More in re: Huemer: "Please don't be Aristotelian"

"When and how would Aristotle - or more specifically, an Aristotelian - exercise the virtue of sardonic wit?" (asks UP)  "When it's all in fitting proportion and harmony, at the right time, in the right place, in the right measure, a phronemos will tend to figure it out over time.  Like, duh.  (If that means smoking a bowl to get warmed up, then so be it.)" (answers UP)

If there's one thing I learned in philosophy fight club, it's that those who go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line - er, uh, Aristoteles of Stagira, top student of Platon and tutor to Alexander the Great, founder of such systematic disciplines as dialectic, propositional logic, biology, psychology (let's just say De Anima, which I will get to in just a moment), whose theories took some nearly 2000 years for other thinkers to supersede, etc. etc. and whose most lasting and greatest contribution to philosophy as done today is found in the all-important area of ethics, perhaps along with the topic I'll cover next - those who dare denigrate this man as a philosopher have their work cut out for them to say the least.  He keeps getting misrepresented (and like an axiom accepted in the process, etc., as Rand points out) and each time he keeps getting back up.  Compare the shoddy treatment of Aristotle by a Bertrand Russell vs. the clue-having approach of a Christopher Shields & Co. at the Stanford Encyclopedia, just to get a small sampling of the oft-recurring picture here.

How would one be able to spot a first-rate metaphilosopher, BTW?  I have only semi-developed ideas toward systematic and reliable criteria in this regard.  Note that I begin with "dialectic" above, which (presented in a less famous book of writings known as the Topics) is philosophically fundamental to Aristotle's method of approach to any number of life's biggest questions, which yielded great (sprawlingly learned) results then and which I believe can be of timeless and lasting usefulness for human thinkers and actors.  ("Be cognitively and practically perfectionistic ffs.")

So, I'd like to apply Aristotelian method as exemplified in De Anima to contemporary pseudo-disputes in philosophy of mind - specifically, the "question" of whether some kind of substance dualism is necessary to understand the mind-body relation.  (A dialectic approach is by its very nature reactive against dualisms where they are posited....)  On the some-kind-of-dualist side (in the present day, not to mention the most famous and infludential mind-body dualist, Descartes) is David Chalmers, on the some-kind-of-Aristotelian/hylemorphist side is Daniel Dennett, noted atheist (doesn't believe in that supernatural tri-omni God, that's for sure) and (buzzword alert) philosophical naturalist (who might be thereby easily caricatured as a practitioner of scientism, for which see the not-unrelated Rapoport/Dennett Rules [bad news for leftists: advantage Rand & libertarianism]).

Now, Aristotelian-style hylemorphism - coming from the Greek roots for "matter" and "form" - says in basic essence that the soul is the form or organizing principle of a material body (and which in its most mature or developed or perfected activity or energeia - this also seems indispensable to what's Aristotelian proper - also serves as the final cause or telos or (in the case of humans) eudaemonic destiny of the organism).  And the point when it comes to philosophy of mind is that the soul or organizing principle ('mind' in the case of humans; 'sentience' in mentally less complex forms of consciousness) is inseparable from the body, both in the metaphysical sense (of things like dependence of one substance or substrate upon another), and in the conceptual sense (i.e., we can't coherently and sensibly conceive of the body-processes and soul-processes going on apart from one another, because their very nature as matter-principle and form-principle, and their functional and/or teleological explanations are inseparable from one another, and perhaps some other considerations).

My sardonic suggestion is this: dualism as represented by Descartes is a metaphysically inferior and magical-thinking-involving, and Aristotelian-style hylemorphism is not only the superior position but is just plain more commonsensical.  I mean, for fuck's sake already.

