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?

What quality Rand scholarship looks like

I've just had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of Volume Three of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand's Political Philosophy (2019).  It is by Darryl Wright (one of the members of the Society's steering committee), and is titled, "The Place of the Non-Initiation of Force Principle in Ayn Rand's Philosophy."  It is available as a free sample at the book's website.

(Polemical paragraph...)
It puts all the Rand-bashing hackery ranging from sloppy to reckless out there in a very different light.  Rand-bashing (as distinct from fair and honest criticism, which I anticipate in the later chapters of this book; the bashing basically characterizes Rand as a cruel hack herself who appeals only to pimply adolescents) is all blatantly dishonest, every last bit of it, and every Rand-basher qua such, without exception, is a blankety-blank lowlife.  Here is just one recent example of it at reddit's badphilosophy subreddit, a forum which purports to highlight and ridicule the myriad examples of usually-amateurish thinkers and ideas falling afoul of respectable and serious philosophical practice (supposedly Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are egregious offenders in addition to Rand).  The blankety-blanks at the askphilosophy and main philosophy (sic) subreddits are little better when it comes to Rand.  (Reddit as a whole is toxic/leftist/structurally dishonest in its political aspect; its upvote/downvote model - itself structurally dishonest - is a lower-pleasure-indulging popularity contest rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.) There is no excusing said behavior given all the scholarship that's been available for decades now from professional philosophers/scholars demonstrating that Rand can be understood adequately by competent and careful interpreters, and the bashers will be judged accordingly in the eyes of history.  They have obstructed progress on the wider consideration of crucial neo-Aristotelian philosophical themes (as are in evidence in Wright's article, Den Uyl and Rasmussen's work, Tara Smith's book, Sciabarra's work, etc.).  Speaking of which, Volume Four of the Society's series, in preparation, is specifically focused on Rand's comparative relation to Aristotle, the man whom no one but philosophically ignorant STEM-lords and whatnot dare to bash (and whom, as the man said of his teacher Plato, not even the wicked have the right to praise).

One of the virtues of Wright's article is to situate Rand's thought within certain themes and controversies in philosophy as they've been traditionally approached.  It is particularly memorable how Wright masterfully summarizes (and it is only a summary or condensation) Rand's epistemology or theory of proper cognitive functioning - which, as any serious student of Objectivism knows, makes fundamental reference to the role of hierarchy and context in knowledge-formation.  I like his reference not just to concept-formation but concept-maintenance, an active ongoing process that incorporates new information.  It had always struck me as a bit odd how Rand and Objectivists would speak of the formation part without explicitly referencing the maintenance part.  Bashers might say that this is an example of Objectivists' being sloppy and incomplete, but the Objectivists (most of them, usually) are implicitly if not explicitly intellectual perfectionists doing the best with what time and resources they've got, no thanks to the so-called professional mainstream.

An example of where Wright ties themes in Objectivism to 'mainstream' disputes occurs on p. 38, footnote 26, where he brings up the familiar notion of observation being "theory-laden."  He ties this to the 'Objectivism-speak' about the "prior context of general knowledge that guides the assimilation of the evidence."  Another fine example of Wrights tying-in of themes is his characterization of Rand's concept of knowledge as awareness (Rand uses the phrase "mental grasp") as distinct from 'justified true belief.'  I remember back in the day (the previous century most likely, probably on Jimmy Wales' MDOP) first being introduced to the interpretation of Rand's conception of knowledge as awareness, and it had always struck me as very plausible or correct given the difficulties that arise with the traditional 'justified true belief' formulations.  It strikes me as one point on which epistemologists might take a helpful cue from Rand/Objectivists/Peikoff.  (Wright more than once references lecture 1 of Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy course, a lecture which also made a favorable impression on me.)

Wright raises an example of an item of genuine knowledge as follows:

"A concept classifies together a potentially unlimited class of the referents to which it applies, and an inductive generalization similarly purports to identify the attributes of or relations among an unlimited set of particular instances. For instance, a statement such as “The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” condenses a wide body of (ultimately perceptual) evidence and applies to an unlimited number of cases past, present, and future." (p. 35)

“The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” is as incontrovertible an item of knowledge as any, which should tell you right off that skeptics are in the weeds and shouldn't be taken seriously.  The only issue of real concern is the how for arriving at/validating such an item of knowledge, which is a yuuuuge topic but . . . well, to apply the principle of induction here I'm going to go to the Series page at UPitt Press's website, click on the Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (2013) link, go down to the sample link at the same location I found the Wright piece's sample link at the Foundations of a Free Society link, and voila, Gotthelf's article, "Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Rethinking Abstraction and Essence."  See?  Induction works.

