (ie a truly radical leftist, not Democrats) would not think Biden is a victory on grounds of any of his policies, and I’m not aware of any leftist saying that Biden would be a victory because he can be manipulated to do what they want. 

*

Somehow, I forgot to add:

I think it’s insane Brook would say that Biden is a hope for anything. 

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Just a note (I’m not replying to your whole post yet): When I say “smash” I’m talking about D2s specifically. The DIM Hypothesis groups philosophies according to their attitude toward integration; the D2 attitude (which comes from Kant) is that integration as such, and the products of integration, should be destroyed. This was not the attitude of the Founding Fathers or of the Enlightenment period they lived in – they were trying to replace a bad government with a better one, not merely smash for the sake of smashing. The rioters out there now, the Antifa people and such, aren’t really in favor of anything. “Defund the police” is not a practical way to run any kind of society, it’s not any kind of positive thing, it’s just destruction for destruction’s sake. (Isn’t it interesting that they don’t just confine themselves to “police brutality” but want to abolish the police altogether?)

I certainly don’t agree with religion and I do think it’s a threat. However, I don’t think it’s an immediate threat. I think the Left would be able to establish dictatorship much more quickly because of their willingness to destroy the existing system, whereas the Republicans would try to work through that system, and it would take longer. That would make Republicans the lesser evil, albeit still evil.

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1 hour ago, necrovore said:

“Defund the police” is not a practical way to run any kind of society, it’s not any kind of positive thing, it’s just destruction for destruction’s sake. (Isn’t it interesting that they don’t just confine themselves to “police brutality” but want to abolish the police altogether?)

I’m not sure if it will matter for your later response, but you might be painting things with too wide of a brush. We wouldn’t be able to accurately capture the threat posed by someone if we aren’t careful about the claim they are making. Defunding the police is not uniformly about abolishing the police. Defunding is reducing the amount of funding in police departments. There are some that say the reduction in funding should be 100%, therefore abolishing the department. I disagree with with them completely and that, and think that is a very bad thing. Reducing the funding by say, 40% reduction of funding is not the same as abolishing, though. Personally, I’m in favor of defunding the police by some amount, more or less completely eliminating the funding for things the police should not be doing in any capacity at all, such as responding to mental health crises. You might be right in terms of Portland about people wanting to completely abolish the police, but that seems relatively contained. 

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9 hours ago, Eiuol said:

I think it’s insane Brook would say that Biden is a hope for anything. 

Under current circumstances, that is as an alternative to Trump , a not-so-extreme a counter-candidate IS a hope. It is a hope for the non-election of Trump and, therefore, a hope for a better Republican party for the (medium-term) future.

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I wonder where Brook gets his information, and whether it is completely factual dispassionate journalistic objective information… and what or who owns that platform which provides that rather than opinion… or political propaganda, activism, indoctrination, and virtue signaling… (none of the “mainstream” media companies do that do they?) and what are the motivations and forces driving those platforms and who owns them… I wonder.  And how do they insulate themselves from the general Marxist leftist influence which is being exerted in social media and other (search? online shopping?) computing platforms… or is the converse actually true?

 

Garbage in garbage out… even if Brook were the “very model of a modern major general” of Objectivism.

 

BTW

I’d like to subscribe to a modern media outlet that still ACTUALLY adheres to journalistic principles, and provides dispassionate reporting of factual information absent opinion, political propaganda, activism, indoctrination, and virtue signaling.  i.e. they report the news like they are supposed to RATHER than try to persuade readers of some agenda they are pushing.  Do you remember when CNN was reputable and objective?

 

Not sure they exist anymore, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

 

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14 hours ago, AlexL said:

Under current circumstances, that is as an alternative to Trump , a not-so-extreme a counter-candidate IS a hope

I addressed this by saying that “not so extreme” is false. I don’t think Bush and Obama were substantially different. The status quo stemming from them is horrifying, and that’s what Biden is to the max. Basically, I haven’t been convinced that status quo is somehow less scary or less destructive (in terms of individual rights) than Trump. Not to mention that Trump is still pretty close to the status quo as it is. 

 

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On 7/26/2020 at 2:48 PM, necrovore said:

I think that Kant’s quote above is a roadmap, and the Democrats / Communists are following it. They have a playbook, after all, which has worked to establish Communism in other countries, and now they are merely using it in the USA. The general idea is, use the D2 people to smash the old system, and then establish a new M2 system.