Now, there's this phrase sometimes or often thrown about in philosophy of mind discussions: "neural correlates of consciousness."  Now, everyone considerably learned has heard about the phrase "correlation doesn't imply causation."  So "neural correlates of consciousness" are not to be taken to mean neural causes of consciousness.  We wouldn't want to bias our terminology/framing illictly on behalf of a monocausal-dependency-relationship position (complicated by free will, which is a distinct but not unrelated issue), now, do we?  But what, then, does "neural correlates..." do in framing terms if not to indicate that it's a mere correlation or some 1:1 correspondence at best but we would be too quick in our framing to attribute any form of causation to this relationship (and which is perhaps merely put together in thought by habit of association, as Hume might put it)?

So "neural correlates" doesn't help us when some better alternative - let's just pull it out of my ass and call it "neural substrates of consciousness," say - is available to us, now, does it.  And what reason is there not to go with the commonsense understanding that what we have here is consciousness and its neural substrate (which is inseparable from what the hoi polloi might call a central nervous system [ffs already, do the folk really have more wisdom on this topic than the academic hairsplitters and would that be surprising?]).

So it wasn't until modern technology of scientific discovery that we find out in detail about these neural . . . this neural substrate of conscious states whereas before in the history of thought - not within the Aristotelian tradition, mind you, but in traditions of thought where true metaphysically real magic is believed to occur or explain the observed - it was not understood "how" the body would be the one and only container of the soul or mind.  (This "how" might be a simplified version of the famous so-called hard problem of consciousness as Chalmers formulates/frames it.)  But Aristotelian hylemorphism explains how in principle this (mutual?-)dependency relationship (body/matter and soul/form) is not only possible but inescapably necessary.  We just need to get careful in how we formulate mental or subject-perspective or first-person predicates on the one hand, as distinct from (but not altogether dualistically opposed to) how we formulate physical or third-person predicates on the other.

But here is how the first-person and third-person perspectives are inseparably linked in the hylemorphic framework: The MRI machine (say) locates some kind of activity in some portion of the brain and this is (causally) associated with the person's inner mental experience which only that person has direct or any other sort of full access to.  (Empathic pain at another's pain is very much associated with the others' first-person pain-access, but it's a different sort of unwanted mental state, what we might usually say is emotional pain rather than physical pain or bad-sensation.)  This is a commonsense distinction (what I experience on the one hand; what data the MRI picks up on the other), but it doesn't lend any support that I can see to a dualistic framing.  First-person experience is distinct from third-person observation or explanation, is all.

And it seems to me like Descartes, in his otherwise admirably independent-minded zeal to free his thought from scholastic-ish dogmas of a petrified 'Aristotelianism,' ditched the hylemorphic and biologically-based teleology baby along with the cosmic-teleology bathwater, and in the process came up with what must ultimately be deemed a shitty philosophy of mind (with magical thinking about the pineal gland as putative 'locus' of the [coincidental? incidental? occasional? parallel? wtf?] 'interaction' being the icing on the cake).

(On TV now, News channel headline: "Warren accuses Sanders of Sexism."  Really?  That's what gets the mass interest?  Genuinely fascinating... (Also, does Demo-rat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries not see how he's in self-parody mode whenever he uses the phrase "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," like in his latest, "Putin wants to artificially install his buddy Trump once again at 1600...".  This in addition to stuff like "Grand Wizard of 1600...".  The guy's a clown.))

Prof. Huemer likes common sense, he presumably prefers sophisticated explanations for common sense positions should tend to be preferred over the alternatives, we see how sophisticated treatments of the mind/body distinction (ugh) can run afoul of common sense, we can see how Cartesian or other dualism has fundamentally bad or misleading framing of the "problem" whereas Aristotelianism offers a compelling a dialectically-complete solution to the problem (read: compelling explanatory understanding of the phenomena taking systematically into account all the contributing and entailed phenomena), and yet Huemer chides those of us who identify (in serious and fundamental and quite-well-supported ways) as Aristotelian?  (If it's the term "Aristotelian" that's problematic, then: where would an intellectually-perfectionistic/dialectically-complete approach to philosophy of mind lead if not hylemorphism?  Alternatively: how does a non-caricatured (i.e., not eliminative-materialist but rather substrate-reductionist) Dennett not basically have the last word on the "problem"?)