One word to note in Wright's paragraph above - one that caught my attention when Peikoff used it in one of the early lectures of his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand course - is the word "condenses."  What conceptual knowledge/awareness does is to condense the vast range of perceptual observations/awareness, with higher-order abstractions or also what Rand terms abstraction from abstraction, condensing the more rudimentary concepts into broader classifications and ultimately into organized theories or sciences or episteme.  This condensation-function of concepts is referenced directly by Rand with her discussion of unit-economy.  I apply the principle of unit-economy a lot in my postings when I provide contextualizing hyperlinks so that all the content doesn't have to be reproduced in one blog post (since blog posts can get long enough as it is...).  They serve more as a file-folder (using Rand's imagery) to reference as the need arises.  (It helps to organize one's mental contents really well, in order to make the recall function that much more useful/effective.)  It's a very nice principle to have induced and to apply, since contextualization of bold and controversial-sounding claims (e.g., Rand-bashers qua such invariably are scum) is fucking great.

It should be pointed out that Wright's article situates Rand's principle of the non-initiation of force within her broader philosophical theory, i.e., it contextualizes it for purposes of what follows in the book.  The whole point of Rand's having formulated an epistemological theory (explicated in fuller detail in Peikoff's works, most importantly OPAR) is a practical one: in order for a human being to flourish most effectively, the human must exercise the conceptual/knowing faculty most effectively, for which the human requires a systematic guide for operating, i.e., for organizing mental contents.
This has something to do with the principle of dialectic, what Sciabarra identifies in fundamental terms as the art of context keeping, which has fundamentally to do with mental integration, which fundamentally guides the principle of the wikipedia hyperlinking format as I'm sure Wales was well aware of.  I mean, heck, Wales' introduction to Objectivism was the Lexicon.  Note also that Rand's description of the fundamentality of philosophy in human cognition is exactly-correctly reflected in the hierarchical fundamentality of philosophy in wikipedia's hyperlink structure.  So to recap: Wales induces an organizing principle from the Lexicon, applies it to the now-widely-used wikipedia, proves Rand right about philosophy's fundamentality, and the Rand-bashers have what to stand on, exactly?  Zilch.  Well, they do have a point (by accident) about her polemics (most notably her Kant ones), but they're way bigger offenders themselves in that regard, so they still lose.

As one might have induced from the above, the above organizes and condenses a lot of principles into a few paragraphs, buttressed by the presumptively-knowledge-expanding function of internet hyperlinking.  (In the internet age, what's the Rand-bashers' excuse, or the excuse for blatantly ignorant opinion-formation generally?)  The perfectionistic/perfective condensing habit takes cultivation and effort to form and maintain, and that effort is one of focusing one's mind, and it is this act of focus that is the irreducible fundamental element of human volition or free will.  As I'm sure Wright explains in full detail in his next chapter in Foundations for a Free Society, "Force and the Mind," and as Peikoff explains in detail in lecture 8 ("The Evil of the Initiation of Force") of his Objectivism Through Induction course, physical force is antithetical to this volitional knowledge-formation-and-maintenance process.

Force is the partly or wholly successful attempt to substitute the free and independent judgment of a person's mind/intellect with someone else's, and that is antithetical to the cognitive requirement of objectivity, i.e., of the necessary processing of mental contents for knowledge and decision-making in the service of one's life/flourishing.  (Rand introduces this point in the language of objectivity or of the objective/intrinsic/subjective triad in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" of which no one has even attempted a rebuttal in 50+ years, it's that definitive and final in the essentials.)  Rand uses the term "physical force" to emphasize that it is a physical action that severs the relation between the victim's (free) thoughts and (coerced) actions - the closest thing to an actual real-world duality or opposition between the mental and the physical, if you will.  See also my recent posting, "The core libertarian principle explained" for more.

To wrap up: now that this post has provided a flavor of what quality, clue-having Rand scholarship and Randian method looks like, we can safely flush the willfully clueless Rand-bashers down the toilet and safely give serious Rand scholars the attention and consideration they (and Rand) deserve.  (2019's other "scholarly," university-published (yikes) Rand book, leftist scumbag Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl, provides the definitive contrast case, right down to the blatantly dishonest smear that is its title.  [The gullible ignoramuses in the comments section of a new video with Scumbag Duggan, in which they slime and smear Rand as a sociopath and her admirers as gullible ignoramuses, without showing the least bit of effort at rudimentary fairness and mutual/empathetic understanding - it's like they go out of their way and bend over backwards not to make such an effort - should take a good, hard look at themselves.])  Both the (abnormal) bashers and the (normal) critics tend to say things about how Rand just isn't rigorous or systematic enough in her writings to be taken seriously as a philosopher (or as a world-historically great or important philosopher at least on the level of, say, a Rousseau or a Marx if not a Spinoza or Nietzsche), but the case of Wright and others shows that anyone who studies the relevant materials carefully can identify and explain the rigor and systematicity in Rand's thought.

