Scumbag Kamala Harris vs. Obama

If Joe Biden has a spotty record on civil rights, why would Obama make him his VP?

Evidently that is a question that didn't occur to Scumbag Kamala Harris as she schemed her bad-faith ambush on Biden.

Terms I've come up with to describe Sen. Harris, descriptors of what people hate in politicians (and it's almost amazing so many observers have failed to notice these in Scumbag Harris): dishonest, phony, opportunistic, panderer, cynical, more clever than wise and not very clever at that, intellectually shallow, race-baiter, malicious, demagogue.

Her role in the Kavanaugh smears when the chips were down says it all; of the Dems getting in on that appalling act, she is surely the most despicable.  How would you feel about having her as prosecutor in a case against you?  Kavanaugh found out the hard way.

And this is the candidate the betting markets are assigning the best chance to win the nomination?

[Addendum 7/6: Others are catching on!]

Dems should nominate a recession for '20

That is far and away their best chance of beating Trump.

What makes the Left so loathsome and dangerous?

Two major problems with present-day left-wing American politics:

1. The usual problems with leftism I've discussed before, but in particular the clamor among left-wingers - and the lefter the more bizarro and unhinged - for more government taxes, controls, etc.

2. The left's refusal to engage in a serious, responsible, accountable dialogue with the opposition (much less the strongest representatives among their opposition [e.g.]).  (The irony of the left's defecating all over Habermas on this count is lost on them....)  Today the leftist trend is ever more toward deplatforming, shaming, shunning, ignoring, strawmanning, contempt, hubris, flat-out dishonesty/evasion, ridicule, echo-chambering, mob intimidation, screaming and shouting, gaslighting, crying racism/sexism/transphobia/etc. on razor-thin pretexts, smearing . . . those are some big intellectual vices, and they explain a ton about the deplorable intellectual degeneration/atrophying/disease of the present-day left.

So, combine 1 with 2; what does that mean?

It means that the left seeks to impose their values and vision on the rest of America, through the ever-expanding power of the state -- but they don't want to engage in a good-faith conversation with those upon whom they seek to forcibly impose their values and vision.

This makes today's leftists something other than ordinary fellow citizens: it makes them domestic enemies.

The intellectual collapse of the left accelerates further...

As if the massive overwhelming body of evidence of left-wing intellectual collapse accumulating seemingly by the day under my 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' tags wasn't enough, we get this ("Unsafe" 1930s SF school mural to be destroyed).  This is "cutting edge San Francisco values," unchecked, undiluted.  (The school board voted 6-0; the diversity of viewpoint here . . . I don't know how to finish that sentence.)  To borrow wording from my previous post, I believe that, barring some unforeseen (ahem) and revolutionary turn of intellectual events, this collapse is inevitable and irreversible given the widely shared values, assumptions and episteme of left-wingers as they have "evolved" over recent history.  Where is the wisdom in any of this stuff?  My term for this "development": Slow-mo trainwreck. :(

This mural has been up for decades.  Questions: Why only now do the students and/or faculty get around to being "harmed" and "triggered" by the mural?  Would it have anything to do with overwrought "social justice" poison being pumped into their minds in recent years?  If they're "harmed" and "triggered" by this, how wimpy are these "educators" making the kids and/or themselves?  And what powers of "interpretation" are coming into play?  Are these powers becoming increasingly deranged and deluded without suitable external check/criticism?

I will quote in full from Wesley Yang (more images and links at the link):

Live tweet of meeting of SF school board where they voted 6-0 to paint over a mural painted during 1930’s by Communist depicting George Washington in his capacity as slave owner and Indian fighter. The mural was intended to portray the moral ambiguity of the founding. 