[Addendum: just to make sure that the pro-hylemorphism point is sufficiently battered home: We might hear a dualist say something to the effect of, Well, the component or constituent parts of an organism don't have mental experiences.  The nerve fibers being impinged aren't the subjects of the pain; the organism is.  So that's why we are left to wonder how it is that at organism-scale all these non-conscious components end up giving rise to something conscious?  A parallel question arises with respect to free will: how can an organism composed of mechanically-determined components end up, at organism scale, having free will or self-direction capability?  And yet in both cases the Aristotelian seems to have the answer - that the person raising the question has already given the answer!  IOW: When we speak about what happens at organism-scale, we're already contextualizing what it is that's going on with the component parts such that we can't simply treat the nerve fibers being impinged upon in isolation from the explanatory framework (something something survival value and then also observations about the most mature or developed condition/activity of the organism [self-actualization in the case of humans, etc.]).  In this explanatory framework, the nerve fibers being impinged upon just is the efficient cause - the causing event - of the organism's pain-sensation.  One might say from the third-person explanatory standpoint that it just is the (locus of) the organism's pain-sensation (whether or not the organism is ever aware of the causal explanation).  (Hint: an Aristotelian might bring up distinctions in explanation or causal account as appropriate/fitting for the subject matter., without ruling out multiple accounts applicable to the same phenomena - hence, for example, why he says there are characteristically four distinct causes at work in nature, all interdependent but all contributing something irreducibly distinct and transferable across multiple phenomena.  (The wood constituted by wood molecules serves as a material principle or cause, a formal cause at the level of the wood's principle of organization, and this wood can be put to use either in a boat or in a house - a transferability characteristic.  The principle involved in nervous system tissue appearing across numerous instantiated organisms even though nervous system tissue is by no means easily transferable with present technology, is another example of the fourfold-causal principles at work at and what levels of explanation.)]

[Addendum #2: This is another can of worms, but Huemer basically says "Please don't be an Objectivist (Ayn Rand devotee)."  His interpretation of the content of Randian egoism varies quite a lot from mine (vetted by that Rand-and-dialectics guy at the head of that now-university-published Rand journal).  (The "hypothetical Objectivist" he describes is nothing like the actual friends-of-friends-of-Peikoff I had the great pleasure of real-time interacting with in person this past year; nothing noble-soul- or benevolent-sense-of-life-like about disintegrating a homeless person who adds two seconds to one's commute time.  Like, duh.)  I guess it's these sorts of variations in interpretations that can at least sometimes be philosophically interesting or instructive (as in: better application of Dennett/Rapoport Rules, please; too much failure at this throughout the history of philosophy and thought generally), which is why 'History of Philosophy' can remain a lively field.  Shouldn't we at least be up to snuff as to what/how a (representative figure like a) Christopher Shields understands as being 'authentically Aristotelian', if one isn't particularly interested in spending the bulk of one's scholarly time combing the history-of-philosophy scholarly literature?  (In the case of Rand/Objectivism, the leading scholarly authority around today would be Peikoff, so it helps to have a clue about this guy's input on what's what in Objectivism if one is to issue forth any sort of authoritative-sounding opinions about Rand/Objectivism.  This is by Ayn Rand's own public attestations in 1976 (Ayn Rand Letter) and 1980 (open letter of recommendation appearing in 1997's Letters of Ayn Rand) about Peikoff's expertise in her philosophic thought, no less.)]

Huemer vs. history of philosophy

three philosophers

Re Prof. Huemer's attack on "the history of philosophy" (as he describes it therein; 'Against History') and in particular his (grounds for) saying, "Please don't be an Aristotelian."

As per the previous post I'm transferring over from what is addendum/digression there to main body here:
===

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]

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]

The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)

AOC: an excellent fucking idiot, or a perfect one?

