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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demo rats and impeachment: much worse than partisan hypocrisy

I wrote a post on the general topic of Demo rats and impeachment just yesterday, but I want to focus in on one essential point I raised there to highlight how monstrous these creatures have become these days:

This is the group of creatures, remember, whose standards for impeachment (of their political opponents, that is) is such that they were rushing to call for impeachment of Kavanaugh on no good evidence whatsoever (all the while letting a Demo rat president get away with obvious perjury - how intellectually and morally perverted is that?).  They can't be trusted.

The Demo rats' treatment of Kavanaugh was beyond the pale, clearly so, enough to disgust even some Dems who apparently didn't speak out loud enough against the obvious perversity.  If ever the 'rats destroyed their intellectual and moral credibility, it is because of their reckless attempt to destroy Kavanaugh.

What the current crop of filthy, disgusting, toxic slime known as the Democratic leadership in Congress and their enablers in the media and elsewhere consider to be justified, is the following:

Impeach and/or destroy someone without any credible evidence
and
Let someone else get away with obvious perjury

In other words, knowingly and deliberately punish the (presumed) innocent and let the (clearly) guilty go unpunished.

This isn't comparing like with like and then pointing to a partisan double standard.  This is more sick and twisted than that.  It's one thing to be a partisan hypocrite; it's another to uphold utterly opposed standards of evidence and punishment on purely partisan grounds.  That makes the destroy-Kavanaugh crowd unqualified evil-doers, people who have no business having power in a sane and civil polity.  Morally speaking they are criminals operating under the pretense of doing hardball politics.  They are beyond the pale.  They are sick and twisted fucks.  They are not owed respect, deference, the presumption of good faith, the presumption that they are decent human beings.  The proper attitude to take to the sort of people who adhere to the even-worse-than-double-standard above is one of distrust and enmity.  They are enemies of the good and decency.  They contravene the spirit if not letter of the Constitution they swore to uphold, when they so extremely pervert law and justice (whether for partisan ends or anything else).  They are thugs and should be regarded as such.

Sen. Graham put it in less harsh tones:

If this is the sort of outright perversity that is being normalized, enabled, abetted, excused, not spoken out against, etc., on today's American left, then that speaks even worse about them than everything else I've been criticizing them for up to now.  This puts them into a different category of evil.  There is no good reason whatsoever to concede intellectual and moral credibility to any of the left/Dems/"progressives" who failed to do the right thing during or after the Kavanaugh episode.

If anything, it is the likes of Scumbag Kamala Harris who should be impeached, formally censured, or otherwise punished for fraudulently using the judicial process as a weapon of personal and political destruction.  In no uncertain terms is she and her behavior fraudulent: this career prosecutor declared that she believed Kavanaugh's accuser before hearing the defense's side.  Other leading Demo rat politicians (including Warren, Biden and Sanders) are on the record affirming that Kavanaugh's accuser was credible (and Kavanaugh not credible) enough that Kavanaugh's career should be ended.  (Of course, they accuse Kavanaugh of lying under oath to the Judiciary Committee, in which case the mere usual ol' double standard is at play: they let Clinton get away with perjury but found Kavanaugh's "unacceptable."  Actually, it's obvious Clinton lied; is it obvious in any way that Kavanaugh did?  So even there it's not comparing like with like.)  They fed and enabled media and grass roots hysteria about Kavanaugh's "credible accusers."  And they repeated the same vile act, recklessly rushing to raise or renew calls for impeachment within minutes of "new" allegations coming to light just in the past month that turned out to be a dud along with the others.

This is dead-to-rights stuff if ever there was any.  These creatures don't even meet minimal standards of basic decency.  They can't be treated as co-equals in a search for truth because they sabotage the very underpinnings of that.  It is intellectual and moral bankruptcy, if not outright malicious evil, not to recognize and repudiate this sub-decent, beyond-the-pale-even-for-politics perversity for what it is.  And that appears to be the intellectual and moral state of the American left today.  On the merits their intellectual and moral credibility are utterly destroyed.  It doesn't please me to say such things, but it's where the totality of the evidence inexorably leads.