A few years ago I was waiting in line for a concert in downtown Los Angeles. Someone handed me a flyer for the book The New Communism. I haven’t read it, but your post reminded me of that experience. Maybe the Ds are using the Ms, not the other way around.

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5 hours ago, Eiuol said:

I addressed this by saying that “not so extreme” is false […]

By “Under current circumstances, that is as an alternative  to Trump , a not-so-extreme a counter-candidate IS a hope” I did not intend to imply that Trump is “extreme” and a Dem candidate would be less. My claim is that Trump is worse than a Dem candidate, IF the latter is not of the extreme left. Sorry if the wording appeared ambiguous.

And the reason I gave was that “the non-election of Trump [being, under circumstances] a hope for a better Republican party for the (medium-term) future”, because GOP is the only major party which could  be in the future for some individual rights etc., more than the Dems

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15 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

I wonder where Brook gets his information, and whether it is completely factual dispassionate journalistic objective information… and what or who owns that platform which provides that rather than opinion… or political propaganda, activism, indoctrination, and virtue signaling… (none of the “mainstream” media companies do that do they?) and what are the motivations and forces driving those platforms and who owns them… I wonder.  And how do they insulate themselves from the general Marxist leftist influence which is being exerted in social media and other (search? online shopping?) computing platforms… or is the converse actually true?

 

Garbage in garbage out… even if Brook were the “very model of a modern major general” of Objectivism.

 

BTW

I’d like to subscribe to a modern media outlet that still ACTUALLY adheres to journalistic principles, and provides dispassionate reporting of factual information absent opinion, political propaganda, activism, indoctrination, and virtue signaling.  i.e. they report the news like they are supposed to RATHER than try to persuade readers of some agenda they are pushing.  Do you remember when CNN was reputable and objective?

 

Not sure they exist anymore, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

 

I remember CNN once as being reputable at international coverage, and then in later times like other esteemed media e.g. the BBC, the power to influence minds, to promote moral doctrine and be political Kingmakers, completely went to their heads. And too, the intense competition from the internet was a phenomenon that turned the balance of factual reporting plus a modicum of distinct opinion pieces, to much more of the latter, and now even the straight journalism has subliminal messages (‘narratives’): this/he/she - “bad”; that - “good”. (And if you have to ask why, you will never get it).  I find many readers and viewers are quite naive about the media’s manipulation - ‘grooming’ - of the news and absorbing ready-made opinions. “This was on XYZ, so must be factual and right”.  A TV station or paper hardly needs to be untruthful about the facts, they simply neglect to mention, or play down, facts which they know of which don’t fit their narrative. Result, a stream of information that amounts to misinformation, especially when heads of some news outlets act together in concert, which they do. News coverage and dissemination is man-made, simply. Many ‘men’ - like artists, to a degree - are recreating reality according to their publisher/owner’s “metaphysical value-judgments”. So it is a cinch to portray one person as constantly awful and another as saintly. The reader needs a solid grounding in reality outside of TV and newspapers to discern when there are misrepresented facts, glossed over “missing” facts and sometimes invented facts.

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On 7/26/2020 at 6:43 PM, Eiuol said:

First off, America was founded because revolutionaries smashed the system, and since you are posting here, I don’t have any doubt you support the American Revolution. Smashing the system, on its own, is not necessarily right or wrong, it depends on why the system is smashed.

The American revolutionaries sought to preserve the natural system of “government by representation” while smashing only King George’s attempts to establish “an absolute tyranny” over the States through “repeated injuries and usurpations.” So it was King George who was attempting to smash the system. From the perspective of the “natural law” revolutionaries, the King was going against the laws of nature.

If we look at what’s happening today, the right generally wants to preserve the American “government by representation” while the left seeks to smash it through the tyranny of the mob.