AOC's latest is that there being billionaires is not a morally good outcome.  Last I checked, the increase in the instances of billionaires in the world has come along with vast net benefits for masses of people - including drastic reductions in global poverty.

The data are all there at ourworldindata.org.

Take the iPhone and iPad, for instance.  Someone named Steve Jobs made billions (in net worth, not in mansions and cars and golf courses and hookers and blow and gold coins sitting around in an Olympic-pool-sized vault - but rather, something more like current-value-of-expected-future-revenue-stream, i.e., value-created-over-replacement-level, etc. etc. from the iPhone, iTunes, iPad, etc.) through his serving a vast electronics-hungry market of people worldwide.  All the while, global poverty has plummeted, even in the non-iPad-consuming (but perhaps partly iPad-producing...) parts of the world, and someone probably had to end up having some billions of dollars next to their name in the net worth calculations for that to occur.  Mises explains all this quite well in his work on the role of the business tycoon in satisfying mass customer demands, i.e., cultivating a specialized skill in spotting and realizing value-added.  Rand, of course, perfects the analysis in such a way that Atlas Shrugged provides that much more value-added over and above Human Action -- we're at the very tail end of the distribution here in terms of 20th century political-philosophical acumen . . .

I don't know how much more stupid AOC can get than this.  The other day she was saying that the USA was "evolving into fascisuuuuuuum" all the while we have a better example over in China of a more fascism-like environment that serves as a marked contrast to the world's leading light (the good ol' USA, warts and all) which has the moral capital that China lacks to lay claim to being the world's lone superpower for some time to come.

AOC says that she looks about her and does not find "an advanced society."  Her idea of an advanced society involves something called demo-ratic socialisuuuuum where billionaires don't exist while poverty is eliminated (if you can believe that shit), but I've yet to year about AOC's proposal for philosophical education for children (and ipso facto the rest of the mentally-competent citizenry?) ASAFP which would be the fastest way to ensuring whatever the most advanced society we can reasonably expect to realize, which along the way means dialectical engagement between competing ideas about the good and the right at the highest levels of give-and-take (Dennett/Rapoport Rules, etc.) (that's one problem with the Academic Loser-Left, it's all take and no give with them, "the selfish cunts"?).  Ideally it means all informed citizens do their homework as thoroughly as (e.g.) Rawls and Nozick did, at least on the essentials, so as to engage most effectively with their influential-on-academia treatises?  Ideally it means all informed citizens who keep hearing about this Ayn Rand woman know where to look to find good scholarship on Rand.

(Hint: Gregory Salmieri, editor of the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Rand, and not Scumbag Lisa Duggan, author of 'Mean Girl,' is a reputable Rand scholar.  Scumbag Duggan responds to pointed inquiries about the level of thoroughness and care in her work with evasions and insults.  Also, the only decent critics of Rand these past few decades have been libertarians, e.g., Nozick and Huemer, and even there you find some effective pushback from more Rand-friendly figures like Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen - also reputable Rand scholars who were editors of the first academic publication on Rand's philosophic thought in the 1980s.  Also, Sciabarra is a reputable Rand scholar, and the most reputable of all Rand scholars is, of course, Peikoff, by Rand's own attestation.  In the ideal, Dennett/Rapoport society, anyone wanting to comment on Rand and be taken seriously will be thoroughly familiar with the themes covered in Peikoff's output and not just the already-devastating material in Rand's output, e.g., "What is Capitalism?", "Man's Rights," "The Comprachicos," "Art and Cognition," "This is John Galt Speaking," "Apollo 11," "Don't Let It Go," "Philosophy: Who Needs It," etc.  The Peikoff courses are more like material trying to explain in all necessary painstaking detail the cognitive processes that lead to the skill level involved in penning these and other gripping essays/monologues.)