[Addendum: I've mentioned/link a number of Peikoff's courses but the one that any serious student or reputable scholar of Objectivism needs to be familiar with, just on the basis of its name alone if nothing else, is his Understanding Objectivism one (also in book form).]

[Addendum #2: re Rand's anti-Kant polemics referenced above (and again now), I will at some point address what appears to be an unacceptable part of the ethical theory as he presented it - though not really a part of neo-Kantian ethical theories I've been exposed to, just as with his infamous argument against lying to protect the innocent from a prospective murderer (as distinct from a duly contextualized virtue of honesty that rationally compels taking deceptive measures to protect the innocent from the murderously wicked). What would be unacceptable is that Kant appears to hold the view that continuing life in an indefinitely miserable state rather than committing suicide is the morally preferable option.  That's what Rand gleans from the one passage of his that she ever quotes at any length (from the Groundwork, and which is contained in her "Kant" Lexicon entry just again linked - "It is a duty to preserve one's life..."), about the man who is miserable but continues on out of a sense of duty.  Alternative and perhaps overly charitable readings of the passage are that he's merely applying the otherwise helpful inclination/duty distinction ("duty" meaning the morally obligatory recognized by the actor as such, grounded in Kant's theory in the Categorical Imperative(s) [about which Rand is unacceptably silent all the while she bashes him]).  The Aristotelian virtuous person/character is one for whom virtuous action and desire are harmoniously integrated, where (employing Susan Wolf's terminology as applied to life's meaning) subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness (or perhaps the noble or fine or kalos).  Why not say that remaining alive but miserable, or truth-tellingly exposing the innocent to the murderously wicked, is to treat one's own or the innocent's humanity merely as a means to a theoretical abstraction?  Or, is Kantian ethical method (re: e.g., respecting humanity as an end-in-itself) an empty formalism as some critics have claimed, unless supplemented or contextualized by things other ethical theories consider important?  [Note: I need to study Parfit's impressive-looking synthesis of Kantian with other ethical theories, although a maximally impressive theory would incorporate virtue ethics, of which Aristotle is the most prominent/influential exponent.]  That being said, see my "Core libertarian principle explained" link where principles widely recognized as 'Kantian' or 'deontological' are employed, although in a context that's foundationally Aristotelian/eudaimonist.  [General note about standards for effective polemics, especially philosophical ones: They should follow those Dennett/Rapoport Rules as a matter of habit, which implies that characterization of X should rise to the standard of what seasoned scholars of X accept as accurate (which is how so many anti-Rand polemics can be dismissed from the get-go; the proper standard there might be, "Would Darryl Wright or other Ayn Rand Society scholars or Leonard Peikoff take it seriously?"), and they should be done at enough length to uproot all the assumptions that lead to a complex theory worth polemicizing against.  I've pointed to Mises' polemics against Marxism/DiaMat as an example of how to do polemics, and while they meet the length requirement, I'll have to look at how his characterizations hold up after I go through the high-paywalled Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx published last year.  But he is quoting directly from Marx's condensation/summary statement of historical materialism in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy....]]

Loathsome leftist loser Leiter & Co.'s "black book of capitalism"

Note that the so-called black book of capitalism the leftists imagine there to be is a reaction to the damning evidence (namely, 100 million dead and millions brutalized/demoralized) presented in the Black Book of Communism.

I've taken the loathsome Leiter to task before on his anticapitalist/leftist intellectual sloth, his one-sided cherry-picking of the evidence,  etc.  But this just about takes the cake.  As against all the data available at ourworldindata.org, Leiter cherry-picks this one article about suicide rates in the USA as evidence of capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to imagine some causal connection) - or the global neoliberal juggernaut, if you will - making life simply unbearable for ever more people.

I mean, why now, all of a sudden, did capitalism get around to upping the despair/suicide rates?  Globalization and/or automation outsourced their jobs and so it's capitalism's fault that the mostly-public, mostly-Demo-rat-run education (sic) system was too piss-poor to prepare people for the transition?  You basically are in mindless doubling-down territory if you try to keep up a leftist narrative.  You'll notice that the 3.5% unemployment rate gets no mention, capitalism gets no credit for that.  The number just isn't all that important; by definition . . . let me try to mimic leftist thought processes here for a moment, and tell me if you haven't seen it a thousand times . . . the unemployment rate only includes eligible labor force, those seeking work vs, those who have work, which excludes those who've given up perhaps in hopelessness and despair which is due to the private ownership of the means of production because . . . this is where it gets really tricky and I don't claim to know where it might go from here.  One thing's for sure, if they didn't choose to learn from Mises and Rand and the 100 million killed by Reds when they had ample opportunity to do so, then they're probably never going to learn.

