Robert Paul (‘Howlin’) Wolff in Cloud Cuckoo Land

When Robert Paul Wolff strays from the 'reservation' of Good Sense and floats up to Cloud Cuckoo Land* I refer to him as 'Howlin' Wolff.' The man is quite a study, a representative specimen of the species, academic leftist. When I criticize him, there is nothing personal about it: it is the species, not this particular specimen that is the cynosure of my interest. The way to study a species is via representative specimens.

Some of Wolff's posts at The Stoned Philosopher The Philosopher's Stone are outstanding and I agree with them in toto. But others are just loony. And the good professor seems unaware of just how crazy and irresponsible they are. The man is 80, but not demented as far as I can tell. But he is a lifelong lefty, having first drunk the Kool-Aid at the Sunnyside Progressive School, a "red diaper operation," as he himself characterizes it.

In a recent outburst, he writes,

I'm not sure you youngsters know just how hard it is for me to keep writing light, amusing things on this blog while the world around me is going to hell. There is so much to be angry about — legitimately morally outraged — at home and abroad that I can scarcely get through the day without encountering six or seven reasons to despair. [. . .] I am talking about genuine man-made evils . . . . Sometimes they spring from religion, such as the barbarism of ISIS or the oppression of the Palestinians. Sometimes they are rooted in bureaucratically entrenched racism, like the murder of Michael Brown. Often they are grounded in the very structure of our political economy, like the obscene inequalities of wealth and income.

1. The most outrageous and irresponsible of Wolff's claims above is that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was murdered. We know that Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson. But as Wolff knows, to kill is not the same as to murder. If A murders B, then A kills B. But if A kills B, it does not follow that A murders B. There is more to murder than killing. Murder is wrongful killing. Of course Wolff knows that. He also knows that a legal verdict of murder comes only at the end of a criminal proceeding. But unless I have missed something, Officer Wilson has yet to be even indicted. First comes the indictment, then the trial, then the verdict, then the sentence (if the defendant is found guilty). Wolff is well aware of all this too.

Wolff's groundless and inflammatory accusation is yet another illustration of the tendency of contemporary liberals and leftists to jump to the defense of the (perceived) underdog regardless of the facts of the particular case and regardless of who is right and who is wrong. It's as if the underdog occupies the high moral ground just in virue of being the underdog. It's as if the weaker of the agents party to a conflict is morally superior to the stronger just because he is the weaker. Some think that might makes right. Lefties seem to think that mightlessness makes right. Such is the moral obtuseness of leftists.

We know that Brown is a thug from the videotape of his stealing from the convenience store and his roughing up of its proprietor. Videotape has the anti-Obama property: it doesn't lie. Wolff must have seen the footage. Apparently, it didn't faze him.

Of course, I am not saying that the kid's being a thief entitled the cop to shoot him, even if the cop knew, which presumably he didn't, that the kid had stolen from the store. But if Brown initiated an altercation with the cop after the cop issued the reasonable command to get out of the street, and tried to wrest the cop's gun away from him, as some reports indicate, then everything changes. He is no longer an 'unarmed teenager' but a potentially armed assailant. But we don't know all the facts, and Wolff has no grounds for jumping to the conclusion that the shooting of the boy was wrongful. Again, that is just the typical knee-jerk leftist defense of the underdog qua underdog.

But I suppose one shouldn't be surprised by Wolff's take on the Michael Brown affair given his utterly absurd reaction to the Trayvon Martin case.

Wolff here vents "a rage that can find no appropriate expression" over "The judicially sanctioned murder of Trayvon Martin . . . ."

"Meanwhile, Zimmerman's gun will be returned to him. He would have suffered more severe punishment if he had run over a white person's dog."

What fascinates me is the depth of the disagreement between a leftist like Wolff and a conservative like me. A judicially sanctioned murder? Not at all. A clear case of self-defense, having nothing objectively to do with race, as I have made clear in earlier posts. And please note that "Stand Your Ground" was no part of the defense. The defense was a standard 'self defense' defense. Anyone who is not a leftist loon or a black race-hustler and who knows the facts and the law and followed the trial can see that George Zimmerman was justly acquitted.

Wolff ought to be proud of a judicial system that permits a fair trial in these politically correct times. But instead he is in a rage. What would be outrageous would have been a 'guilty' verdict.

Was the blogger at Philosopher's Stone a stoned philosopher when he wrote the above nonsense? I am afraid not. And that is what is deeply disturbing and yet fascinating. What explains such insanity in a man who can write books as good as The Autonomy of Reason and In Defense of Anarchism?

Does the good professor have a problem with Zimmerman's gun being returned to him after he has been cleared of all charges? Apparently. But why? It's his property. But then Wolff is a Marxist . . . .

It is sad to see how many fine minds have been destroyed by the drug of leftism.

2. We are told that the barbarism of ISIS springs from religion. Not from Islam, or from radical Islam, or from Islam hijacked by cynical manipulators, but from religion. All religions are the same and they are all equally bad. Beneath refutation. More Marxist Kool-Aid, or to turn the Marxist opiate trope on its head: the real dope is the Marxist dope:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. (Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

3. The oppression of the Palestinians? Again that is just reflexive, as opposed to reflective, defense of the underdog qua underdog as if the relative weakness of the Hams terrorists and the Gazans who support them justifies their atrocities and condemn's the IDF's defensive operations. But we've been over this ground before. See Why Sam Harris Doesn't Criticize Israel.

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* A translation of Schopenhauer's delightful Wolkenkuckkuckheim.