Ayn Rand's detractors as a most unimpressive, dishonest bunch

It isn't difficult to throw down the gauntlet against Ayn Rand's detractors (which includes a sub-group of intellectual swamp-dwellers I refer to as Rand-bashers -- very low-hanging fruit).

The gauntlet-throwing goes something like this: Make your case that Rand shouldn't be taken seriously to the faces of Ayn Rand Society scholars who can competently vet for accuracy the (almost uniformly ignorant but hubris-driven) negative critical characterizations of Rand's ideas. (That Rand detractors uniformly demonstrate by their behavior that they are less concerned with accuracy about Rand than with having an opinion about her, is compelling evidence of dishonesty on their part, all on its own, IMNSHO.)

So I'd issue this triple dog dare to any and all of Rand's detractors: follow J.S. Mill's advice and present your case to the most formidable representatives of the 'Randian' position you can find - those who (using Mill's terminology) present the case for Randian ideas in the most plausible and persuasive form (since Rand isn't around to defend herself ffs). Ayn Rand Society scholars fit that characterization as well as anyone. They have dual expertise - in academic philosophy and in Objectivism. The (blatantly dishonest) claim that Rand isn't taken seriously by "experts in philosophy" actually means the following if it is to be rendered in any way persuasive or plausible: Rand is not taken seriously by expert practitioners in philosophy who are not also experts in Rand's Objectivism. (Should this even come as a surprise, given Mill's very sage advice about having and testing opinions?)

And yet these "expert" critics would fall apart all too easily when thinkers with feet in both camps can all too readily "translate" this or that point in Rand into academia-speak. "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen do this all the time, like they did in their rebuttal to Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" (which Rand's usually-dishonest detractors cite as the final word on the subject). That's not to mention their "Aristotelianizing" of Rand in their essays in The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and in the academy Aristotle is not exactly considered a lightweight. (The Dougs can manage very expertly to draw the parallels between these two thinkers; why can't everyone else?)

So just as soon as any Rand detractor is ready to engage in actual good-faith dialectic with the likes of Ayn Rand Society scholars (and not, like the lowlifes on /r/badphilosophy, picking on arguments made by Objectivists not so academically established, or arguments by the author of this here blog, say [bring it on, I triple dog dare you; all I ask for is intellectual honesty, is that too hard?]) -- only then would I be ready to take these entities seriously.

In Galt's Speech, Galt/Rand state: "Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."

I've never encountered a Rand detractor who honestly considered the meaning and import of such statements in Rand's writings. Typically a Rand detractor will focus instead on mocking the statement "Existence exists." And a typical Rand detractor will simply concoct out of thin air the notion that for Rand, it's Rand who gets to define what "unbreached rationality" means (i.e., agreement with the philosophy of Ayn Rand -- so Prof. Hospers was failing to use his mind to the fullest when it came to disagreements with Rand? [Rand-detractor blanks out, as always]). But these folks don't, in any remotely credible way, get to ignore the totality of Rand's statements once they start pointing to this or that Rand quote to be a detractor about. Once they're committed to opining about Rand, they have to play by certain rules of intellectual integrity or GTFO. One of those rules is one extremely central and key to Rand's philosophy: context-keeping (a point in Rand's philosophy her detractors know absolutely zilch about, else they wouldn't be detractors - at least on this point - since of course there's no coherent case to be made against context-keeping). These context-keeping rules ethically compel one to consider the full context of Rand's statements, i.e., the full body of her work, and to do so in the utmost good faith and intellectual curiosity.

(And there's even free will here. Even such low-character individuals as Rand-bashers have it within themselves to be great, but it's up to them.)

And so, part of the body of Rand's public writings include an endorsement of Leonard Peikoff's 1976 course on her philosophy. In an open 1981 'Letter of Recommendation' she described Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her philosophy - and anyone who knows all the surrounding history know that Rand couldn't remotely possibly give such an endorsement lightly. Anyway, if anyone is most curious and good-faithy about what Rand meant by the virtue of rationality, over and above the Galt passage, or whatever else one finds in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, one would - if diligent enough, and it shouldn't be hard - to find it spelled out in much detail in Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (1983) and elsewhere. In that course, you get not only the Lexicon passages and the generalized statements about key & central concepts of epistemic/cognitive method like context, integration, and hierarchy in the 1976 course (adapted as Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), a standard/reference text that any Rand scholar/commentator worth taking seriously would take seriously, which automatically excludes the likes of Heller and Duggan), but Peikoff goes indepth with many examples of how to respect context and hierarchy.

From the standpoint of "Rand Studies" it doesn't really matter in the slightest that Rand herself didn't provide this detailed content in such courses to fill in what she doesn't say in her writings; her endorsement of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas suffices to make him an indispensable source of Rand scholarship. (With the 1976 course there is no ambiguity about this whatsoever. While Understanding Objectivism did in fact come a year or so after her death, the 1976 course was authorized by Rand herself, and so it is kinda dishonest on its face for Rand's critics not to even acknowledge such material, yes? What else than some form of dishonesty or other - and intellectual laziness, complacency and hubris are forms of dishonesty - would explain this level of ignorance? How is it not willful, culpable ignorance given the 45 year stretch between that course and today no less? But the pattern holds up in the case of the absence of anything remotely resembling a serious critique of the Galt Speech, some 64 years after its publication no less. Surely a relevant error in Galt's speech - a real error, not a strawman that Rand's detractors typically if not always employ - would have pointed out by now? I can't even imagine what that would supposedly be. And when it comes to the quality of Understanding Objectivism even without Rand's being alive to vet it all the way, there are countless longtime students of Objectivism (the folks whose intellectual context the detractors have chosen - have bent over backwards in fact - to be ignorant of) who would nonetheless attest to its value for understanding "how to think like an Objectivist.")

My ultimate philosophical standard-setter is Aristotle, who (despite errors he committed) perfected the art of dialectic and I essentially rank philosophers in merit/importance based on how well they approximate this perfection. And when the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (also willfully ignored by Rand's detractors) makes a big deal about "dialectic(s) as the art of context-keeping" I get most curious. Don't you, dear reader, get most curious to learn more? I mean, a dialectical sensibility would pretty much require one to get curious. (Prove me wrong.) As a historically contingent matter, as to my own intellectual context, I got into the study of philosophy via Rand - encountering her Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in my teens while still mainly a student of economics put me on the path to ethics and political philosophy (how have I done so far?) - but I certainly don't consider the be-all and end-all of philosophy (refer back to the first sentence in this paragraph). But I do consider Ayn Rand to be a very helpful litmus test for who really has a clue and about what. The very most intelligent philosophical people that I know of are those who know what to take seriously in Rand and how. (Note, it's not her polemics against the likes of Kant. For that, I'd throw down exactly the same gauntlet to Kant-detractors among Randians (and there are a lot of them...), to support their case that Kant is "the most evil man in mankind's history" (Rand's own words) to the faces of some selected group of Kant scholars who can vet the characterizations for accuracy and context, and best of luck with that. For more effective - and by necessity more detailed and lengthy - polemics, I like how Mises takes down socialism and the Marxoid variant in particular.