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8 hours ago, whYNOT said:

I remember CNN once as being reputable at international coverage, and then in later times like other esteemed media e.g. the BBC, the power to influence minds, to promote moral doctrine and be political Kingmakers, completely went to their heads. And too, the intense competition from the internet was a phenomenon that turned the balance of factual reporting plus a modicum of distinct opinion pieces, to much more of the latter, and now even the straight journalism has subliminal messages (‘narratives’): this/he/she - “bad”; that - “good”. (And if you have to ask why, you will never get it).  I find many readers and viewers are quite naive about the media’s manipulation - ‘grooming’ - of the news and absorbing ready-made opinions. “This was on XYZ, so must be factual and right”.  A TV station or paper hardly needs to be untruthful about the facts, they simply neglect to mention, or play down, facts which they know of which don’t fit their narrative. Result, a stream of information that amounts to misinformation, especially when heads of some news outlets act together in concert, which they do. News coverage and dissemination is man-made, simply. Many ‘men’ - like artists, to a degree - are recreating reality according to their publisher/owner’s “metaphysical value-judgments”. So it is a cinch to portray one person as constantly awful and another as saintly. The reader needs a solid grounding in reality outside of TV and newspapers to discern when there are misrepresented facts, glossed over “missing” facts and sometimes invented facts.

It will be interesting to see how this self corrects.  Perhaps a resurgence in direct consumer subscription will result when people realize the free content with ads model often produces garbage… and also that a market adhering to a content demand model rather than a content pushing model is just better all around.

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Before the 2016 election (at OCON, as a pertinent unscheduled remark before class in response to someone’s objection that Clinton would raise taxes), Binswanger commented “What else is new?”, correctly directing attention to the central question: which candidate would introduce the best or worst new ideas into the political area? On those grounds, I was inclined to vote for Clinton. Since the Democrat always gets the electoral votes in Washington (if the electors vote as instructed, which they did not all do), this is a purely theoretical issue for me.

With the benefit of hindsight, I conclude that Trump’s policies have on balance been better than anything we could have reasonably expected under a Democratic president, and his political implementation has been vastly worse than anything we have experienced in my lifetime. I’m not talking about his popularity, I’m talking about his unprecedented expansion of executive power, his penchant for arbitrarily rewriting the law, and his generally random and unprincipled behavior. On the third hand, he did appoint two relatively decent SCOTUS justices, whereas we would be in a whole long-term world of political hurt had Clinton won.

On the fourth hand, Trump has simply exploited latent broad powers that were bone-headedly granted to POTUS by Congress, by giving an unreasonable reinterpretation to statutory language. The lesson to be learned here is that Congress needs to actually read the legislation which they enact, and understand that some day (like, already), some president is going to exploit the powers inadvertently granted to him. The fifth hand is that while I originally assumed that Trump had a team of competent behind-the-scenes managers who would guide him and therefore us away from the brink of destruction if the occasion arises, that has proven to be over-optimistic.

My penultimate conclusion is that it doesn’t matter all that much which one of these jokers gets elected. What does matter most is the party-line balance in the House and especially the Senate. Given the non-trivial probability of a Democrat majority in the Senate, my final conclusion is that a non-Democrat exercising veto power against the left could be important.

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A Conservative conversation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGZVUw2\_sg

 

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4 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

I’m talking about his unprecedented expansion of executive power, his penchant for arbitrarily rewriting the law,

Can you give your best example of a law that Trump arbitrarily rewrote?

 

4 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

My penultimate conclusion is that it doesn’t matter all that much which one of these jokers gets elected. What does matter most is the party-line balance in the House and especially the Senate. Given the non-trivial probability of a Democrat majority in the Senate, my final conclusion is that a non-Democrat exercising veto power against the left could be important.

If a non-Democrat with veto power could be important, then it should matter which joker gets elected.

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Trump’s insane response to COVID-19 should be enough to immediately disqualify him from being given any further consideration as a serious Presidential candidate.

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20 hours ago, AlexL said:

because GOP is the only major party which could  be in the future for some individual rights etc., more than the Dems

if that’s all you meant, Republicans have historically failed on this. All evidence points to “not gonna happen”. You would need a new political party. I don’t have reason to think that any Republicans will reform their ideas if Trump loses. 

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8 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

Trump’s insane response to COVID-19 should be enough to immediately disqualify him from being given any further consideration as a serious Presidential candidate.

Under-authoritarian or over-authoritarian in his “insane response”, would you say? Easier to say (while far from finally established) with the gift of a little hindsight.

And I don’t know if any other president could have performed any better to save lives and to satisfy all citizens, through the panickers to the denialists, given the extreme predictions by scientific bodies and an alarmist media input delighting in making political hay. I’m open to correction, but Trump would appear to have been on the side of not closing down the economy (my position from the start) and getting restarted early, but bowed to the purportedly expert consensus he was given. As any leader would have to do.

Individual choices - freedom - may sometimes seem indistinguishable from unplanned chaos.