The council voted to paint over the mural at a cost of $600,000 because it threatens their “safety.”
SF Board member cites White Fragility theory as justification for disregarding intent of painting by Communist in the 1930’s that portrayed Washington as Indian fighter and slave owner
"Robin DiAngelo and other critical race scholars consistently cite the fact that intent does not mitigate impact. Because we are a product of our times and our socialization, we may do and say things that are horribly racist and not understand why."
But there's a new therapeutic doctrine that has merged with anti-racist progressivism which holds that violent images have the power to induce trauma and must therefore live in a sanitized, expurgated reality.
This is an anti-rational and anti-artistic doctrine that recasts a form of primitive superstition as progress and enlightenment.
But schools of education have trafficked in this form of thinking and it has become the baseline for a generation of educators and administrators.
They are fully immunized against any justification made with reference to the older worldview, and feel that they are acting righteously in eradicating any and all traces of the past that deviate from the new orthodoxy. They cannot be persuaded of the errors of their ways.
This ideology has been around for decades and the cause of countless purges in left-wing spaces.
The SF board of education is what happens when Portlandia or the Park Slope Food Co-op control hundreds of million in funding and the schooling of the next generation.
The basic asymmetry we now confront is that the "worst are filled with passionate intensity." Overwhelming majorities of the public find this ridiculous but passively, while the most energetic actors believe this.
Alongside the worst filled with passionate intensity are those who run interference on behalf of a rise of an anti-rationalist, anti-artistic philistinism by portraying those criticize it as alarmist or hysterical
Just because the tendencies latent within the movement and openly avowed have not fully expressed themselves does not mean we should not say what they are. The guardrails just came off.
You will endlessly encounter people who will acknowledge that every instance of this is stupid without recognizing that it's not mere stupidity: it is action organized by a coherent worldview seeking for hegemony that will not be stopped unless something stops it.
Black students expressed concerns about the murals in 1968, but according to this article from the time, did not seek to destroy the murals but balance them with more positive representations of black people, such as those that made contributions to science
This concern was at least partially addressed in 1974 with the addition of art by a contemporary black painter
Arnautoff was a major artist and the school is an important repository of WPA era art.
...
An English teacher described student who “almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”
The board made clear their justification for acting in a statement

So while it’s true that perennial concerns about representation and sensitivity clothe themselves in the jargon of different eras, the jargon proceeds from ideological tendencies that push toward certain outcomes. Even the radicalism of 1968 didn’t call for destruction of art.
For that, we had to wait until 2019 and the coming to fruition of an ideology that holds that people can’t look at art with critical distance, historical perspective, or aesthetic judgment, and they can’t and shouldn’t be taught to do so.
They should instead be protected from “harm” and their “safety” ensured through the destruction of art that troubles them.
The strongest argument on their side was “this isn’t a museum where people choose to go to be artistically challenged, but a school where kids cannot avoid seeing a vivid mural depicting a dead Indian and black slaves. If we could move it, we would, but we can’t.”
But we should attend closely to the ideas that are being enacted here. The people quoted in the Times piece indicated that most students didn’t want to destroy the painting. A supporter of removal said “the art is not worth saving if even one native student is triggered by that.”
What would in any other setting be seen as a reduction as absurdum is being avowed in earnest as the actual standard. And the truth is that the reality on the ground is likely to be close to that.
The news here is not that some people in a progressive echo chamber have absurd beliefs. That has always been true. The news is that those people have institutional power and are exercising it, and they are just getting started.
The idea that a painting by a major artist from the 1930’s has inherent value that has to be balanced against “even one person triggered” has zero standing. Everyone’s claim to be harmed or endangered is indefeasible and overrides all other values.
The authoritarian potential with which such a belief is charged is obvious; we no longer have to speculate about what those who hold these beliefs are prepared to do: at minimum they will happily force people never to state certain truths and compel them to avow falsehoods
They will also do things like forbid anyone from taking algebra in 8th grade as an ostensible measure against "white supremacy" even though 75 percent of those who take algebra in eighth grade are Asian, as the SF board of ed did a few years back.
With the result that fewer black and Hispanics were able to take calculus in senior years -- producing the exact opposite result to those intended
The SF Chancellor of Schools who led the push to ban 8th grade algebra then went to NYC, where he has mandated implicit bias training as part of the "decolonizing education" push that emerges from the same body of doctrine: [trainwrecky image of "White Supremacy Culture" training]
In April, the board abruptly canceled its school lunch contract over "taste and equity concerns" without a back up plan.
The board was forced reinstate the contract after students addressed the council citing concerns their peers would go hungry.
I don't live in SF or NYC but I've begun following local school board news in both places because they provide a working model of actually-existing progressivism in action -- Portlandia in power. It will only get worse until people organize to put a stop to it.
I mean this quote by an SF board member -- what satirical writer would have the chutzpah to invent such a quote?

[1] WHERE'S THE DATA ON TASTE??!!
[2] "What I'm hearing from a lot of folks is that we should renew the contract because we need to feed kids, and that's not the conversation we should be having."

"Trump's racism" vs. his opposition's dishonesty

[Warning for snowflakes: drill instructor mode below.]

Here's a question that would be asked in a polity governed by reason and wisdom:

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump said that neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017 were "very fine people" - purportedly an implication of his statement that there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017.

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, Trump's statement emboldened and gave succour and comfort to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists, white nationalists, etc.

If Trump's opposition/haters are correct, there's nothing that Trump said or did since that time to downplay his giving comfort and succour to white supremacists.

So, the question:

Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?

Isn't that what Trump's haters/opposition would have predicted might ensue?  That non-whites would have to live in fear in Trump's America?

The reason there hasn't been a repeat of Charlottesville is because the narrative Trump's haters have promoted since that time is a lie - the product of willful dishonesty or stupidity.  In short, his haters are almost unbelievably stupid, or fucking liars, or a combination of the two.