(BTW, I have now gone through the whole of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx as I said earlier I would do as a condition of making further commentary on Marx/Marxism (as per Mill's advice, etc.). The only essay that is somewhat impressive in there is Ollmann's outline of Marx's dialectical method. And yet one of Ollmann's students - the aforementioned editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies - holds that such method has its roots in Aristotle and that Rand exemplifies it in the development of her philosophy [though not necessarily of her polemics against other thinkers; Hospers had similar opinions which he told Rand directly about and he kind of knew his stuff]. How does a Rand detractor honestly account for this? [I'm not holding my breath.] Now, the Oxford Handbooks series is a first-rate scholarship and research resource, and if the Marx one is as unimpressive overall as I found it to be, I don't see much if any future for Marx studies among honest first-rate scholars and thinkers. The scholars in the Marx Handbook are hardly dialectical over and above their preaching.  About the only thing I can see Marxism and not some other system of thought (dialectical or otherwise) having gotten correct which might explain its appeal to socialists is that laborers in capitalist society have historically had it tough - especially those with the least specialized skill sets and hence bargaining position - and that maybe there are ways of making things less miserable for such people. The utter pile of BS comes when it's capitalism specifically that these socialists blame for such conditions, and their avoidance of dialectic with capitalism's leading thinkers (especially Rand and Mises, but there are plenty of others who can identify what's bunk in Marx/Marxism) speaks volumes IMNSHO. That's all I have to say about that for now.)

As for Rand as the litmus test for intellectual honesty: maybe some other thinker(s) could be used as an example (I mean, how often is Aristotle lazily/dishonestly caricatured ffs?), but Rand is a good one: she's controversial, her political ideas are certainly opposed to that of the Academic Mainstream. (Supposedly it's the same with her ethics, but lo and behold, the Dougs were right on this decades ago and those in the academy with a clue are coming to the realization: Rand's egoism is a version of neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics (with of course rationality as spelled out in Rand/Peikoff's body of work being the primary virtue which explains the others - independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride). (Question: how does Rand's ethics - dialectically steelmanned of course - play off dialectically with and/or against Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, itself the product of a comprehensive lifelong exercise in dialectic? And why the heck isn't Gewirth's book itself all the rage?)

And what I find, countless times without exception, is mostly politically-left Rand detractors (although the ones on the Right are hardly better), not just on internet forums but in the academy, being utterly, disgustingly un-dialectical in their treatment of Rand. And I use Rand as a litmus test because I figure if these academic creatures are willing to play as fast and loose with their characterizations of Rand as they do, and given that such ideas correctly grasped are as full of merit as Ayn Rand Society scholars maintain, I know with a certainty that these folks will go the extra mile to crap all over the best thinkers if those thinkers don't conform to their "progressive" ideas an MO.

And what has that "progressive" academic MO become in recent years? Well, the Amy Wax episode serves as an illustrative case.  Prof. Wax dared to say that the racial achievement gap might not be completely chalked up to systemic racism but rather that (objectively troubling) phenomena like the rate of single-parent families in the Black community arguably help to explain the achievement gap (and that a rigorous adoption of "bourgeois values" would go a long way to fix that problem). For speaking her mind thus, fellow Ivy League (University of Pennsylvania) students and faculty went apeshit, construing her arguments as 'white supremacist' and other such silliness, not bothering to give her a chance to defend herself against these charges in an honest dialectical fashion (and so they treated their determination of what her views were as the final determination - how is this not blatantly f'ing dishonest?), and signed letters calling in effect for her cancellation (her only protection being tenure, but we can forget about academic freedom without that protection, right?). Nothing remotely resembling an honest inquiry and exchange of ideas occurred at this Ivy League venue. (And when a Black professor, Brown's Glenn Loury, makes similar points that Wax did, guess what the "progressive" response to Loury is. Silence. A dishonest silence resulting from refusal to engage dialectically, and/or a refusal to know the most plausible and persuasive arguments from a given side. But at least Loury doesn't get smeared like Wax did. Guess why. His skin color. And that, too, is blatantly dishonest. Still, somehow these creatures don't consider it racist to ignore a Black scholar's research; I thought that was the essence of a racist behavior according to these creatures?) (Hot take: I think the Left is such an intellectual basket-case now, so dialectically inept and so useless for tracking truth, that its "Woke" narratives about systemic racism are the product of a failure of "progressive" social policy to close the achievement gap. They are doubling down on the dogma and refusal to have dialogue even with the likes of Prof. Loury. It's pathetic.)

(Also: the pattern of blatant dishonesty with Wax/Penn is repeated in how James Damore was canceled/fired by Google. Strawman, refuse dialogue, and cancel forthwith. And somehow even this ridiculous behavior has its defenders/rationalizers! In any case, this behavior within corporations and the ideology motivating has its origins in the Academy. If you challenge the ideology strongly enough, don't expect an honest response; expect being called a racist/sexist, denied lucrative opportunities, or - if you're Black - being ignored outright.)

And outside of exceptions (which prove the rule) like University of Chicago which make explicit a commitment to academic freedom, this kind of anti-Millian, dishonest-smear approach has become the "norm" in academia. And had these folks not been so thoroughly, blatantly dishonest in their approach to Rand, the litmust test case, I might have given these creatures the benefit of the doubt. I've since abandoned such hopes, short of a revolutionary overhaul of what the Academy has become (when it comes to politically-charged matters, at any rate).

So, to sum up, and once again: Rand's detractors don't deserve to be taken seriously in the slightest until they rise to the challenge of taking on Ayn Rand Society scholars, the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and other such people that Mill would advise going to in order to actually understand that with which one supposedly disagrees. (I mean, who in their right mind believes that rationality-as-context-keeping as the primary virtue is something to disagree with? But what else is one to make of what Rand's detractors stubbornly-ignorantly say?) And given that for 60-some years now the Academy has failed to do the minimal Mill-recommended thing, speaks volumes about a politically-charged corruption of the Academy. A disgusting, despicable corruption that shows true colors when the chips are down.

I won't hold my breath. Dishonest people might well prefer going to the grave dishonest rather than admit a bad behavior they indulged in for years or decades on end. If honest dialogue is not what they're after, then it's a state of intellectual war; they are enemies of truth and inquiry. That the academy would subsidize and protect this blatant dishonesty (in Rand-detractors' case, for six decades and counting) calls for an accounting that won't piss off the American people in its avoidance of addressing the core problems and means by which the Academic Humanities and Social Sciences parasitize upon them (the American people). If they treat an Aristotelian thinker such as Rand like garbage, what garbage behaviors won't they engage in (and at taxpayer expense, etc.)?  When it comes to Rand (and capitalist thought generally), the "leading academic philosophy blogger," a tenured Law Professor at a top school no less, is dishonest garbage and I see no problem with calling him out for that. California taxpayer funds are used to financially support Duggan's blatantly dishonest trash under the guise of scholarship (and the scholars blurbing that book are similarly trash who bend over backward to ignore.

Perhaps I should come up with some sizable monetary bet, which I'd be guaranteed to win, to the effect that Rand's detractors will never rise to this challenge?