Re: those always-crying-racism leftist losers

The image above says a bunch but here's another image that also comes to mind:

There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers; here you are all equally worthless!

America needs to get rid of its racism, structural and otherwise, but more than that the American left in need of getting its philosophical act together.  And that is why I intend to trigger these fucking losers as much as needed to get the point across.  They are in desperate need of the boot-camp treatment because as disappointing, dysfunctional and occasionally disgusting the racial situation in this country is, it hardly even begins to compare to the absolutely and utterly loathsome, shitty, grabasstically unorganized intellectual state of the American Left.  They have reduced themselves to subhuman scum (qua leftists; they might be functional people in other respects).  But inside every one of those filthy maggots is a lover of wisdom trying to get out.

I've written about the main fundamental problems with leftism before.  To recap the basics plus whatever else new comes to mind: Leftists are obsessed with the political because it's their religion-substitute, their source of meaning in "something greater than themselves."  They're full of hubris and conceit about their supposed intellectual and moral superiority.  They refuse to listen in good faith to the strongest, steelmanned version of their opponents' thinkers/arguments.  Their anti-capitalism is for losers, at root a rationalization of envy and resentment.  They have their own lives together no more than anyone else and yet they think they have the wisdom (although they don't think in terms of wisdom, or else they'd be full-on dialectically advanced steelmanning-as-fuck philosophers) to direct the lives of everyone else, and all by force no less (given their politics-as-meaning mindset).  As an expert on Ayn Rand's thought I know with a 100% certainty that they haven't the faintest how to steelman Rand's philosophy and insist on attacking a strawman version, every time.  They're oblivious to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, anyway, else they'd demonstrate having a single fucking clue about the virtue-ethics tradition over and above their own ethically narrow fairness-and-harm set of criteria (the steelman version of which are found in the Kantian and utilitarian traditions, especially).  I think I have developed over time some pretty well-attuned (not infallible, mind you) "ring of truth" sensibilities, and Dennis Prager's claim that there is no wisdom on the left rings true as a general diagnosis of the left's present potentiality-squandering condition.

When it comes to the subject of race or racism in particular, they come across as even more appallingly pathetic than usual (qua leftists).  Their ever-expanding racism-narrative is borne of one basic flaw in their worldview: they refuse to face up to the fact that their preferred social policies have failed to the situation of blacks and minorities, and so instead of responding to the intrusion of reality in this regard they double down and insist that this failure is attributable instead to structural and other racism.  But the reality is that their essential failure here is one of hubris and lack of wisdom.

Case in point:

When University of Pennsylvania Law Prof. Amy Wax said - quite eminently reasonably and in obvious good faith - that the black community could benefit from an infusion of bourgeois values, the reaction of the campus left at Penn (faculty as well as students) was to melt down in epic fashion.  This bunch of ill-educated Ivy League fuckheads reacted by pulling out every little dirty trick in the current leftist playbook to try to discredit and smear Prof. Wax.  Much as they do with Donald Trump, they seized upon mainly one statement she made about the success of European whites (probably in response to a question for the article in which her statement appeared, so we don't have the full context for that statement, now, do we), amplified the racial element of that statement, and made it the only story - going out of their way to miss whatever legitimate point was contained therein.  Likewise, when Wax referenced the era in which she saw bourgeois values flourishing - roughly, the 1950s - the leftist Ivy League fucks decided to focus only on the pre-Civil-Rights racial discrimination that existed then, as if that were the thing Wax was talking about.  So instead of it being about bourgeois values the leftist Ivy League shit-for-brainses went out of their way to make it about "white supremacism" instead.   Go look at the link for yourself and read in detail what this bunch of loathsome lowlife leftist losers did in response to Wax's reasonable argument.