And it really isn't difficult to figure this out, with some intellectual honesty and a bit of persistence.

The facts:

Politifact provides the transcript from Trump's Aug. 15, 2017 press conference in which the "very fine people" phrase is used.  (The posting of the transcript at Politifact is dated Apr. 16, 2019.  Question: why the fuck would it take Politifact almost 2 years to post the transcript?  More on that in a bit.)

Now, Politifact has a rating system for the truthfulness of a statement, ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."

Politifact's "rating" or determination at the bottom of the posted transcript is: "full context is needed."

Well, no shit.  But what does that imply about Trump's haters (including those in the press - and you can see how even the reporters questioning Trump in his press conference seem to have comprehension issues [where did they receive their "education"?])?

If Politifact were to do what it really ought to do in addition to posting the transcript, and that is to assess the truth or falsity of the Trump haters' claims that he called neo-Nazis "very fine people," what would be the correct rating for Politifact to give those claims?

The claim that Trump said neo-Nazis were "very fine people" is a pants-on-fire lie.  It indicates such a degree of disregard for truth and context by his haters that they shouldn't be considered credible sources about what their opposition says or thinks.

And what's more, it definitely damns the "news" sources - Trump is exactly right to call this "fake news" - who emboldened Trump's haters and gave them aid and succour in their lie.  The "news" organizations - and this goes definitely for CNN - either knew it was a lie, or failed in their job as news sources to get the full story.  Scott Adams has all the archived evidence of CNN's blatant dishonesty.  Will CNN ever issue a correction, or will it slink away into silence in hopes that they won't be called to account about this again?  Will they admit that they unprofessionally peddled a lie to the American people, or will they unprofessionally avoid all accountability for their peddling the lie?

Either alternative puts CNN (and other similar situated "news" organizations) in a very tough spot.   They have been caught dead to rights, promoting a lie.  The best option at this point for CNN would be to admit that it's no longer a news organization - certainly not in its politics coverage - but a selective and biased source plus selective and biased commentary.

So fuck CNN, and fuck all the Democrats/left/"progressives" who peddled this lie.

One thing that these Trump haters do a lot of, is to say how scared immigrants are that Trump's goons will come into their cities and homes and destroy their lives.

But the real, main cause of the immigrants' fear on this count is that they listen so much to dishonest and/or monumentally stupid Democrats who have every partisan political motivation to stir up the fear among their constituents.

So fuck the Democrats/left/"progressives" yet again for their epistemologically criminal fear-mongering.

Anyway, why did it take Politifact so long to post that transcript?  It's because the dishonest partisan Dem/left/"prog" had stonewalled long enough in the face of Scott Adams calling them to task.

Back to the original question: why didn't Trump's remarks about "very fine people" embolden white supremacists?  Because very shortly after that press conference, Trump issued an unequivocal condemnation of white supremacy, calling out such organizations as the KKK by name.  He sent the unequivocal message that he does not support or condone their activities in any way.

That, too, is a fact disregarded by the dishonest left/Dem/"prog" crowd.  (I almost said "stupid/dishonest" but stupidity doesn't explain blatantly disregarding facts.  These are intellectually dishonest pieces of shit.)

Fact is, the scummy Dem/left/"progs" weave an entire false narrative about Trump's supposed racism by going out of their way to assume the worst when Trump says something that might be tied to some ethnic or racial subject.  This race-hustling has become the stock in trade of the entire party, indeed the entire intellectual culture of the Left, including the parasites of subsidized classrooms (who should be swept aside).

By the way, the URL that I just linked contains as its first search result this item from HuffPo.  It's the same basic epistemological criminality, this time applied to Ayn Rand.  And I dare say that this example is typical of leftist Rand-bashing:

Letter from a Galtian

“I am really curios (sic) to know what motivates the mind of a socialist,” you write. “Why do you think its (sic) fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not?”

(Apparently the email software used by producers doesn’t have a spell-check function. Fitting, I guess, for people whose fictional hero described scientists and other educated members of society as “parasites of subsidized classrooms.”)

This hubristic piece of shit apparently either didn't read the Galt speech or did read it but has serious comprehension problems.  After all, what is John Galt but a scientist?  What is Hugh Akston if not an educated member of society?

Given such serious comprehension problems, one has to ask: was he "educated" by parasites of subsidized classrooms?

I dare submit that the entire intellectual culture of the Left has become (if it wasn't always) a dishonest cesspool in which opposition ideas are constantly caricatured so as to be made to look weaker by comparison to the "superior" leftist alternative.  Whenever an opportunity for a serious debate about their caricatures presents itself, they run away like cowards.  I've seen this happen every time when it comes to their caricatures of Rand (their most formidable intellectual adversary).  And in this case it's entirely no accident that the parasites of subsidized classrooms aid and abet them in their smears; if Randian ideas take hold in the culture, they (in their present form, that is) are out of a job and stripped of their power to "educate" the youth.