Being a Rand detractor (and I don't mean someone who disagrees with her polemical approach, else that would make Hospers a "detractor") is not an honest-and-informed option.  No honest informed person thinks that context-keeping wasn't of fundamental focus for Rand (whatever errors she committed), as inextricable from her entire way of thinking. Should I make that sizable monetary bet on whether a Rand detractor could identify and explain what Rand was onto with this context-keeping stuff (before even getting to any commentary or critique of Rand on this topic).  How does one reliably and integrally understand Rand's concept of self-interest without considering the entire context of her philosophy ffs? I mean, after all, Rand says the utmost achievement of one's values (a proxy for selfishness; agent-relative value) requires a mastery of the right sort of cognitive process (those much like Aristotle's, say), and hence why she bothered to venture into epistemology and method much more than she did in (e.g.) Galt's speech.

And it so happens that proper familiarity with ('correct grasp of') Rand's ideas usually results in a deep admiration for Rand whatever one's disagreements. You could just go and ask the aforementioned Society and Journal people yourself, or see Rand entries in this here blog.

So, how did the Academy become so populated with people so hubristically sure that Rand is a hack, lightweight, evil, etc. while never engaging in an honest dialectic with her defenders?  (This must surely be asked about any academic "philosophers" who unprofessionally bash or dismiss Rand. The existence of the Ayn Rand Society all on its own should put these "philosophers" dead to rights in their professional malpractice. J.S. Mill, following his own advice, wouldn't debase himself so.) Along the same lines, how did it become so populated with people who refuse to engage in honest dialectic with the likes of Prof. Loury? It's not just pathetic, it's ridiculous. But it's not like the meltdown of the (non-STEM) Academy is any secret these days; the only issue is arriving at a proper diagnosis. And we can arrive at such a diagnosis if we refer to such litmus-test cases as Rand and Loury (and many, many others...).  And the solution to this cause of the Meltdown is pretty simple: just be intellectually honest ffs, how hard can it be? Are you so wedded in your opinions to leftist/"progressive" ideology (now mutated into "wokism" and other such ideological framings foreign to the American mainstream and formulated by the "woke" one-sidedly without anything resembling an honest dialectic with that mainstream) that you refuse to have them challenged on a level field of play?

ADDENDUM: The Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series (3 volumes and counting, the fourth to be on the relation between Rand and Aristotle) contains back-and-forth between Objectivists and professional philosophers who don't identify as Objectivists but somehow found a way to take Rand seriously. Why can't everyone else (or at least those who hold an opinion on Rand) follow their lead? Ask enough questions like this and insistently enough, and Rand-detractors get cornered like the intellectual/ethical rats they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)

ADDENDUM #2: Whereas the Understanding Objectivism course was only in expensive audio format for nearly 30 years (around $270 back in the day, and easily worth it), and as such was that much less accessible/available for scholarly research, the transcribed book version has been in print for 9 years and counting now. The existence of this material in book form has been made well-known by online Objectivists these past 9 years to anyone who will listen. This here gauntlet has been on the ground for 9 goddamn years and still the Rand-detractors won't lift a finger to be honest. Those Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies volumes are also now accumulating years of availability (although they're not quite as cheap as Understanding). The detractors pretend like none of this material exists. (Or maybe they just don't have a clue at all. Which is worse?) I've encountered countless Rand-detractors who, without a single exception, refuse to be honest and usually get nasty when challenged. That's a green light to induction about their character. I can't fathom what other conclusion one can rationally reach at this point. I've done the homework; I've provided abundant documentation/links in this blog post and others; I've contributed a journal article debunking a common lazy and undialectical caricature of Randian egoism; I know the lay of the land. And Rand-detractors are losers, end of story. They'd never accept the gauntlet-challenge; they are cowards such as they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)

ADDENDUM #3: Readers familiar with this blog will already have some ideas about what I offer on the positive-proposal front. I envision an end of history (or some equivalent using other terminology) a defining or formal characteristic of which is dialectical method which means (among other things) universal steelmanning of ideas. (Mill and I believe Aristotle would approve!) What is dialectic (as to sorting through competing plausible opinions as distinct from context-keeping generally) than universal steelmanning? (And I speak here specifically of the intellectual aspect of an end of history; I'm making an educated guess that that this intellectual aspect will have ethical and aesthetic analogues.) And how distinct (in terms of referential extension) would universal steelmanning be, from more or less universal exposure of the citizenry to a formal Philosophical education (e.g., Philosophy for Children)? (The one rule I would institute for Philosophy for Children (P4C) is: Steelmanning Only. The rest is gravy.)  I really don't think it's too demanding (once the principles are made readily digestible by the citizenry) to do steelmanning-only or at least aspire to that standard. But I've also said that the (or merely "an"?) end of history would have an Aristotelian character, primarily because of the dialectical methodological example Aristotle set (whatever his errors). But such appellations and terminology don't matter nearly as much as the methdological practice itself. (Did I mention that such practice is perfectionistic?)  (Any dialectic constituting the 'end of history' must of necessity compare and contrast dialectic in the Aristotelian and Hegelian senses. It's not clear to me that Hegel claims to "supersede" Aristotelian dialectic so much as to incorporate it, with some 'dynamical' analysis of history as a process of ideas (small 'I' in Hegel's format?) coming to better and better fruition, through dialectic. So wouldn't Hegel say that no one can accord to ignore, dismiss, or - per the usual lowlife practice - strawman Rand's ideas about human perfection, i.e., intellectual perfectionism?  Strawmanning gets in the way of progress toward the end of history -- so let's aggressively marginalize strawmanning behavior accordingly....)

The academy: structurally dishonest?

The latest from the shitshow that the leftist-infested academy has been turning into more and more. (h/t Maverick Philosopher, additional related link there)  Aside from the obviously suspicious circumstances of this tenure-track person's firing, and the obviously credible depiction of all-too-familiar "woke" smear tactics involved, there is an entirely valid point the author raises:

I did not enjoy the protection of tenure (I was, however, tenure-track), but we should not rely upon tenure to uphold free inquiry. Academic health is not served by a message that tenure can only be secured by those prepared to embrace political orthodoxies. After all, if tenure is intended to protect people who challenge dogmas and orthodoxies, why would we support a system that punishes non-conformists and that sieves them out before they are capable of safely challenging prevailing views?

Gee, ya think?

The blatant hypocrisy of the tenure system, from an academic-freedom standpoint at any rate, is now laid bare.  Not just a system of tenure under the currently prevailing leftist-scum-infested shitshow, but any system of tenure whatsoever: from a intellectual-freedom-loving standpoint, what legitimate function does it serve?  Why in the everloving fuck should anyone, anywhere be made to feel afraid to speak their minds?

Not just in the academy, but corporations, or . . . anywhere.  It's an unphilosophical world where there are punishments for intellectual honesty.  I don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuck if intellectual honesty makes someone annoying, unpopular, or "uncomfortable" for others to be around.  (Why can't these others fucking deal with it?  What the fuck is their problem?  [Note: this is not to say that other factors besides intellectual honesty can make someone annoying, unpopular, etc.  But that's not the issue here.  All too many people don't value intellectual honesty or intellectualism very highly, and they are annoyed or made uncomfortable in its presence, and that's a problem with them.])  Intellectual honesty is the one paramount value I embrace, and intellectual dishonesty (among the kinds of which is intellectual laziness) the one thing that really grinds my gears; it is the #1 cause of the world's avoidable problems.

What the fuck, is the idea of a free and fair marketplace of ideas utopian, or something?