Now, where on earth, pray tell, would an entire mass of Ivy League students and faculty have ever gotten the idea that this was a normal and acceptable approach to conversation about difficult and contentious subject matter?  Is it possible that the mentality that led to such an easily-triggered meltdown when the chips were down is pervasive in the academy?  And what measures, exactly, have the academic Left taken to remedy this problem after it's been made abundantly evident by Jonathan Haidt and other researchers?  I ask because, as far as I can tell, they haven't done jack shit to remedy the problem.

So I submit that the ugly incident at Penn is, roughly speaking, the "best" that the American left is able to come up with when confronted with a reasonable argument from the other side that triggers them in just the right way.  Yes, their response to a law professor's reasonable argument about bourgeois values was to cry racism, and that's the best we can expect from the crowd of lunatics that is the American Left today.  Fucking pathetic.  Fucking worms!

[Edit: New shit has come to light.  Reportedly Prof. Wax said something directly and unambiguously racist, although Wax is saying her comments have been distorted.  And guess what: the left has so badly shit away its credibility that when I see reports such as this I cannot believe them on their face any longer, without full access to the original materials.  That's what these fucking losers get for their established pattern of intellectual malpractice.  They blew it.  Further, none of this affects the facts about the 2017 bourgeois-values episode linked and discussed above, nor absolves the Penn leftists of their intellectual malpractice then.  They're every bit as much the losers even if there happens to be a racist around when they cry "racist!"  Tough shit, huh?  [Update: and guess what, it's the same ol' caricature/smear tactics, quite obviously so to anyone exercising decency and restraint.  Racism-crying leftists being scum again, not surprising in the least.  Fuck 'em!]]

Unless/until the leftist worms fix their own problems they forfeit all moral right to whine and cry about racism and attribute blame, because I for one am sick and tired of hearing all that from them.  I have had it up to here with their shit.  No more; putting the foot down.  Can you imagine MLK acting like this bunch of divisive, angry, dialogue-avoiding whiners?  No, you cannot.  He was too constructive-minded, and he also took seriously - something the left no longer does - the ideal that people be judged by the content of their character, and that means that the cultivation of character (so as to make lofty judgment commensurate with lofty character, of course) should be of the highest priority.  And it also means some basic intellectual honesty about how much the mentality of leftism (which becomes more unhinged and epistemically reckless by the day) has victimized minorities perhaps more than anything else this past half century.

(And, yes, I've already anticipated the "best" rhetorical chicanery the left might come up with in response to Wax: she's claiming that black people fail to adopt bourgeois values such as hard work and thrift, thereby perpetuating mean stereotypes about blacks.  Of course, the same thing coming out of the pen of a Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams elicits crickets from the racism-cryers.  But another dialectically appropriate response to the chicanery about mean stereotypes is that what triggers the left about "bourgeois values" is the prescription standing fundamentally at odds with what their worldview dictates, which is that the solution is political/taxpayer-funded.  This is not even to touch upon what may be the elephant in the room, which is the percentage of single-parent households in the black community.  Blaming, e.g., mass incarceration doesn't really ring true to me, since that demographic trend was already in place before the last half century.  And when a leftist like Sen. Cory Booker is pointing to mass incarceration since the early '90s, the natural thing to wonder is whether he looks at the benefit side of the equation as well as the cost: what has happened to the nation's murder rate since that time, and what does that mean in terms of the number of black bodies in prison instead of six feet under?  While I don't know all the specific numbers here, I do know that the nation's murder fate has fallen considerably.  And what I do know - the Wax episode being Exhibit A - is that leftists have avoided a good-faith dialogue about these difficult and controversial topics.  And, to top off this little digression about sociocultural trends and their effects on life opportunities and outcomes, this item which very recently came to my attention points to what may be the one most fundamental causal factor for a given locale: social capital.  Well, duh, Aristotle had that figured out long ago.  And what better and more comprehensive a way to build that social capital than, you know, philosophy?  If leftists weren't so busy misplacing their priorities and obsessing about the narrowly political while pretending to be intellectually superior, they would know this already.)