(Then, induce the principle involved with Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff across all the history of philosophy such that (e.g.) an Aristotle-basher like Bertrand Russell doesn't hold the public's attention in the light of the contributions of a most respected Aristotle scholar like W.D. Ross (Aristotle, 1923; editing the Oxford Translation of Aristotle's work in the early 20th century).  In the ideal advanced society AOC has not provided any helpful cues toward, there will be widespread familiarity with the admittedly difficult ideas of Kant and Hegel and their relevance; this includes widespread familiarity with such 'metadata' as where to look for (e.g.) the most thorough or the most cited of Kant or Hegel scholarship.  One should be able to distinguish most thorough and most cited; e.g., I found Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995) to be the most thoroughly researched academically published work on Rand at least for a good decade or two - prima facie evidence of this is the thorough use of Peikoff's lecture materials as well as books, something that Scumbag Duggan didn't bother with in the slightest - whereas the Peikoff-friendly academics affiliated with the Ayn Rand Society (a reputable source about Objectivism...) have been loath to reference or discuss Sciabarra's work much.  The people and organizations near in orbit to "Objectivist apostate" Dr. David Kelley, or Jimmy Wales' Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy email list in the 1990s and thereabouts were, on the other hand, much interested in discussing Sciabarra's ideas/themes.  I'd like to hear from scholars of Rand, and Aristotle, and Hegel and others about Sciabarra's claims about the Aristotelian provenance of dialectics as he understands it ("the art of context-keeping") and his claims - endorsed in all essentials by avid avowed Aristotelians like the Dougs - of Rand's Objectivism being an expert application of Aristotelian-dialectical essentials in the landscape of 20th century thought (with the necessary scale and scope of integration required to compose Atlas Shrugged being Exhibit A).  (I would also use as examples of dialectical sensibilities in action Aristotle's sprawling research program and Sciabarra's sprawling bibliographic references.)  Why should people in an advanced society expect anything less than care and thoroughness in such research and opinion-forming processes?  I find dialectical sensibilities in action to be a rewarding enterprise.)

An advanced society is also a society comprised of people who are aware of the basics of all the major theories and schools of economics (including the Austrians/Mises), and taught to think about those economics ideas in conjunction with possessing a knowledge of the data at ourworldindata.org.  The juggernaut that is industrial capitalism has almost wiped out extreme poverty, for a population of people approaching 10 billion, and has implemented at profitable scale the technologies that made (e.g.) the iPhone possible.  To borrow a phrase from a Gentle Giant song, is any of this that I'm saying here stuff that Aristotle would discontend?  Not the fool AOC, but the sage Aristotle.  Would his homework-doing lead him to the conclusion that capitalism is exactly as win-win beneficial as Rand and Mises say, that it's particularly difficult to envision a system that can supersede it (he would at least have metadata-level awareness of what's going on in David Ramsey Steele's From Marx to Mises (1992), an exhaustively-researched 20+ page bibliography study, itself one of the 1300 or so works referenced in Sciabarra's Total Freedom, so it's like condensations of condensations of exhaustive research going into the present-day pro-capitalism case...), and that Rand's "What is Capitalism?" captures the essential here (which is a condensation, into one essay, of the theme of Atlas Shrugged) at least as well as anything out there?

