NRA, God, Supreme Court, Trump (in that order)
(The following is a draft excerpt from a forthcoming book on the 2020 election, related to the excerpt ‘Jefferson Bernie and Biden’ on this site. This excerpt touches on the question of the objectivity of the Supreme Court’s role in American politics, with particular regard to the second amendment (guns). The preceding chapter in the book deals with the nature of the relationship between God (if such exists) and morality and Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.)
Since it is implausible to believe that Trump believes in God or acts as if God is the source of objective morality (or even that God’s commands involve evincing a divine subjective feeling), this chapter assumes that God does not exist, but that either objective moral facts exist anyway, or that morality is subjective. In which case, which of these options fits most closely with the moral nature of Donald’s and Hillary’s relationships with the NRA and their attitude towards (innocent) human-animal gun death and (innocent) non-human-animal gun death?
As implicit ethical egoists, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump can consistently claim that human-animals have natural rights of the sort alluded to in the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights though Trump can consistently claim that non-human-animals don’t have natural rights (and thus condone the actions of his sons in taking pleasure from killing wildlife in Africa). In fact, he can consistently claim that human animals don’t have moral rights. Ethical egoism, a form of consequentialism, rejects the notion of moral rights as nonsense. Moreover, there are no actions on this Trumpean egoistic view which are morally wrong because of the nature of the action (or policy) in question, contrary to the implicit views about ethics propagated by the main stream media.
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Come on man
On Friday July 5 CNN aired segments of Chris Cuomo’s ‘one-on-one’ with Joe Biden (in a cafe, the kind of place Biden likes to be seen). The same segments were introduced in the afternoon (by Dana Bash in for Jake Tapper) and at eight o’clock (by Jim Sciuto, in for Chris Cuomo).
Earlier in the same week (Monday) a CNN poll seemed to show that Harris had gained a surge in popularity after the debates of the previous week and was now not far behind Biden. The next day, a Quinnipiac poll gave further cause for concern to the Biden campaign, with Harris narrowing the gap on the ‘front-runner’ (media did not mention that three fifths of those polled said they might still change their mind prior to the Democratic nominee election).
Some relevant facts were not mentioned by CNN in their sensationalist coverage of polling throughout the first week of July, after the first Dem debates. First, although the CNN poll suggested that Harris’s surge was caused by her debate performance against Biden, the same poll showed that 36% of respondents had not even watched much of the debates but instead closely watched news coverage of them later on. Of course, such coverage just focused on Harris and Biden, colored with the opinions of CNN ‘experts’.
One conclusion can be drawn - it was misleading of CNN to say that Harris’ surge was a result of her debate performance with Biden, since too many people (36%) might have formed their view about Harris based on CNN coverage of the debate, not the debate itself. To a significant extent, the poll may just reflect CNN’s propaganda about the debate.
Read more: Come on man