In short: Someone needs to gouge out leftists' eyeballs and skullfuck them without the courtesy of a reach-around while they drop and give the instructor 20 push-ups, which is another way of saying they need philosophy fucked right into them if that's what it takes to get it in there.  This is in no way to deny the role and responsibility of the Right in the nation's intellectual bankruptcy (they'll overcome the presumption of blame here just as soon as they start talking all about philosophy), but neither the Right nor even the Left until recently have been nearly as vile and vicious as the Left has become today.  (I'd say the pathology involved became more screamingly obvious in the last 5 years or so.  But the roots run deep and the chickens have come home to roost.)  Incontrovertible proof of this point is that it wasn't until recently that the Left resorted to crying racism every 5 seconds as reality keeps intruding upon their worldview.  Hopefully this not-so-slow-mo trainwreck can serve as a lesson to both Right and Left about how not to go about things, and perhaps even lead them sooner or later to philosophy as (at the very least) the best prophylactic against such degradation.

Do leftists, Dems and "progressives" have a superior moral compass?

I would merely like to break down the logic of this.  It's no secret that leftists, Dems and "progressives" pride[*] themselves on having a moral compass superior to that of their political opponents, i.e., the basket of deplorables.  It's also no secret that leftists, Dems and "progressives" are the majority in big coastal cities (NYC, LA, San Fran, etc.).  Does this mean that, according to leftists, Dems and "progressives," the greater the proximity to a big coastal city, the greater the reliability of one's moral compass?

Something tells me there are some severe Dunning-Kruger issues going on here, among leftists, Dems and "progressives."  (For now, that is.)

More where that came from.

(If they're so intellectually and morally superior, why haven't they discovered and promoted philosophy for children yet?)

[*] - Clearly I'm speaking here of a false pride, not legitimate Aristotelian or Randian pride.

[Addendum: As you listen to how Dems/lefties/progs [DLPs] defend abortion rights - in terms of the right of a woman to control her own life - keep in mind that this is how radical pro-freedom people like Rand defend our rights against government controls in general -- i.e., our lives aren't the government's or the demos's to dispose of.  It would appear that, given their lack of philosophical integration, the DLPs are being rather selective in their invocation of freedom on this topic.  Why (the lack of philosophical integration)?]

AOC and the toxic twitterized destruction of discourse

It's amazing how no one has drawn the cognitively-available stark connection between these two phenomena yet.

The legendary toxicity that twitter brings to (the destruction of rational) discourse is now becoming gobsmackingly clear to more and more people.  Unlike blogs (see the best one around right now, for instance - see just the output from the past week alone; it's legendary [with more recent posts under the influence of cannabis, giving lie to claims that it impairs productivity]), Twitter is a low-effort, low-thought-demanding medium.  It appeals to people's pleasure centers and encourages them to 'like' whatever satisfies their biases or to 'dislike' whatever would disconfirm them.  (The vast information made available by the internet, absent a philosophical mindset properly drilled into its participants, only means more information that can be ignored, distorted, etc.)  Social media in its present form places pleasure over truth, a problem Socrates, Plato and Aristotle noticed plenty early on.  It seems people don't learn (fast enough).

The most important topic that can be discussed right now is philosophy for children.  You won't find that being discussed on Twitter.

Let's set aside the Trump phenomenon for now - I'm not interested in the slightest in leftist-loser and Democrat whataboutism at the moment - and look at perhaps the single most intellectually-destructive and therefore toxic figure on social media right now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  I know that twitterized memories may be short, but let's look back within the past month for the level of idiocy AOC is capable of, and rewarded with "likes" on social media for:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

✔@AOC

Republican hypocrisy at its finest: saying that Trump admitting to sexual assault on tape is just “locker room talk,” but scandalizing themselves into faux-outrage when my sis says a curse word in a bar.
GOP lost entitlement to policing women’s behavior a long time ago.
Next.