Shouldn't these nitwits just stick to the climate-change-discredits-capitalism narrative?  It's a lot less difficult to keep a plausible story straight there - that is, until you dialectically/contextually/hierarchically, if you will (considering both presuppositions and implications, etc.) bring in the role of future tech (AI, etc.), in which case it looks like the leftists are losers there, too.  Yes, indeed, the age of the neoliberal global juggernaut has brought with it one of the greatest things the world has yet seen - the Internet - and it is true, despite the benefits of all that, despite all the raw data/info it makes available to your average inquirer, it hasn't resulted in  particularly improved integrators of data on average across the population.

If anything, given the tendencies of the left-run education (sic) institutions - the case of Leiter being representative of the intellectual rot smugly trying to pass as sophisticated and superior - it has produced inferior information-integrators.  What else is the notoriously toxic twitter sewer but a bunch of inferior info-integrators sucking each others dicks (or using mouth on whatever of each others' genitalia) and imagining Trump/America to be racist and everything is getting worse because of capitalism stuff.  No, it couldn't be because the education (sic) system is failing to meet expectations, it gets a C-minus or so in the cognitive-skills-value-added dept. despite all the extra dough poured in there, and the taxpayers' patience is wearing thin (advantage: Trump/GOP).  No, the thing for the (loathsome) leftist and twitter spittler to do is to double down and blame capitalism (private property), somehow.

But getting back to the real world here: the primary causal factor in human affairs, if you examine it thoroughly and carefully, is the mental and intellectual, with material production value-added a subordinate causal consequence (i.e., historical materialism is conceptually untrue).  And something something the fundamental role of philosophy in human intellectual life (and implications for educating children [a proven success wherever tried] as well as everyone else who's eligible in the ways of philosophic inquiry), a point I've been making a lot over the course of this blog (see, e.g., the 'Intro' link, "Better Living Through Philosophy, in broad outline," at the top of this blog posting).

And it'd sure be damn nice if the leftist losers would stop smearing Ayn Rand at every opportunity and actually make an effort to grasp her point (about, e.g., "the role of the mind in man's existence").  The "best" that the academic left has come up with these days is a hit-and-run smear piece by the intellectual thug Scumbag Lisa Duggan, saying that Rand's point is something about being a "mean girl" - that this "mean girl" thing is more centrally and fundamentally connected to Rand's worldview than (say) the role of the mind in human existence or the Benevolent Universe Premise or heroic sense of life.  Nope, it's not about any of that; it's about Rand having this chip on her shoulder about those folks who proclaim that man's life is the state's to dispose of; this makes her the mean one here, you see.

The loser-left argues against capitalism pretty much as, well, as dishonestly as it argues against its various lame caricatures of Rand.  There pretty much had to be a convergence of both methods and subject matter here (and to a lesser extent this applies to the left's non-response to Mises), since Rand made the fundamental-level identification about the role of the mind/reason/intellect in the capitalistic production process and how that had to lead to the huge advances in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (and the founding of America the nation, as Rand is quick to point out is pivotal to human progress pace the ignorant anti-America leftists smears).  As long as the left refuses to engage reality and/or Rand on this point - about the effectiveness of capitalism at bringing out elite intellectual contributions of economic producers (and this may have something to do with yet another interesting cognitive principle Rand identified: unit-economy) - they will continue to fail in their smear campaigns.  If they engage Rand/reality on this fundamental point (no thanks to the likes of Scumbag Duggan or Comrade Leiter, who actively destructively interfere with doing so), it will be a win-win.

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?...).]

Damore vs. Google: the case for the plaintiff

I relish writing posts like this one because I have absolutely no patience for intellectual dishonesty, and the whole left-ish so-called social justice movement, and so-called diversity and inclusion (D&I), and so-called political correctness (a term that has become one of disapproval, although it didn't have to), as these things have actually been promoted and practiced by left-ish types, have institutionalized intellectual dishonesty to a very considerable extent.  [Follow-up posting on the dishonest dynamic of present-day leftists here.]

One of the basic de facto rules of this bastardized-by-leftish-types form of "social justice" is:

Go out of your way to misrepresent the ideas/arguments of those who challenge the "social justice" orthodoxy.

Another de facto rule:

Make sure, as much as you can get away with, to replace fair argument responsive to what the opponent actually says, with shaming tactics.

Damore says that Google has institutionalized to some extent a culture of shaming and misrepresentation, and based on what evidence I've seen, he's exactly fucking right, and it's the leftish ones who oughtta be ashamed of themselves.