Do I even need to ask what sages like Socrates (who was sentenced to death for being honest/"annoying", for godsakes...), Plato, Aristotle, et al, were they revived to speak authoritatively today, would say in response to such questions?

What a fucking joke.

[Addendum: Is social media structurally dishonest?  Consider: "likes" are what drive social media, but "likes" entail a popularity contest, not the encouragement of honesty and truth.  Of course social media is structurally dishonest, and that's the #1 cause of why social media is such a widely reviled toxic shitshow.  The old discussion formats - listservs, Usenet - didn't have this problem.  Fuckerberg, Dorsey, Huffman and the other war-profiteers of "likes" can stuff it.]

[Addendum #2 (3/11/2020): Leiter quotes Kathleen Stock on twitter: "The problem with academic feminist philosophy is that it’s run like a fiefdom, not like a normal open philosophical discussion. There are things you are just not allowed to say, and people you are not allowed to offend. Quality suffers, and to [the] rest of [the] world, it shows."  (Fucking twitter and its cognition-diminishing character limits, huh?)  Now, just replace "academic feminist philosophy" with "academia today," and definitely keep the "to the rest of the world" part, and you might see just what a fucking joke this all is.  This is sickness, folks.]

Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

From University of California Press - Yikes!

I've commented on Duggan before here, focusing mainly on an online summary-excerpt of Mean Girl, as well as here, showcasing how Duggan (contemptuously and dishonestly) responds to challenging inquiries about her work: she is a poison tree from which one cannot expect honest fruits.  Having now had the opportunity to see the entirety of Mean Girl, I can point to a number of facts about this book that objectively demolish her intellectual and scholarly credibility.

Duggan quite perfectly epitomizes a subspecies of creature I dub the Rand-basher.  I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, and no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever will, for one simple reason: Rand-bashing is an inherently dishonorable activity given the degree of value in Rand's work.  I'll name a few telltale characteristics of the Rand-basher, but the fundamental underlying one explaining all the rest is: intellectual dishonesty.

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

You might think that a putative scholar of Rand's thought, whose thesis is set out in a title like Mean Girl, would want to take some care to counter the community of scholars who don't share that opinion.  The fact that she makes pretty much no effort whatsoever to engage these scholars is a red flag that this putative scholarship shouldn't be taken seriously.

And it's not like Duggan doesn't consult and cite numerous sources in the endnotes and bibliography.  In fact - given that her main focus is on Rand's literary and cultural influence - she does include in the bibliography the three volumes edited by Mayhew (a member of the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, and acknowledged among the community of Rand experts as an expert) on Rand's three major novels.  But not only does she not quote, reference, or cite any of these volumes or its several contributions in the main text or the endnotes, while quoting and citing all kinds of negative comments on these novels, there is no evidence whatsoever that she is seriously familiar with what is in these volumes.  (Just for instance, the Gotthelf and Salmieri contributions to the volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged, focused in particular on the Galt speech that is the philosophical centerpiece of the novel, are indispensable contributions for anyone not already familiar with their thematic content.  Indeed, there is really no indication whatsoever in Mean Girl that Duggan has any familiarity with the underlying philosophical structure of Objectivism.  In that regard, she is not an intellectually serious commentator.  Her "summary" of the Galt speech is all of one brief paragraph and conveys none of the philosophical fundamentals in any serious or insightful way beyond anything else she had already said in Mean Girl.)

The only notable additions to the bibliography of secondary sources besides the three edited by Mayhew, are the two volumes Sciabarra is involved in, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.  Now, any expert on this stuff knows how thoroughly (well, exhaustively) researched Russian Radical is - its reference sources include all the Peikoff courses up through the Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (I'll get to Peikoff more in a moment, since doing so is downright unavoidable in this context) and lots of other taped material besides - and any expert in this arena is also aware that Sciabarra delves deep into those philosophical fundamentals, particularly Rand's philosophical method (something something "dialectic as the art of context-keeping"; for some details in this blog see here and here) within which all her specific positions/theses, formulations, and applications are inextricably embedded.  But Duggan's only mention of this book is as a source for early biographical Rand information (which would be in the first section of Russian Radical).  Her only mention of Feminist Interpretations is almost merely in passing and with superficial reference to only a couple of the pieces.

Speaking of mere-in-passing mentions, Peikoff comes up in only two places.  The first is one brief paragraph as it relates to all the people Rand supposedly "alienated" thereby leaving "only" Peikoff around to inherit her estate.  (Amazingly enough, Duggan manages not to sink to the usual Rand-bashing low of mentioning that Rand accepted Social Security benefits in old age; usually the Rand-bashers do so in a gleeful "gotcha" manner as supposed proof of hypocrisy without bothering to mention or learn about her 1960s essay on government grants and scholarships.  Given the general pattern of dishonesty on Duggan's part, perhaps this was a lapse on her part so to speak, or perhaps I missed it.)  The other is an inclusion in a "Key Figures" section before the bibliography along with about 10 other people, with about 2 or 3 sentences provided for each.

Now, any serious scholar and expert on Rand knows about the importance of Leonard Peikoff to knowing what's what in Objectivism, including especially that stuff about method (context-keeping, integration, hierarchy, etc.).  To mention it for the umpteenth time, she give her very-high-bar-to-clear authorization and endorsement of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course, the most complete and definitive statement of her philosophy in her lifetime.  It's not like this and other courses (e.g, Understanding Objectivism) haven't been available, for free, on the Ayn Rand Institute website for some years now, or that Understanding hasn't been available in book form since 2012.  The book based on this course (which, not insignificantly, Peikoff considers the definitive statement of Objectivism) is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) (a.k.a. OPAR).  This isn't among the works listed in the bibliography.

One might think that critics of Rand, interested in getting it right, would be curious to see what a course or book titled Understanding Objectivism by Rand's most qualified student and endorsed teacher/interpreter, is all about.  But I have never once encountered the slightest curiosity from Rand-bashers in this regard when I've told them about it and that pretty much all serious long-time students of Objectivism attest to its importance.  Such a pattern of behavior falls under any number of the bullet points above.

Listed in the bibliography, meanwhile, is Slavoj Zizek's borderline-to-downright silly article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  It's the only evidence that Duggan is so much aware that this journal exists.  (There are some not-so-silly articles that have appeared over the years in that journal, including this one.)  Now, if Duggan were a serious, honest, not-lazy scholar, she would have done her homework by inquiring into what besides Zizek appears in that journal.  There are, after all, plenty of pieces in there analyzing Rand from a literary and cultural perspective.

Duggan goes to great lengths in Mean Girl to portray Rand as having a contempt or disregard for "inferior" people, selectively and one-sidedly marshaling "evidence" to that effect (most if not all of it is slippery and snide insinuation based on assuming-the-worst readings of the original texts - this falls under the Strawman bullet-point above).  Given the mainly literary context in which Duggan is operating, she draws connections here between Rand and Nietzsche.  Now, a couple things Duggan says in connection with Nietzsche: First, he's among the 10 or so included in the "Key Figures" section; the first sentence under his name is, "The work of German philosopher Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western intellectual history," and then mentions that Rand initially admired his critique of religion and Christian morality and his concept of the "Superman," before later rejecting him.  But guess who's not included in the "Key Figures" section: Aristotle.  Now, Duggan does mention at least a couple times in the main text that Rand was really big on Aristotle.  Perhaps the omission of Aristotle from the "Key Figures" section is just another piece of evidence of laziness and/or sloppiness on her part.