Would Aristotle provide a much more thorough commentary upon the work of Sciabarra and the Dougs than what they've received so far from their academic 'peers'?  I mean, are they basically right about Rand's being a rightful heir to the venerable Aristotelian tradition or not?  Or do her polemics leave enough to be desired (e.g. not showing the slightest familiarity with Kant's quandary in the Antinomy of Pure Reason before pronouncing him an evil evader? that sort of thing?) that she falls short of the standards of perfection in dialectic and other conduct that Aristotle tried to exemplify?  I mean, he did say of Plato's theory of Forms/Ideas, 'farewell to such tarradiddle; they are mere sounds without sense,' but at least his rebuttal to the Ideas was explained in detail; Rand never went into detailed polemics against her philosophical 'enemies.'  I guess she comes closest to any such thing in her essay "Causality vs. 'Duty'" inasmuch as it comes into direct conflict with Kant's ideas about specifically moral motivation (that it must be done for duty's sake - that there is something irreducibly autonomous about why we are motivated by moral considerations; it doesn't come down to a calculation of interests or the 'virtue of prudence' but rather assigns an inherent dignity to humanity as such as an end in itself . . . the other aspect of Kant that Rand really never touches upon but which actually best explains his profound influence on mainstream moral philosophizing).  Without coming to grips with Kant's Antinomy and with Kant's project being in great part a response to what he regarded as the Rationalists' (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) pretense to knowledge of supersensible realities - which contextualizes his talk of "denying knowledge to make room for faith" - Rand's attack on Kant's foundational appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy isn't particularly helpful.  (Wouldn't we find a suitably 'Aristotelianized' Hegel more insightful in regard to this and other pesky dualisms?)  Her brief polemical attack on Nietzsche in 1961 ("For the New Intellectual" - an essay that is less than utterly fabulous in its entirety, due to the brief polemical attacks) belies her own early Nietzsche influence and even her own positive words about Nietzsche in 1968 which would contextually account for the sources of Nietzsche's appeal.

But Rand's deficient polemics aside, when she's talking about her own ideas and theories, and applying her thinking and writing habits to contemporary cultural commentary, how is she not a first-rate figure?  I mean, has no one noticed that in the 1960s she had no public-intellectual competition to speak of - that no one was producing anything remotely like the body of theory and observation contained in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967)?  I mean, whatever the value-added-over-replacement-level of works like Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), do they exceed overall and in deepest fundamentals what's going on in C:TUI much less Atlas or The Fountainhead?

Would AOC's advanced society involve people often trying to envision what Aristotle might or might not discontend given all the readily available data about political economy, moral theory, and related areas of study?  Or is AOC's idea of an advanced society predominantly involve people who are as ignorant, intellectually lazy, one-sided, hubris-filled and annoying (if only because she wields real power, a legalized kind involving a gun, in a nominally free country) as AOC?  Do we one-sidedly Chicken Little about the global climate crisis while proposing solutions no consensus of economists could take seriously, while providing no accounting of the pace of technological advancement (in this "not-so-advanced society," see) or - most important of all, as Rand as well as anyone could recognize - the record of humankinds' capacity for problem-solving?

(For example, I am currently in the process of solving or trying to solve how to deliver an incontrovertible, thoroughly researched, one-stop clearing house of a book or series about the eudaimonia/happiness-benefits of a life lived philosophically (and, in the process, discovering the best philosophical paradigm for the organization of life - e.g., is it Aristotelian-style dialectic; or at the least is Aristotelian-style dialectic a better philosophical paradigm or set of organizing principles than, e.g. Marxian dialectical materialism)?  Are there dangers in applying a totalizing 'dialectical' paradigm to the formation of society?  Dangers only with some strands of totalizing dialectics but only benefits with others, like if a society of full-fledged Aristotelians set itself to the task of optimal problem-solving?)

From what I can tell, the Academic Left qua such doesn't produce thinkers like Aristotle or aspiring Aristotelian(-style dialectician)s ; it produces loyal mouthpieces like AOC (and left to run amok it would produce only such loyal "minds") who like routinely to shit all over the things that made America and distinctively Western civilization great, and then to pretend that the USA is a nascent fascist entity when we have a real and very contrasty example of such an entity right in front of our noses in China, as I like to think Aristotle would affirm.  As much as erecting more border barriers might trigger the word "fascism" in AOC's noggin, the wider question being begged is why so many non-white people from around the world would want to gain entry into even a nascently fascist and hateful country.  And, a commonsense question in this context given current Beltway events: Can Xi Jinpeng be impeached for anything?  Given current and past Beltway examples, wouldn't you probably need an opposition party for that thing, much less a minimally effective one?  Seems like only disloyalty to the one, ruling party in China could get one into deep trouble in that context.