Let's take one example of what the culture at Google instills in its toeing-the-orthodox-line employees:

Former 'Googler' Yonatan Zunger considered it appropriate to chastise Damore thusly:

I’m going to be even blunter than usual here, because I’m not subject to the usual maze of HR laws right now, and so I can say openly what I would normally only be allowed to say in very restricted fora. And this is addressed specifically to the author of this manifesto.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”

I need to be very clear here: not only was nearly everything you said in that document wrong, the fact that you did that has caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function. And being aware of that kind of consequence is also part of your job, as in fact it would be at pretty much any other job. I am no longer even at the company and I’ve had to spend half of the past day talking to people and cleaning up the mess you’ve made. I can’t even imagine how much time and emotional energy has been sunk into this, not to mention reputational harm more broadly.

And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.

If you hadn’t written this manifesto, then maybe we’d be having a conversation about the skills you need to learn to not be blocked in your career — which are precisely the ones you described as “female skills.” But we are having a totally different conversation now. It doesn’t matter how good you are at writing code; there are plenty of other people who can do that. The negative impact on your colleagues you have created by your actions outweighs that tremendously.

You talked about a need for discussion about ideas; you need to learn the difference between “I think we should adopt Go as our primary language” and “I think one-third of my colleagues are either biologically unsuited to do their jobs, or if not are exceptions and should be suspected of such until they can prove otherwise to each and every person’s satisfaction.” Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come. But our company is committed to maintaining a good environment for all of its people, and if one person is determined to thwart that, the solution is pretty clear.²

I’m writing this here, in this message, because I’m no longer at the company and can say this sort of thing openly. But I want to make it very clear: if you were in my reporting chain, all of part (3) would have been replaced with a short “this is not acceptable” and maybe that last paragraph above. You would have heard part (3) in a much smaller meeting, including you, me, your manager, your HRBP, and someone from legal. And it would have ended with you being escorted from the building by security and told that your personal items will be mailed to you. And the fact that you think this was “all in the name of open discussion,” and don’t realize any of these deeper consequences, makes this worse, not better.

Now, does this sound like a response appropriate to what Damore's manifesto was actually saying, or does it sound more like a lack of willingness to properly engage with Damore's context and replace it instead with strident virtue-signaling?  It sounds a lot more like the latter to me.  What it tells me is that the mentality displayed here is cultivated at Google to such an extent that what really happened is that Google exercised no due diligence/effort to explain to Damore how/where his ideas went wrong, how they present a potential danger of contributing to a hostile work environment, and how he might have the opportunity to correct his errors before it's determined that he and Google aren't a good fit.  (It turns out they aren't a good fit, if the above response to a good-faith presentation of putative science and fact is more or less the "best" that Damore could expect from the company.)

In short: does it sound like this chastisement is written with the aim in mind of anticipating how Damore might respond, or is it basically a one-sided rant?

I recommend reading some of the comments that follow, particularly the quality and tone of those who applaud and pile on.  Do they demonstrate a willingness to actually understand Damore's views, or are they really quick to conclude that he must have been promoting the loathsome ideas they attribute to him?  Keep in mind, as you answer this, the general culture of the American left today when it comes to characterizing opposing views they don't like: are they more likely than not to misrepresent - sometimes blatantly and obviously - their opponents' positions?  Are they more likely than not to jump to the conclusion that a debatable point is instead racist, sexist, etc. and therefore beyond the pale of rational argument?

Because that's the pattern I've been observing on the left these past few years now, and it's fucking disgusting.

Now, contrast the righteous rant from Mr. Zunger above with this comment (by James Gillmore), and see whether you think one is making more of an effort at dialogue, understanding and actual empathy than the other:

After having of course read the manifesto and responded to various comments, here’s my response to one of the comments:

“And the answer to the million dollar question is this [i.e. what the young man should have been told, i.e. what would have been far more helpful]:

“Historically [and currently basically everywhere that doesn’t have these policies], it’s been the other way around, where male-dominated work culture has led to a lot of unfair circumstances for female employees. We’re slowly improving, but we aren’t there yet. In an ideal world, such policies wouldn’t need to exist. For now, we’ve deemed the best thing we can do is offset the imbalance of power as best we can and create a welcoming environment as equally as possible for all. Yes, the policies are an unnatural construct for a larger even more unnatural construct: mega corporations, which can no longer be truly accountable for the people they bring on board. The best answer is JUST TO BE NON-DISCRIMINATORY, but since we are so focused on the greed of our ambitions of growth, becoming small and guaranteeing that is not something we care about. The cost is it leaves males wondering if they are now the ones at a disadvantage, and females doubting whether they earned their position. It’s an imperfect system in an imperfect world, but regardless you are here, and you competed against hundreds of thousands of others, so rest assured you’re more than worthy of your position; and if you’re a male, you’re male after all, toughen up, be a gentlemen and look out for the women in your group! You’re a technologist after all, it’s easier than ever to carve up your own path; if you don’t like it you’re free to go.