But there's also an awfully dubious claim Duggan makes in an endnote (ch.2, note 26) in connection to Nietzsche: "Rand was not a close reader of Nietzsche, but more of a fan, until she eschewed his influence...".  Now, in Wiley-Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri, eds., 2016, included in my extensive cataloging of Rand scholarship linked above), Nietzsche scholar/expert Lester Hunt writes a chapter on Rand's relation to Nietzsche.  It begins by quoting Rand from author-information material she submitted ca. 1935 to the publisher of We the Living that Also Sprach Zarathustra was her "bible" and that she could never commit suicide as long as it exists.  Does that sound like someone who isn't a close reader of Nietzsche?  Or: how did she ever happen upon the "noble soul" aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil that she discusses in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (which Duggan obliquely refers to in the same footnote quoted above), without doing some pretty close reading?  Not only was Duggan evidently too effing lazy to know about the Companion and its contents, but how can she keep her story straight that a not-close-reader would know about such an aphorism?  This is Duggan characteristically playing fast and loose with the facts.

Here's another point of evidence of Duggan's lack of thoroughness and care: she does quote numerous times from Rand's Journals (including a context-omitting discussion of Rand's early comments on the serial killer William Hickman, whom Duggan blatantly-dishonestly asserts in the book's Overview section was an initial basis for Rand's "ruthless 'heroes'"), but there is no mention anywhere in the book of Rand's Letters!  There's a shit-ton of material of interest in the Letters.  This has direct bearing on the quality of Mean Girl's "scholarship."  For instance, in the Overview section there are a couple or so sentences describing the main points of each of the chapters, accompanied by bullet-pointed key concepts or names for each chapter.  For chapter 2, covering roughly the 1930s and 1940s of Rand's life/work, one of the bullet points, in addition to ones like 'Marriage to Frank O'Connor,' 'Anthem,' and 'The Fountainhead', is 'Isabel Paterson.'  Now, for one thing, the mentions of Paterson in the chapter are pretty much in passing, conveying merely that she was the main mentor-figure to Rand in the '30s and '40s, and that she wrote a book titled The God of the Machine (1943).  Now, in the Letters, there are two sizable chapters containing Rand's correspondence with two key figures: Paterson and John Hospers.  (Hospers isn't mentioned in Mean Girl.  Suffice it to say that this well-respected professional philosopher, expert in aesthetics, and big fan of Atlas Shrugged didn't regard Rand as "mean," whatever criticisms he did have of her.)  One of Rand's letters in connection with Paterson was one praising The God of the Machine as the best book in political philosophy in 300 years and a decisive antidote to The Communist Manifesto.  Duggan declares somewhere in Mean Girl that Rand's understanding of capitalism and markets is fundamentally deficient, but it's safe to say that Rand's understanding aligns with that of God of the Machine.  It's also safe to say that Duggan is too lazy to have known about this, or what's in that book.  Also in the Letters is Rand's ca. 1980 letter of reference for Leonard Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her ideas, although I doubt Duggan cares to know this or its relevance.

In her discussion of Atlas Shrugged, Duggan neglects to mention its theme ("the role of the mind in man's existence."  Gallingly, she makes reference to the novel's "civilizational theme" as echoing the one that "shapes Anthem."  About Anthem, Duggan manages to at least make reference to "individual initiative" and "innovation," and then says, "The civilizational framework and character descriptions in Anthem are inscribed in a pervasive hierarchy [this is the prose of a pretentious twit, BTW] of mental and physical ability that intertwines with racial, class, and moral differences in all Rand's fiction."  So even when she kind-of touches upon the role-of-the-mind theme running throughout Rand's work, she poisons it with a discussion of a supposedly "racial" makeup to Rand's heroes (which she does at numerous points throughout Mean Girl, it's pretty disgusting).

When she bothers to discuss Rand's nonfiction writings, she does the following:

It's evident that she didn't bother to go through Rand's 'Objectivist Newsletter/The Objectivist/Ayn Rand Letter' collections, but rather only the anthologized books.

Now, she shows familiarity with at least the first essay in For the New Intellectual (1961), but also in FTNI are the speeches from her novels introduced by explicit discussions of their themes, which as I've said Duggan neglects to show any deep familiarity with.  (Ask Rand-bashers what the theme of Atlas Shrugged is, without cheating, and they'd never properly guess it in a million years.  I know this from experience.)

When she discusses The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) anthology, the one essay she discusses is the "Racism" one.  Duggan used this as an opportunity to bring up in the usual smeary Rand-basher ways Rand's supposed views on "the erasure on indigenous peoples, restriction on immigration from more 'primitive' parts of the world, and the persistence of sharp racial inequality in the 'private' economic and social spheres [as] part and parcel of her system of rational morality, even as she opposed state-imposed racial (and sex) discrimination."  Actually, an honest scholar discussing what is part and parcel of Rand's system of rational morality would at the very least make mention of the general points of the lead essay in The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics."

The same vice marks her treatment of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).  Instead of demonstrating real and serious familiarity with the lead essay, "What is Capitalism?", she focuses instead (for a short paragraph) on the essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," only to mention  Rand's positive reference to Reagan's speech nominating Goldwater in '64 "as a promising new direction for electoral politics - a new direction her influence helped to shape."  Big whoop.  What's really the meat and bones is what's in the lead essay.  For one thing, Rand gives her definition of capitalism there.  Duggan doesn't mention this definition anywhere, although she provides her own in the Glossary.

If all the laziness and sloppiness weren't in evidence enough, her discussion of The Romantic Manifesto (1969/1971), a work one might reasonably think is crucial to grasping Rand's literary aesthetic, is all of one sentence.

This is growing tiresome.  It's all too obvious that Duggan doesn't possess the intellectual/philosophical wherewithal to provide an insightful analysis of Rand's philosophy.  She leaves out way too many crucial sources that would shed a positive light on, and foster understanding of, Rand.  The length of the book is all of about 100 pages, and many topics are covered all to briefly to provide much if any useful information for serious inquirers.  A book accomplishing that task would have to be considerably longer than this, and there are already numerous books on Rand out there that provide way more value than this one does.  If there were constraints on publishing length limiting this to 100 or so pages, on that basis alone it is perhaps better that it not be published at all.  Or, if one were to assign Rand to a scholar in some academic 'Brief Introductions' series without butchering the subject, I can think of many - even relatively mediocre ones - who are way more qualified than Duggan.  No serious expert on Rand's thought can possibly think this book meets even minimum quality standards.  The dishonest title, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway that it's nothing more than a hatchet-job rather than a minimally decent attempt at being fair, objective, enlightening, or anything of the sort.  Its only use is as a foil case contra serious Rand scholarship and a lesson in how not to be taken seriously (which is the only point in going through the trouble of making this post).  I'll link again to another post demonstrating what high-quality Rand scholarship looks like.

In this post I haven't done much to show what Duggan actually does say about Rand in Mean Girl, but I've already discussed the gist of that in the post linked at the beginning of this one, and there's plenty there to show just how shoddy her work is - along with that second link revealing the level of intellectual and moral character behind this work.  Along with fundamental dishonesty, her other main character flaw, along with so many other leftists and "progressives," is hubris.