So how on earth would this U.S. Representative (NY-14) be so out of it, as to think there are nascent cultural-political forces in the USA that would make us more like the regime in China?  How does someone with a degree in International Relations and Economics from Boston University end up being so out of it as to imagine such things?  How does someone so out of it get an endorsement from Obama?  How does someone so out of it get such a free pass even from the more reasonable and responsible of center-to-left big-govt "liberals" much less the fawning adoration of the far & academic left which unleashed her kind on the polity?  I mean, basically, the academic left has as a core idea for an advanced society something euphemistically and kinda dishonestly called "demo-ratic socialism" but once everyone gets their better-living-through-big-government, punish-the-most-able benefits, where do these advanced citizens go from there presumably with all their new free time?

When do they get around to implementing Philosophy for Children for all schools from grade 3 or so onward?  Why haven't they already, given that it's a no-brainer and the literature makes it perfectly obvious that kids can consider and reflect on bona fide philosophical material (e.g., the nature of justice, happiness, the soul, God)?  What about the whole meaning of life issue?  Is that solved by demo-ratic socialism, or should the citizenry be informed of the state of the art research on the topic, which doesn't seem to make reference to capitalism vs. socialism?  How about applied aesthetics such as getting kids and the citizenry exposed to the essential canon of classical music (in addition to other essential genre-canons, but this one arguably has priority).  Wouldn't there be a closer tie to better living with research into these areas, than with whatever "benefits" supposedly accrue to ordinary folks from a punitively redistributionist fiscal scheme?  (Once the billionaires are outlawed, how do they suppose that the next generation of high-tech goods and services would be realized and delivered at the most feasible combination of quality, price and time saved?  Do these leftists have any viable and sustainable alternative to point to, besides an economic system that has worked better to alleviate human problems than any other economic system on record?)

AOC is faithfully parroting the Academic Left line.  She hasn't really put any careful and thorough thought into any of this stuff, so that leaves us the question: What about the Academic Left itself?  What's its excuse?  How did it fail to put 2 and 2 together by comparing the history of the world before and after modern industrial capitalism and conclude anything other than that it alleviates misery and solves problems (although it tends to do this in unequal measure across the population, which seems to be the real "problem" for the left)?  How does one manage, as does the typical academic leftist, to attribute no credit to capitalism for the problems it solves, while making light only of capitalism's supposed evils - e.g., not crediting capitalism for the dramatic fall in global poverty, but blaming it for climate change (as though there were no connection between these two things, as though it's not the markets-adopting, widespread-absolute-poverty-reducing China with its 1B+ population that is now the world's highest-volume carbon emitter)?

The likes of AOC are where the Academic Left's theoretical rubber hits the political-praxis road.  Is it a remotely impressive result?  Or should we instead rate these phenomena on a scale of (dis)value describing the exact opposite of impressive - e.g., willfully destructive?  Would there be a more perfect example of the willfully destructive run amok than a critical mass of AOC mentalities?  Through the usual pressures for ideological purity on the left, wouldn't a critical mass of AOC types end up being indistinguishable from 20th century Red movements?  If we replace "AOC types" with "Academic Left types" do we get any more encouraging an answer?  Is the Academic Left a perfect fucking idiot?  Any more/less so than the genuine 'fascist Right'?  As for combating climate change, can we leave this to the reasonable and responsible experts in the sciences of the doable?  Past performance tells me that such types are not to be found on the far left; even so much as a loser as Nancy "Keeping out Illegal Border Crossers is Immoral" Peloser recognizes what an obvious epic loser the Green Dream or whatever it is, is.  Cutting poverty increases carbon emissions, ceteris paribus.  What isn't held equal is population size, technological capital, and human problem-solving capacities.