202K

6:50 A

(This tweet was in the wake of incoming Demon Rat congresscritter Rashida Tlaib saying that they would "impeach the motherfucker!")

I'll reproduce what I said earlier in this blog, and to which there is no reasonable counter that I can remotely fathom:

In the twisted cognitive world of [AOC] & Co., such gender-baiting is now the norm even when it is illogical and gratuitous.  To anyone with common sense - this excludes today's unhinged leftists - the gender of the person using foul language toward Trump is entirely irrelevant. 

But even more damning of [AOC]'s cognitive "skills": anyone who knows how to read and parse language properly knows that Trump was not admitting to sexual assault.  He said that he grabbed women "by the pussy" and that they welcomed it.  ("You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything....Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.") 

Perhaps the demonic Democrats have managed to bastardize the meaning of "sexual assault" as well?

This is not the only time AOC has spread her blatantly toxic (intellectually inferior) garbage on social media.  Let's try this one out:

Ocasio-Cortez Responds to Republicans Criticizing Her Over Latest Mistake: Stop 'Drooling' Over My Every Word

Ryan Saavedra provides video in which AOC says: "If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House."  Saavedra adds: "The 3 branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial."

How does AOC respond to Saavedra's correction?  Watch:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

✔@AOC

Maybe instead of Republicans drooling over every minute of footage of me in slow-mo, waiting to chop up word slips that I correct in real-tomd, they actually step up enough to make the argument they want to make:
that they don’t believe people deserve a right to healthcare.

Rep. Niraj Antani

✔@NirajAntani

What is a chamber of government, @Ocasio2018? https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1064340509441720320 …

52.7K

8:07 PM - Nov 18, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

19.8K people are talking about this

Let's set aside for the moment the issue of a 'right to healthcare' (an issue AOC would be too ignorant to discuss non-toxically). [ * - see appended note]

Here is what AOC considers to be a real-time correction:

"If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House."

It is simply rationally unacceptable for an elected member of Congress to get away with saying that she made a correction here.  Do I need to spell it out?

(See also: Dunning-Kruger effect, observed in those whose overestimate their own cognitive abilities and don't know it.)

In just the past few days, AOC took to more flat-out intellectual laziness/dishonesty, by smearing a source based on its supposed funding source.  (Only when she was called out on her obvious scummery did she back down.)  She doesn't really care about doing her homework before making her claims.  Nothing about AOC's MO is progressive.

[Edit: Does AOC's following have the cognitive characteristics of an apocalyptic cult?  Cult leaders are well-known for their charisma but otherwise generally reviled as toxic.]

[Edit #2: In the "You can't make this shit up" department, AOC said, "I think it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage."  How can someone possessing such a superior moral compass be so intellectually lazy?]

[Edit #3: The real problem with AOC?  Her enablers.]

If we want to really crack down on social media (and especially twitter) toxicity, we should home on in its biggest offenders ASAFP.

Next up: More on philosophy for children.

[*] - The global GDP right now is roughly $75 Trillion, or about $10K for every inhabitant of the planet.  How much would it cost to fund this so-called right for all people who putatively have this right?  Why are the so-called rights of which AOC and her "progressive" ilk speak so expensive?  This is a separate issue from whether a decent people, through some institutional arrangement or other, statist or private, help to ensure people's needs are met.  This is about what kinds of enforceable claims we can make on the lives, minds, and efforts of others.  [The claim of a right not to be killed is enforceable, but doesn't really make any demands on the lives, minds, and efforts of others, now does it.  Anyway, the point of having a government isn't to generate desirable outcomes but to secure freedom.]  Even Ayn Rand says in her Galt speech that helping others as a spiritual payment for their virtue is a selfish necessity, but not a matter of duty as such.  This is even assuming people would need help in a society where its members live with maximum rationality, able (e.g.) to compose blogs that meet high philosophical standards.  It's easy to make happen.  Plus, healthcare costs can be drastically reduced for just about anyone who does his lifestyle homework.  The Democrats and Republicans are fighting over CRUMBS right now.

