“America On Trial”

I don’t usually link to my advertisers, but I saw that “Socrates Style Philosophy” was coming up as one of the Google ads (there seem to have been a lot of “philosophy” ads recently, and some of them have actually been interesting), so I took a look to see what it was all about. Here’s a small snippet of “MC Williams’ New Political Theory”:

Williams’ philosophy shines because of his so-called “HARMONIC CONSTITUTION”, which stunningly harmonizes and merges three distinct separated powers theories, 1) the ancient ‘Monarchy/Aristocracy/Democracy’ separation theory, 2) Montesquieu’s ‘executive/legislative/judicial’ separation theory, and 3) the spatial, i.e. federal, separation of powers concept. Then he uses this meta-theory to analyze political justice per se, and in America in particular.

Yeah, exactly.  Here’s hoping that someday I’ll produce a philosophy so shiny that it’ll outshine even this one! The URL is “AmericaOnTrial.biz,” too, so it’s no wonder. I was hoping “MC” was going to stand for Master of Ceremonies and that his advertised “political philosophy epic” was going to be a Saul Williams-type deal. But no, instead, he’s a crackpot. One more quote in the beyond. Under the heading “Fractal Micro-Federalism,” his site describes the following “breakthrough”:

Williams shows that the more fractal a political system gets, the stronger, and aximatically more just, it becomes. (Fractals are shapes made up entirely of copies of themselves.) Predictably, he adds federalism to his harmonic constitution, insisting that each state be a federation. No surprises there. But then astonishingly, he applies this to each substate and sub-sub-sub state, ad infinitum. Each member state of a federation is “microfederalized” (his word), and each micro-member is again federalized into infinitely small pieces, down and down. The extraordinary thing is that he takes this process all the way down to the family and even individual level, showing how individuals are composed of a Harmonic Constitution, separation of powers, (even the human brain is biologically a kind of three-part government!) and then down to cellular, atomic, and sub-atomic particle levels, with weights of muons compared to neutrinos corresponding identically to the his broader proportions of, say, executive and democratic power in a large federal state. If he is even close to right, its a complete breakthrough.

This has to be a joke. It reminds me of a lecture I gave at debate camp over the summer called “On the Cutting Edge.” It was all fake and funny and stuff, and it sounded a lot like this.