*the second to last sentence is an imperfect addendum in an imperfect world that will always be loose around the edges; I don’t think it creates any value to pretend it’s something it’s not.”

And a related response to another thoughtful commenter is this:

“My overall response to what you’re saying — and it’s not something I disagree with — is that the degree of response to this young man also must be just. It’s not just “about degree” — DEGREE IS EVERYTHING. What he’s been grappling with isn’t abnormal — and if the only response is over-reactions like what he received from the now-ex-googler who felt it was his job to bring down the hammer, I don’t think we’re gonna make any progress evolving humanity.

“Here’s the thing: when wrongs or violence (real or imagined or virtual) are acted upon someone, you are more inclined to feel for a victim who is a friend. That’s how empathy is developed. But if everyone is enemies (like Zunger just declared), both sides won’t see each other as friends and will have no motivation to understand each other. That’s why this young man doesn’t understand the pain women have gone through in the workplace, and it’s why women and men like Zunger don’t understand his. Not the pain he’s been through likely as a social outcast, and not the obvious pain of being virtually executed as he has been today. It’s shocking that people can’t put themselves in the shoes of said young men, and instead rejoice in his summary execution — especially when that’s exactly what they are asking of said young man. 2 wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, if this was a relationship and real life (not just a blog article Zunger can distance himself from), it’s usually the person who overreacts that ends up being far more in the wrong and having to clean up the mess (if she/he is a brave well-intentioned individual). If you’ve been in any sort of fight with your significant other and overreacted, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

“With no room for dialog, there is no understanding, and no evolution of viewpoints. Things absolutely can’t be black and white. Similar to good music and art being all about nuance to create a mood, to have any sort of effect, nuance and degree are paramount.

“Some people say “well, the line has to be drawn somewhere.” Definitely, there are cases where fighting back to avoid extinction is the only option. This isn’t one of them. Not the way Zunger handled it. And such circumstances are truly rare at the end of the day.

“The young man wrote a manifesto after all — that means he was open to dialog. In the above link I propose what he should have been told. Catch-22 or not [i.e. the commenter I was responding to pointed out that the manifesto writer put Google in a position of a catch-22, for if they now fired him, that only proves his point that Google isn’t truly inclusive], he can be assertively told why things are the way they are — and actually, there is no catch-22. There’s a reason these policies exist. I agree that a giant cancerous mega corp needs them. So they should simply be able to explain it to said young man. If they can’t, or their unofficial representatives can’t, without overreacting, that’s a problem. If they don’t understand how young males may struggle getting it, that’s really on them and a problem that may in fact be bigger at this point in time.

“Overall I didn’t find Zunger’s response very well thought out, but just a way to jump in a pool of automatic validation and be the hero where one wasn’t really needed — since after all Google does have these policies in place and is willing to act on them; I’m sure said young man will be fired. And no, I don’t think that the young kid or man deserves this sorta smackdown. It’s not right. I’m sorry, it’s just not. No matter, if it’s some manipulative catch-22 ploy by said young man [because said young man is struggling in the workplace because of his actions toward the opposite sex and the negative response from his superiors, and was manipulating to flip the script in his favor, as the commenter I responded to was guessing].

“If Google can’t come up with something to do with him, they’re lacking in imagination and just proves my point that giant centralized corps are on the outs. The young man isn’t Geoffrey Dommer and instead requires guidance. That level of engagement unfortunately is something you rarely find in society. What you get primarily is asshole patriarchal figures like Zunger Games. Keep that in mind when you think of young men — it’s not like the world is brimming with guidance for how to be a “modern man,” while the world is still figuring it out. [in essence, empathy is required at all levels to live up to the pursuit of inclusivity]

“Just take a moment and imagine this was your son. All of 23 years old and possibly social awkward. Imagine him younger, say 10 — where do you draw the line? Now, imagine he’s on the spectrum — after all, we are all on some sort of spectrum as nobody is a master of every circumstance. Would a profile picture that shows he clearly is autistic or has aspergers change things?

“What would you allow to be said to your son in this situation? Imagine your son is 10 and comes to you and says: ‘Mommy/Daddy, why do the girls get to go to the free after school tutoring program, but I don’t and I’m the one who’s failing?” What would you tell him. And at what age does it become unacceptable for him to even ask? Too much power has been given to said young man. He’s likely an insecure young man who just arrived in a workplace with these policies (even if that was 5 years ago), and has known no other. To cast him out as a social reject is bad policy. He will act out like a child you don’t truly engage.