And so the loser-left's last-gasp effort to destroy capitalism is to destabilize the poverty-reduction effort to "save the planet" while giving no accounting on the other side of the ledger of these other not-held-equal things?  The same bunch of leftists who delivered and/or apologized for 20th century socialism - those unaccountable intellectual thugs?  They're sure we shouldn't try out nuclear energy or something before diving headlong off the abolish-capitalism cliff?  They're sure that they're so on the ball that if(/when?) AI gets sophisticated enough - as superior and sophisticated and advanced as your typical leftist, see - to diagnose (or not) on the basis of systemic features of capitalism, that it'll endorse the far-left abolish-capitalism prescription?  Is the Academic Left 100% sure that it's done its homework here, enough to warrant systematically excluding, ignoring, belittling and punishing as many (presumably) intellectually and morally inferior non-academic-leftists as they can?  If the Academic Left can't be blamed for spawning an obvious loser like AOC - if she is come kind of anomaly among undergrads unleashed on the public - then what about the Academic Left itself?  What successes won't it try to discredit, and what failures won't it excuse?  To disambiguate and translate the wording of the post title into a more familiar metaphor: just how sick is this puppy, exactly?

Just how big of a loser is the Left/leftism, exactly?

Since the example of Ayn Rand is way to triggering for these intellectual lowlifes, how about we present a more, uh, conservative (as in very likely understated) case of unexceeded libertarian intellectual excellence in making the scholarly and technically-refined case for right-libertarian (i.e., capitalist) political theory/philosophy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000).  Sciabarra has since gone on to be lead editor for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999-present) while his academic background is such that he was a student of a leading Marx scholar of his day, Bertell Ollman, author of such works as Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971).  It is also of such an astonishing research orientation that his Total Freedom ends up with 48 pages (or some 1300-ish) references, including all the major philosophers and works of philosophy throughout history along with pretty much anything dialectics-oriented (a tradition stemming from Aristotle, by reputation probably the greatest philosopher of all time, and continuing most especially through Hegel and Marx (in transumated form, i.e., dialectical materialism), and then on through to - Sciabarra argues quite convincingly - the 'dialectical libertarian ascendancy' of Mises, Hayek, and Rand.  And judging by his Rand-related work (not the least of which would be his also-thoroughly-researched [which by necessity includes all the Peikoff courses up through its preparation/publication period] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995)).

Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses.  In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part.  And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it?  Wanna do dialectics excellently?  Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs.  (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones?  Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story?  If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly?  Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique?  Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)

(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)

Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics.  Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms.  Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.

So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting?  Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them.  So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm

First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.

And why would there be, really?  Leftism is wrong, false to the facts.  The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve.  They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added.  The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid.  Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe.  Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence.  (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources."  "The resources" presumably including the human intellect?  Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)

So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism.  If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when.  (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....)  Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding?  Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle?  Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll.  And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?

I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard.  (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class."  Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?)  Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.

Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged?  Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly?  Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?

If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is?  There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.

And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism.  Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one.  The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority.  Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.

(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be?  From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip.  (Or why not a family?)  Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality.  If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.

[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc.  Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty!  Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way.  I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives?  And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life?  Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of).  And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there.  Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]

So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there?  (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?)  Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind.  What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing?  Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living.  All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).  The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek.  Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology.  I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights.  I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining?  Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears.  If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does?  [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])

So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?

[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear!  Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like?  Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective).  Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]

[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode.  Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"?  Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?)  If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]

[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!"  This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims?  I'm talking the Academic Left, here.  Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention?  I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics?  As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people.  I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly?  It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently.  Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.).  She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century.  I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx.  On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication.  As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit.  The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left.  There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible.  Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology?  Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words?  But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al.  I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise?  I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell?  Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)?  I guess not.  Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")?  I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...).  Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one.  What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this?  Jack shit, that's what.  And on and on it goes.  As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims.  So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...).  So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO.  And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought.  (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives.  That's kinda fucking sad, actually.  I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere?  Monograph-length?  Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere?  John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he.  Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'.  And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from.  I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective.  Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume.  (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.)  It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward.  Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history.  So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?)  One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then?  Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist?  By failing to recognize its significance?  Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get?  Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's?  The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets.  Its scholars are perfectionists.  So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure?  Metadata-wise, what does it tell you?  Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern?  That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars?  I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient).  The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes.  Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx.  How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]