Credit where it's due: Leiter lays the smackdown on academic identity politics (and related mischief)

A case in point for why people should be paying a lot more attention to philosophy blogs and a lot less attention to nitwits and trolls on twitter.

Some context: As anyone who's been observant of such things knows, Brian Leiter, U. of Chicago Law Professor, founder of the Philosophical Gourmet Report for industry-standard ranking of leading university philosophy programs (NYU, Oxford, Rutgers, et al), also runs Leiter Reports, billed as the "world's most popular philosophy blog since 2003."  (Nevertheless, he's a loathsome leftist loser of the neo-Marxoid variety, and reckless Rand-basher.)  He is a keen observer of who's who in academic philosophy.  The Ladder Man, as Maverick Philosopher eruditely dubs him (for "his obsession with rankings and status. (One of the meanings of the German Leiter is ladder; another is leader as in Gauleiter.)"), knows whereof he speaks in this area (just not on Rand or capitalism, though; but on Nietzsche, jurisprudence and academic politics he speaks with authority).  Finally, he had to step down as lead editor of the Gourmet Report a few years ago after having acted in a notoriously combative, divisive, rude and unpleasant manner toward a number of his colleagues.  He seems to be an expert in the less appealing aspects of academic politics, then.

His recent commentary on the seemingly extraordinary American Academy of Arts and Sciences selection process merits some notice and honest facing-up-to by all concerned:

Elections to the Academy follow certain patterns.   For example, in 2012, MIT's Stephen Yablo was elected to the Academy.  The following year, his MIT colleague Rae Langton (now at Cambridge) was elected.  Two years later, Langton's friend and former colleague, and Yablo's spouse, Sally Haslanger at MIT was elected.  Haslanger (well-known, of course, for her commitment to diversity [vide Reed for an explanation]), quickly joined the selection committee for Philosophy, and that year only one white man (in his 70s) was elected while two prominent feminist philosophers were among the small number of honorees.  The latter is hardly suspicious:  I've observed the same patterns over the years with formal philosophers, with epistemologists, and with Kant scholars--once one gets in, others in that sub-field are admitted in the subsequent years.  As one AAAS member wrote to me a couple of years ago:  "newly admitted members are often energized to make nominations," and, unsurprisngly, they invest that effort in their friends and colleagues.  

But if there was ever a "popularity contest," it would be the AAAS, in which existing members vote on possible new members on a scale of 1-5 (just like the PGR scale for whole faculties!).  Ballotting proceeds in two stages.  Any two members can nominate someone for election to the Academy of Friends, and after an initial round of voting, 8-10 candidates are submitted to the membership for final votes.  The "panel" is, I'm told, bound by the votes of the existing members, except when there are "diversity" considerations. The current panel consists of Susan Wolf (North Carolina, the chair), Julia Annas (Arizona) Sally Haslanger (MIT), Dan Hausman (Wisconsin), Beatrice Longuenesse (NYU), and Stephen Stich (Rutgers).  The Chair of the panel must ultimately negotiate with chairs of other humanities committees over how many philosophers get to be put forward for membership.

A current Academy of Friends member sent me the list of the current first-round candidates.  This was against the rules, but I suspect that s/he was concerned about the way things have been going.  I will not name any of the nominees.

Understand that most faculty who are elected to the Academy are 60 or older; in philosophy, faculty who are elected around age 50 or younger are few and far between (examples would include, in recent years, David Chalmers [NYU] and John MacFarlane [Berkeley], and, in years past, David Lewis and Martha Nussbaum).   Excluding faculty who were clearly nominated in cognate disciplines, and then put on the philosophy ballot for possible "interdisciplinary" inclusion, there were 31 pure philosophy candidates. 