“He’s not alone in the question he had — even for man in their 20s or 30s. Lots of men are wondering this same thing, especially as the world does evolve to incorporate these policies. We aren’t talking Don Drapers coming from a place of status like Zunger. We aren’t talking the scary men in positions of power that women feel psychological acts of violence from. All of this must be considered to have the most effective biggest picture thinking, and grow young men of the future who truly and innately get it. Who don’t feel an entitlement to the workplace over women. Who view women as equals.

“We’re creating the world as we speak, and there are no hard and fast rules (at least not on a public stage). So it’s detrimental that we’re as inclusive and cooperative as possible in ALL circumstances, rather than assume our point of view is so right that it justifies enacting virtual/psychological acts of violence towards another. That’s precisely the pain women feel based on previous work conditions (and current). If nothing else, Zunger made it ok to treat people like that when you feel justified.

“People every day feel justified in actions, only to either realize they’re wrong, or for everyone else to realize it. That’s the “catch-22” of allowing for such harsh over-reactions — you’re not always going to be “right.” If there is a “rule,” it should be that you should always leave room for error and to be wrong. Degree is important, process (how you go about things) is important. I’m sorry, this isn’t the process. It’s just not.

“Let me know your thoughts on what I proposed the response should be. Perhaps we can craft that together.”

---

So that’s the latest. I urge everyone to think with as big of a picture as possible when discussing this. This isn’t somehow some easy obvious topic, like Zunger indicated, conveniently allowing him to skip over it. If it was, this wouldn’t be happening. Manifestos wouldn’t be going out, you wouldn’t be hearing about it all year in the tech press. The policies wouldn’t exist in the first place. This is an opportunity for the tech world to really champion some challenging issues while showing the world both sides can come to a collective solution.

Lambasting either side isn’t the way. It makes zero sense for said young man to write the most thoughtful assessment he could come up with, and to be shutdown so harshly with zero explanation, given what I’ve pinpointed out about growing understanding men of the future. He truly doesn’t get it. And the other side truly doesn’t get that he doesn’t get it. Nobody gets anything because there is no communication. Everybody is enemies. Nobody is friends. Nobody has any natural motivation to empathize with the other side and understand their pain.

That’s all it would take for said young man to get why the policies are in place, and not end up writing a manifesto that frames women as less fit than men in the workplace. And if not him, at least the next young man.

Doing what Zunger did, as heroic as it might seem, just perpetuates a world where nobody is motivated to understand each other. What he has done creates enemies. And yes, there’s a place to draw the line, but degree is absolutely everything. I suggest to people who side with the young manifesto writer to seek to understand the psychological violence women feel is and has been enacted upon them throughout history by men assuming they are unfit, and I suggest to the women and men who don’t seem to understand this young man to recognize he’s not coming from a place of power like a CEO, he’s likely insecure, young, introverted and the only work world he has ever known is where there are policies which seem to put him at a disadvantage. (And also think of him as if he was your struggling child and Zunger just did this to him). In other words, he doesn’t recognize his own power/value. Neither side does.

Just maybe this young man could be a convert if he was talked to another way.

Lastly, the problem of the people of planet earth is simply that they retaliate too easily. If we don’t evolve past that, we’ll destroy the planet. Especially given how fast technology has evolved in the recent stint of peace that we take for granted.

Now, this comment sounds like basic common sense, i.e.: what about Damore's context?  Should that be taken into account a lot more before firing him?  And is it Google & Zunger's assumption that Damore is not amenable to correction where that may be warranted?  And is such an assumption an honest one?

I think the linked medium thread captures in a nutshell, at the level of metadata as it were, the way the left-ish quasi-egalitarian SJ/PC/D&I [sic] crowd tends to conduct itself in (sorry excuses for) debates.  The pattern repeats itself all over the place in the news.  They smeared Prof. Wax as a racist for her "bourgeois values" argument.  They smear Trump and his supporters all the time as racists, sexist, etc., and most often where they have no clear warrant in doing so.  I think it's all quite fucking shameful and anti-philosophical.  Now, are they open to correction wherever that is much warranted?  Well, there's the free-will answer - they ultimately have it within them to stop being such epistemically-unjust pieces of shit - and then there's the "what is the prevailing culture of leftish doctrine and practice nowadays" answer - i.e., they seem pretty steadfastly committed to remaining epistemically unjust pieces of shit for the foreseeable future, alarm bells ringing and all.

I think that if indeed it's Mr. Zunger's post more than Mr. Gillmore's (the latter's) that represents the mentality in Google's HR, then Google deserves every PR hit from this that it gets.  Zunger's rant may have the surface appearance (to the less discerning) of being solution-oriented, but it's not.  Whatever benefit Damore might have gotten from it is drowned out by the negativity of it and the jumping to various conclusions about him that have the actual function of being mean-spirited and destructive rather than constructive.  Gillmore's post is quite clearly more solution-oriented.