I'm going to close by removing any possible remaining doubts about Duggan's honesty and credibility.  The key context of Duggan's hatchet-job is that, like most Rand-bashers, and most of the very worst and nastiest of them, she is a leftist/anti-capitalist.  The very same dishonest tactics these creatures use to recklessly attack and smear Rand are used likewise to attack and smear capitalism.  If the following isn't the last nail in the coffin as far as Duggan's (and their) credibility goes, I don't know what is.

In the preface, Duggan asserts (as does the typical nasty leftist) that "From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal [i.e., more or less capitalist] politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world.  The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated - the reign of brutal capitalism - intensified."  Now, aside from the rather ludicrous claim that Rand's philosophy in its actual neo-Aristotelian essentials has even so much as come close to exerting its proper neo-Aristotelian influence on the culture (as in, what actually would take place if everyone absorbed and practiced the principles espoused in Galt's speech and OPAR), the factual claim about expanding global inequality is false and can only be the product of a reckless and willful ignorance of the data.

The only serious question remaining at this point is how someone like Duggan and her ilk (this includes all the ignorant fools - willing if not eager dupes - who positively blurbed this trash) could have ended up with the positions in the academy that they occupy, filling publications and student's heads with garbage.  It is precisely because of entities like these that the academy has taken the widely-loathed, ever-leftward and therefore ever-inbred and pro-dishonesty path of recent years.  Upon comprehensive exposure of their blatant dishonesty, I recommend sardonic ridicule as the next appropriate course of action.  Is it really too much to ask that these creeps clean up their act?

The latest AOC idiocy (idAOC?)

Something something the recent remarkable stock market gains are inequality in a nutshell, foolish words to that effect.  Some left-leaning "news" outlet cited the 2.9% year over year gain in "wages" (vs. the exorbitant 22% or so gain in the Dow) as evidence for her thesis.  Except that the latest interpretation from the basically commonsense (and therefore far superior intellectually and morally) biggest "conservative" media outlet that the latest gains were seeing the fastest growth on the low end (which economic theorists would explain in terms of the upward pressure on wages from a ever-tightening labor market, with 3.5% unemployment as ample evidence of that - along with, not coincidentally, the conceptual truism that those on the lower end of the bargaining-strength scale are the ones most likely to become the first people unemployed come the next recession (which anti-Trumpers all over the place were all but guaranteeing would happen under the unknown, unproven President Trump's leadership, and this includes New York Slimes columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - the part-time partisan hack, etc.).

Anyway, pretty much everything from AOC involves some obvious economic fallacy or other, or culpable ignorance of readily available data (e.g. everything at ourworldindata.org), or some obvious unseriousness of thought and mannerism ("it is fascisuuuuuuuum . . . uh, uh. uh. uh, that we're headed toward..."), but what really is so objectively anger-warranting about it is that this person wielding real legislative power could not only be so fucking intellectually lazy and reckless, but also so fucking full of hubris (which goes hand in hand with the fucking intellectually lazy part).  The economy does better (than it otherwise would - ceteris paribus, as any serious student of economics knows about) when the Dow is doing better, and vice versa.  Nobody ever asserted a 1:1 correlation between the two (a fucking strawman, since everyone concedes one is about expectations and the other is about measured output), but the Dow isn't going south when investors of capital (people whom AOC obviously knows jack shit about) are bullish on outcomes in the not so distant future, and when they're bullish people get more available and better paying jobs.

(And since of course the Dow is a measure of expectations it is part of the index of leading economic indicators (LEI); the unemployment rate is, of course, the biggest coincident indicator.  Also, not coincidentally to AOC's studied ignorance, a 2.9% growth rate in wages, with inflation as low as it is, sounds like perhaps upwards of, I'm just pulling a reasonably-well-educated guess out of my ass here, a 50% to 100% faster growth rate in real wages than what was happening under the last Demo-rat presidency.  And as I pointed out some months back, given the slow-as-ever population growth rate these days, a 3% rate of GDP growth translates into double the per-capita GPD growth rate obtained with 2% reported GDP growth, not 50% more.  If people would stop lying with statistics and go through the comprehensive data set and mentally integrate it properly, they'd not give any time, attention or credence, or the power of lawmaking/physical force, to the likes of the fundamentally character-deficient AOC.  [Note from the digression below the context-oriented treatment of "if-then" hypotheticals and consider what such a hypothetical would have to presuppose about those currently  lying with statistics and giving AOC the time of day and whether all that in presupposition and implication would wipe out the need for the very hypothetical itself, heh heh.]  Also, it's not intellectually honest to do as your typical leftist does and that is to attribute a dynamic going on within America - a widening of income/wealth as measured by the Gini coefficient or whatever - to a dynamic inherent to capitalism itself.  The widening gap in America can be explained in great part by the effects of globalization, and with the increased globalization of capitalism - that big driver of CO2 measures which leftist losers use simultaneously to condemn capitalism for its evils while refusing to acknowledge the human benefits - there has been not just a dramatic fall in global poverty rates (whatever threshold you use) but little change in either direction in Gini-inequality globally in the last few decades).  Anyway, it's hard to maintain an anti-capitalism narrative in the face of all the data at ourworldindata.org in conjunction with an understanding of basic economic principles including the role and (win-win) effects of talent differentials - and the data include a huge rise in global population in the era of capitalism . . . which, if the left wants to maintain is a bad thing, it should say so outright (it might help explain their shittily selective attention about the population-reducing crimes of left-wing regimes; the name of that deliberate starvation of millions by the brainwashed-in-Marxism regime is known as Holodomor, kids; the reckless starvation of scores of millions within a few years by that other brainwashed-in-Marxism and hence also totalitarian regime is known as the Great Chinese Famine, ffs - give Mises the relevant data and he would have predicted millions would die and correctly explain exactly why, just as he correctly explained why socialism proper would eventually fail wherever it was tried (something something once all the seed corn was consumed). Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy Che Guevara t-shirt, while the usual leftist-loser suspects just continue on saying how capitalism killed many more all the while global population exploded (just as it did in Industrial England during the Worst Period in Human History according to Marx & Co., ca. 1800-1850)  All of this failure and death enabled by the Academic Left [see tag] with a few honorable exceptions that prove the rule, mind you....)

This is low-hanging fruit at this point; all told, AOC is a fucking moron who happened to be in a far-left congressional district and has some charisma (and more clever than wise, etc.).  Also it appears that a degree in "International Relations and Economics" from Boston U. is empty paper nowadays; if you want to present to the American taxpayer Exhibit A of the academy's intellectual . . . credibility deficit . . . look no further than AOC.  (Philosopher's question: If it isn't outright intellectual bankruptcy, how much further along the deficit spectrum does one have to go before it is reached?  And do we really want to find out?  How good can the standards be there, as things are now, when for instance a Scumbag Lisa Duggan at a top-10-ish university (NYU) dishonestly smears Ayn Rand in a public-university-published book, and then evades and insults those calling her "scholarship" into question - i.e., did she seek out contrary input, e.g., philosophy professors who are favorable toward Rand, or did she run it by the editors of the Journal of Ayn Rand studies for QC purposes, or did she make any effort to so much as know about the Peikoff courses, that sort of thing, all of which she made every effort not to do, basically - all without accountability or consequence?)  She (AOC) actually seems otherwise natively smart/bright but crippled by the education (sic) establishment's selective-worldview-cultivating procedures.  That should be enough to piss anyone off.  Rand's "The Comprachicos" presages what has become of the whipped-by-the-left university and its most loyal, necessarily hubristic spawn (AOC, e.g.).