15 of those candidates were women, 16 were men.  That's already remarkable given that only about 20% of senior philosophy faculty are women.  Of those 15 women, two were also racial or ethnic minorities, and a remarkable 9 of the 15 were feminist philosophers and "friends of Sally," as it were.  Of the 16 men, 3 were also racial or ethnic minorities.  Out of 31 nominated candidates, there were 13 white men.  Of the nominated women, 9 of the 15 were faculty members at top 50 PhD programs.  Of the nominated men, 16 of 16 were at top 50 PhD programs.  Of the nominated women, two were over the age of 70; of the nominated white men, three were over 70.  Of the nominated women, five, maybe six, are under 60; of the nominated white men, two, maybe three, are under 60.

The academic PC (sic!) cohort can run but it cannot hide.  The Ladder Man knows whereof he speaks here.  When even a rabid leftist of his academia-related knowledge says that this shit has gone too far, that's a good sign it has.  If this is happening in the most rigorous of academic disciplines like philosophy, can you imagine where it's headed in the less demanding disciplines, especially the ones with tons of politically-left inbreeding?

In any case, why should philosophers of greater merit be sacrificed on the altar of "diversity" and political connections?

(Gee, ya think libertarians and conservatives could use some friends in academia to enhance their status and therefore influence there?  For the students' sake, of course.  The wasting of intellectual potential for all concerned here [for now] is a bit sickening to watch.)

As illustrated previously, this is what happens when corrupt institutional practices clash with philosophy.  Philosophy can and will lay the smackdown.

[I note that Kolakowski's (Oxford) academic status as a Marx-interpreter(/debunker) far exceeds that of Leiter (a mere PGR top-25 program -- WAIT, HOLD ON A SEC, he's not even in the PGR-ranked philosophy department, but rather the law school there -- ) and he seems not to have learned a bit of good social (ultimately, intellectual) graces from his Aristotelian colleague at Chicago, Martha Nussbaum, among other character faults.  Should the Ladder Man shoot back that Oxford also had "the greatest Marxoid thinker of recent times" in G.A. Cohen, author of Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (OUP, 1978), I guess the answer lies there?  How odd that would be, as I see no evidence of some subsequent dialectic between these two on the intellectual credibility of Marxism.  Mises' monumental Socialism book (Eng: Yale U Press, 1951 [1922]) settled the question of the intellectual credibility of socialism nearly a century ago now, and the socialists didn't do anything adequate to respond to that (they did make an ultimately-failed attempt to answer Mises on the 'economic calculation' problem but didn't address the deeper structural folly of traditionally socialist thought which manifests in its intellectual-lightweight tendencies toward cultural destructionism and generally flouting the accumulated wisdom of tradition), or to Mises' subsequent demolition of Marxoid historical materialism.  Students of the debate like Hayek had it figured out early; socialism is an intellectual basket case, the opiate of the 'intelligentsia.'  It seems like a pattern of debate-avoidance among leftist losers might best explain what the Cohen-Kolakowski relationship looks like to me, and that Kolakowski is - despite shared institutional affiliations (see the parallel there at Chicago) - a dialectically superior philosopher.  Never mind the demonstrably intellectually inferior character of socialism as shown here.  Aristotelians are better philosophers than Marxoids, so I suggest the in-denial Ladder Man and his currently-loathsome leftoid ilk do a better job to take after his Chicago colleague.  Maybe there's more nobiity to be found on Leiter's Nietzsche side of things?  And, leftoids/Marxoids, if you really wanna do your homework thoroughly, with due dialectical completeness, take a lead from neo-Aristotelian 'dialectical-libertarian' Sciabarra, why don't you, ASAFP. To be continued? . . .]