So basically the gist of today's leftish so-called 'diversity and inclusion' movement amounts to this: if you don't toe the line and accept the orthodox assumptions, if you challenge those assumptions (pointedly or otherwise), if you speak your mind as classic rules of free and open dialogue would encourage while presenting what is not obviously bad evidence that runs counter to the orthodox narrative, if you are basically intellectually honest in the process . . . that's not going to help you.  You are likely to be misrepresented, shamed, canceled, unplatformed, smeared, piled on, and generally treated with epistemically-unjust disrespect.  If you're a white male, you're likely to be told that you're coming from a standpoint of privilege and that you fail to empathize with those less privileged, and those telling you that will see no irony in any of this.

One of the virtues that many people see in Trump is his willingness to treat this horseshit for what it is: to call out those who engage in it as the ones who should be shamed for their dishonesty.  When Trump says he has no time for political correctness (sic), what he's actually saying is that he has no time for a culture of systemic dishonesty masquerading as being politically correct.  Damore wasn't being dishonest or disrespectful.  I can't say the same for Google or Zunger.

And that's really what all this comes down to.  Is the predominant intellectual culture of today's left (especially the further left you go) honest and respectful?  No, it is not.  It encourages scumminess toward those who don't toe the line, whatever their reasons for not assenting.  The pattern repeats itself so much and so often as to be unmistakable.  To bring up yet another example on top of the gobs of them already linked in this blog's postings: David Horowitz, ex-New Leftist.  Did his leftist former friends and colleagues treat his 'apostasy' with honesty and respect, or with malice and logically-slipshod/lazy or outright groundless shaming?  The latter(, of course).

But let's not forget about the source of what Google HR, the Demo-rats, the mural-erasing San Francisco school board, the Rand-bashers, the Sowell-ignorers, the Title IX kangaroo court managers, the 'diversity and inclusion' hypocrites, the rent-controllers, the race-hustlers, the #MeToo abusers/Swetnick-believers, the biological-males-in-women's-sports activists, CNN/MSDNC/NYT, the illegal immigration incentivizers, the suspiciously eager gun-grabbers, and the rest of the sorry bunch & enablers have been up to: All of this is egged on and made possible by the fundamentally, systemically dishonest Academic Left who've squandered every benefit of the doubt by this point.  (Let's not forget the hubris that leads them to the notion that those who disagree with them are invariably intellectually and morally inferior - and to their tailoring their response to uncomfortable triggering arguments/ideas accordingly, typically by characterizing them as worse than they are or were ever intended to be.)  If you suspect that someone like Damore is much more a victim than an offender in this affair, you would possess way more common sense and decency than this bunch of loathsome losers.

[Addendum: Is there a case in all fairness to be made for the defendant?  Well, how about this for fairness: Google gets just as much of a fair hearing as they gave Damore - which is to say, jack shit.  Got a problem with that?  How about this to boot: its CEO is a doubletalking, chickenshit appeaser who damn well oughtta know better what is required of treating people with basic decency and respect, as opposed to giving into blatantly obvious illogic and smears.  Treating Zunger and Gillmore even so much as on par with one another = Asshole.  [Alternatively: the cases for the defendant and plaintiff were already pretty much made by Zunger and Gillmore, respectively.  In the linked thread Zunger was cheered on by lesser, sloppy minds even though it's clear to any careful and honest observer which of the two had the upper hand in justice.  Zunger's case is roughly about as "good" as we can expect from the Google side (and note how one-sided it is while purporting to be fair-minded), and under Gillmore-like scrutiny the Google/Zunger case is despicable - and deep down every person of justice knows it, which is why so many are alarmed and pissed about this.  The NLRB having made an Orwellian-style determination in Google's favor changes none of this; it is out of its depth on the fundamental matter of justice/fairness here and it's sad to see "social justice" illogic spread into taxpayer-supported agencies.]]

[Addendum #2: Heterodox Academy carries out an analysis of the data/studies about the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis that the powers that be at Google were too cowardly, dishonest, and PC-whipped to conduct.  And to further contextualize, this critique of Damore's argument tries to be fair/charitable, and for the most part it is, but I don't think entirely.  (It's definitely better than Zunger's anti-charity bullshit.)  But whether it's entirely fair is pretty much neither here nor there in this context.  What this critique represents is something that Google didn't seem to even attempt before firing Damore without further inquiry, i.e., actually present a substantive critique.  And while this critique isn't presented in a format that gives the critique-ee (Damore) a chance to respond, revise, reconsider, relent, etc., Google certainly had a moral obligation to give him that chance, in the spirit of fair and honest dialectic or exchange of ideas in the common pursuit of truth, but can one reasonably conclude that Google did so?  Or is the reasonable conclusion that it was being chickenshit, dishonest, etc.?  You have my verdict on that.]