But next up I think I'll take to task philosophy blogger (already in the intellectual stratosphere by today's lamestream media standards[*]) Michael Huemer's attack on doing the history of philosophy, and in particular his dictum, "don't be Aristotelian."

[*] [* for reasons I won't polemicize about in this here post, the author of the "world's most popular philosophy blog" serves as a complicated case seeing as there is little in the way of non-destructive "philosophy" that ever actually goes on there]
[Digression that should be transferred to the next post & multiple-paragraphed.]
(Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or 'unevaluative' biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).  And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).  (By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.  Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.  But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.)

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]

Damore & Wax vs. anti-dialogue leftists

(Damore context.  For the uninitiated, by leftism or left-wing politics I refer to egalitarian and quasi-egalitarian strains of thought, and the further left you go the more deranged and dishonest it gets.)

At the top of the search results for damore manifesto is an article from Wired that contains some well-reasoned pushback against Damore's arguments mixed in with the whiff of bad faith from the authors about the implications.  (From the looks of things what Google did was not even bother with the well-reasoned pushback - i.e., attempt at dialogue - but instead replaced reasoning with the bad faith part.)

I won't get into the specifics of the science that would be involved in a legitimate back-and-forth on this topic.  That isn't the point.  The point is whether "social justice warriors" and their ilk operate in good faith.  (They do not.)

The whiff of bad faith creeps in more and more toward the end of the Wired article.  Here are instances of such:

What he’s advocating is scientism—using undercooked research as coverage for answering oppression with a shrug.

(This is far and away the silliest use of the term scientism as I've seen, although that isn't important here.)  The authors reach this judgment about Damore's advocacy based on the notion that Damore cherry-picked the science to support what are, more or less, political conclusions.  But how would anyone determine that?  What we do know in retrospect is that there is more to the scientific-studies picture than what Damore presented; the question is whether he should have known about the rest of the picture, i.e., whether he might have exercised further care and diligence in his looking at the scientific literature before making his argument.  (Gee, just imagine if we apply that same standard to the anti-Damore crowd and leftists in general, which is more or less the whole point of this; my contention is that today's leftists routinely are blatant offenders in this regard, not that it's a close call where the motivations might merely be called into question.)

In the specific case of Damore he's almost definitely making an effort to get to the bottom of things and not clearly trying to ignore counter-arguments (as evidenced, for instance, by the numerous qualifications he adds to his statements); the best case that Google and its defenders might come up with is that Damore's intellectual character is faulty enough that he merits his punishment.  But, really, the only way to determine that is to have a dialogue to test Damore's commitments - which Google (in this case) and tons of leftists refuse to have, which reflects poorly on their intellectual character.

More from the Wired piece, where it gets more egregious:

Damore’s dissent, stripped of its shaky scientism [sic], isn’t a serious conversation about human difference. It’s an attempt to make permanent a power dynamic that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If Google was, for Damore, an echo chamber, that’s because his was the only voice he was really willing to hear.

Fucking horseshit!  That's the authors jumping to a conclusion not warranted by anything that came before that.  (Can it be thrown back in the authors' faces, pray tell?  They obviously didn't do their homework before throwing the term "scientism" around like fools, so are we entitled to the sweeping conclusion that they're intellectually lazy and full of hubris?)

I've pointed to the essential problem above, but to reformulate: The authors preceded their closing cheap shot with reasoned pushback.  But that's not what Google did.  It didn't offer reasoned pushback.  It implicitly adopted sloppy caricatures of Damore's point to get to the conclusion that it and the left-activists in the company wanted about his attitudes toward women in his workplace.  Or, put differently, it adopted the same mean-spirited conclusions as these authors without even so much as reasoned pushback, which makes it doubly offensive.

==

The same dynamic was in play with the disgraceful Amy Wax episode (not disgraceful on her part, to be clear).  To recap: Prof. Wax presented an argument about how (among other things) the black-white achievement gap could be closed in great part if the black demographic as a whole did a better job of adopting what she called 'bourgeois values,' among which are things like intact nuclear families which might be expected to help better promote a more solid work ethic, avoid criminal behaviors, that sort of thing.  This resulted in an uproar at her (Ivy League) campus from a mob of students and faculty who virtue-signalled by signing statements (devoid of substantive arguments but long on conclusive claims and "social justice" buzzwords) to the effect of, "These are the views we've determined you hold, and we thereby condemn you, end of story."  There wasn't anything remotely resembling a reasoned dialogue.  One example of the blatant dishonesty is when some of these dickheads turned Wax's appeal to a return to "1950s values" into an appeal for a return to "pre-Civil-Rights" values.  (Compare to the dickheads such as Scumbag Kamala Harris who do the same with Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.)

It's by no means a stretch to believe that if an Ivy League school is pulling this kind of shit, then (given the ideas-networks necessarily involved) this dynamic is pervasive throughout academia.  (Compare the 2000s episode where Harvard's then-president Larry Summers dared to suggest that sex differences might explain the male-female imbalance in STEM professions.  The very topic is off-limits, precluding dialogue and coercing agreement, i.e., without the autonomous cognitive processing and weighing required for objectivity as opposed to intrinsicim.  [Is there anything more ugly, dangerous, and anti-intellectual about the dynamic in question than this?])

Now, after that dishonest uproar/condemnation, the ever-honorable Heterodox Academy hosted an actual substantive discussion about Wax's argument, including this lengthy article by John Gelbach.  The likes of the Gelbach article is what the screaming University of Pennsylvania leftists should have put forth (along with allowing Wax a response - heck, why not bend over backwards in this regard just to be sure) before they reached their definitive determinations.  But they already showed their malicious hand.

Now, my question: in what relevant respects do the anti-Damore and anti-Wax reactions differ, given that reasoned pushback was quite evidently available to be had?  If they don't really differ in essentials, then my suggestion that a similar dynamic is in play in both cases holds up.  (I don't see any relevant or essential difference between these two episodes in that regard.  The only really interesting difference is that tenure protected Wax from firing, else I believe it would have gotten uglier.)

Now, what if I told you that the same essential dynamic is in play in the way the American left portrays Trump as a racist?  Surely if it is, there should be plenty of overwhelming evidence of the dynamic in play.  Since you're either clued in or basically clueless there, I won't bother elaborating in this here post and will leave the rest as an exercise for readers with pointers to this blog's "trump," "race," and leftism-related tags (for which see below).

In sum: the prevailing dynamic of contemporary leftism involves sloppy constructions of opponents' positions - usually in the worst possible light, usually without respect for nuance - followed by no dialogue/dialectic but rather declarations of condemnation.  (The blatantly dishonest dynamic is also at work at various major media outlets.)  And that's why they are, as Noonan points out, the most hated group in America today, and perhaps the most dangerous.

[Addendum: Just to dredge it up yet again as yet another example of the blatantly dishonest dynamic in question, the left's reckless smearing of Brett Kavanaugh - its one-sided presentation of his accusers' stories as the full story (even Swetnick's obvious lies in some (prominent) instances, if you can fucking believe it) and in its utter disregard of the rebuttals from the other side.  So when I bring up how dangerous these deranged dishonest people are, just imagine if they had the run of the place and what would happen to the likes of Kavanaugh then.  The parallels with the Title IX campus kangaroo court procedures are clear.]

Music to my eyes: Noonan on "progressives"

(imagery and sound I might associate with such a smackdown would be the album cover and sequence beginning here)

I can't recall Peggy Noonan (WSJ, 1/4/20) laying it on quite so hard on anyone before, and she's absolutely fucking spot on:

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives [sic] who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism.  In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them.  They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over.  They never have a second move.  Bow to them, as most do, and they'll accuse you of even more of newly imagined sins.  They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral.  Actually they're not.  They're mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.  [Unable to achieve on a level field of play: Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!  Brandt will fill you in on the details.]

Everyone with an honest mind hates them.  Someone will finally move effectively against them.  Who?  How?  That will be the story of the '20s, and a good one.

As to who might pull this off and how, I have a bit of an idea, at least with regard to the "how" part: an indispensable part of any maximally effective strategy for standing up to these cowardly bullies is to go right to the source: the goddamn cancerous Academic Left and its systematic, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt intellectual dishonesty.  These destructive, anti-capitalism, commie-sympathizing, anti-America, anti-commonsense scum have built into their very MO (or, if you will, their intellectual DNA) every which tactic in the book to shit all over the basic principles of fair and decent dialogue.  They insist on caricaturing and smearing their political opposition at every opportunity, and on ignoring the toughest challenges from same.  They pretend to themselves and (insultingly) to others that their idea/arguments are no-brainer winners over the competition (and hence that the competition must be the dumb/despicable ones).

Not nearly as bright as they think they are; chock full of hubris/conceit/smugness; more clever than wise and not very clever at that; ignoble and base; unserious; unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit; intellectually reckless, lazy and wasteful; evasive under challenge; dogmatic; fanatical; beholden to cult/groupthink; authoritarian; proto-totalitarian; ugly of soul and spirit; chronically hateful; and philosophically vacuous and illiterate (for which the win-win solution is right under their very snooty noses).  Oh, who might face down these putrid motherfuckers, indeed....

We might start with revoking any supposed claims these nincompoops have to the labels "woke" or "progressive" or anything of the sort.  Those words they don't get to claim for the hot mess they've made/become.  No, they don't need to be removed, destroyed, or defunded by an angry mob of taxpaying Americans -- not as long as they clean up their fucking act.

[Addendum: more common sense along these lines from another newly-discovered blog.  (Again, how didn't I discover it earlier, rather than have my attention directed toward (e.g.) the twitter cesspool?...).]

Latest on the cancerous Academic Left run amok

Surprise, surprise - lots of obvious race and sex discrimination has resulted from the UC's "diversity statement" protocol.

Given the demographics involved - women and many of the favored minorities are more likely to be politically on the left - the so-called required diversity statements at Berkley/UC are veritably designed (in an evolutionary-mutation sort of way) to increase the presence of leftists on campus.  I mean, it was fucking obvious from the get-go what the agenda is here.  This is the Academic Left doing what it does - enforcing ideological conformity by whatever means it can get away with.  They're commies at heart, purging the impure elements to get down to a hard core of the ideologically inbred, research quality be damned.  (Their own versions of Lysenkoism couldn't be far behind - could it?)

And without legalities getting in the way - as is likely to occur under our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (these pathetic fucks would call that a racist dog whistle, or something) - they would keep on doing it more and more until they've created a completely discredited intellectual trainwreck.  They just can't help themselves, can they.

If you don't see a connection between this trainwreck-in-the-making and the scummy history-rewriting (currently in the process of being discredited by appalled historians) going on at the NYT, then maybe you suck at pattern recognition.  This is the same shit being played out in (only slightly?) superficially different ways.

This is what happens when American leftists as we now know them have the run of the place.  Ultimately it'd be all AOCs all the time, a thorough brainwashing with all opposition dismissed as racist/fascist/sexist/capitalist/imperialist.

For fuck's sake, like there wasn't a nonstop avalanche of evidence of this meltdown already?  Just watch - if/when the UC ideological-conformity statements run into too many legal challenges, the ideological-conformity motherfuckers will do what they can to weasel around them with something even more outrageous, offensive, and twisted.  It's what they do.

This cancer has taken over and just about destroyed the Demo-rat Party and the moderates don't know what to do; they've all been schooled in America-is-racist and capitalism-is-evil memes by the Academic Left and that's what contextualizes their areas of disagreement.  Just how much wealth and privilege of white males needs to be expropriated, exactly?  Exactly how much do corporations exploit the non-CEO workers who create all the value?  Exactly how flimsy do sexual assault allegations against white males have to be before they can be disbelieved at long last?  That kind of shit, not the stuff that middle-Americans disagree about.

The Dems' least-unqualified candidate at this point, the least ridiculous-looking when put up against the Racist Power-Abusing Sitting President, is an old, white male.  The presumptive future of the party is AOC, an obvious trainwreck situation; I'm not sure even Mayor Pete can stem the far-left tide here.

The Blue States' public-union-controlled budgets and always-escalating minimum wages are being sustained by prolonged and solid economic growth; what's their backup plan for if/when the shit hits the fan there?  Blame capitalism/Republicans/white privilege yet some more and hope/pray swing-state voters and not just Academic Leftists will find them credible?

Lastly: Is there any prominent, outspoken figure on the Academic Left these days who isn't a piece of shit?  Because if he/she is not calling out the Academic Left for being the giant cancerous mound of shit that it clearly is, then he/she is part of the problem.

The very premise of "the 1619 project"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve

I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.

The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.

This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits.  (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.)  It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it.  The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it).  It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities.  What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?

Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research.  For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA?  Is the DNA defined by the Constitution?  Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good?  Of course not.  There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land.  What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."

This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness.  It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding.  Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly).  It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day.  (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative).  Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap.  It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied.  And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap.  And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan.   (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory."  CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue.  If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments.  How is all this not obvious ffs?)

Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery?  Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant?  What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment?  Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy.  What's more or truly fundamental?

Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery?  That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different.  But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element.  But again, how does one avoid triviality here?

After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed.  No one disputes this.

But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim?  If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form.  But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century).  That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what?  In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended.  (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years.  Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)

Maybe I've missed something here.  As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so.  But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.)  And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists).  (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond .  How can capitalism as such be brutal?  What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital?  Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition?  If so, I must have missed them doing so.  Are markets inherently brutal?  If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?)  They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected).  Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.

That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system.  Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.

In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.

Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children?  Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process.  And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources?  From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there.  They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?

And where does the NYT go from here?  Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next?  Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model?  (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)

What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters.  It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually.  That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.

I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist.  But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright.  That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again."  It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville.  (How could they not deliberately omit the context?  The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all.  Fucking liars, plain and simple.)  And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars.  And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors?  How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?

More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes.  (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned.  It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]).  It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems.  I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.

[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe.  (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.)  In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...).  (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith?  Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.)  As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other.  A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production).  I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving.  Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.'  (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]