The way the Dems/left/"progs" treat Trump and Rand falls into a pattern of an intellectually-bankrupt non-approach to examining competing socio-political-economic ideas.  It's just that this corruption comes out most blatantly and obviously in the case of Trump (because, well, he's president) and Rand (because she's their most formidable intellectual adversary, and she's got them running around like decapitated chickens trying to "refute" her).

(The intellectual criminality in the latter case, though, is greater because it goes all the way to the upper echelons of the academic food chain, whereas in the former it's mostly political hacks (including the political "news" generators at CNN) doing the dirty work.  The chief tactic used among the professional rationalizers in order to rationalize not taking Rand seriously is to pay attention only to her real or supposed weaknesses while disregarding her strengths.  That's it; that's all it comes to.  There's no way that any of them could honestly look at the goings-on at the Ayn Rand Society and conclude that professional philosophers couldn't take Rand seriously.  What makes their rationalizations more dangerous and destructive than those of rank-and-file leftists is that they are trained in the art of making their arguments appear the stronger even if their position is the weaker.  (IOW, they're a variety of sophist.  One can observe the mental gymnastics of such anti-Rand sophists here, for instance.  They might try to rationalize how a high-profile Aristotle scholar such as Gotthelf could also be an Objectivist, but they certainly have no answer that fits in with their highly dubious anti-Rand narrative as to why Hospers would take Rand so seriously despite not being an Objectivist himself.  They have no consistent-with-narrative answer as to how this president of the American Society for Aesthetics [1983-4] would praise Atlas Shrugged in such glowing terms.  What, oh what, is a sophist to do?))

The "very fine people" hoax is just one clear-cut, dead-to-rights example of Dem/left/"prog" dishonesty, but it's far from the only such instance.  Just the other day, commenting on the Democrat debate the night before, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ("Morning Joe") said (paraphrasing) that "Trump called Mexicans rapists."  Scarborough doesn't strike me as the dishonest type, so an alternative explanation for this is that he's another victim of the parasites of subsidized classrooms, rendered unfit to think at the higher levels.

If you're not a piece of intellectual shit, on the other hand, you can easily make sense of what Trump was saying, which is that there is too much criminal activity in our country due to way too many people of a criminal bent crossing the southern border illegally (and then coddled by Democrats).  (Democrats/leftists/"progs" stupidly/dishonestly conflate illegal immigration and all immigration when they say Trump is anti-immigrant.  They then stir up fear among their immigrant constituencies that Trump is hostile to all of them and has an agenda actually in place to deport all people who are here illegally.)  Then we have Nancy Peloser lying that "Trump's thing is 'Make America White Again' " and that the border barrier addition Trump wants to build - a barrier that by definition would reduce only illegal immigration - is a symbol of racism.

(And what the fuck is Joe Scarborough doing bringing up something Trump "said" four years ago now, at the very outset of his campaign, when he was a political newcomer with no serious experience in political communication?  How the fuck, exactly, was Trump supposed to know about the iron law of politics that if a statement can be construed in its worst possible light it will be and with the aid of complicit "news" outlets no less?)

How can pieces of intellectual shit such as Peloser, CNN, the Democrats, et al, be expected to get it right about anything of fundamental importance in the realm of politics?  I mean, they might get it right when they cite this or that fact and figure they have actually studied, or heck, the natural scientists among them might well get it right about the scientific things they study, but as to what constitutes racism, or what constitutes sound government policy, or what constitutes the American ethos, or what constitutes corporations victimizing people . . . how can these people claim so much as a shred of credibility any longer?  They habitually lie through their teeth, and/or are hubristic fools.

A few months back I made a post titled "Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and their haters."  In that post I said:

Sure Trump says a lot of dumb things, can be quite the dick sometimes.  But have you seen his haters?  They often behave like absolute pieces of shit. 

Sure Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired, but have you seen how her haters polemicize against her?  They often behave like absolute pieces of intellectual shit. 

And I can, if and when I have the time and interest to do so, marshal a mountain of evidence to prove all of this....

Now, I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Trump says a lot of dumb things and can be quite the dick sometimes (do I really need to go through the motions there? Don't his own fans admit this while still preferring him to the even-more-toxic alternative?), and I haven't yet marshaled a mountain of evidence that Rand's polemics leave a lot to be desired (which would establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rand isn't the expert on everything philosophy-related as quite a number of her devoted followers believe).  (I mean her polemics directed at philosophers, that is; I think at the very least the vast majority of her political polemics are so on-target as to be beyond serious criticism, and her diagnosis for why the political creatures whom she demolishes are the way they are is based on a general fact about our political culture: intellectual bankruptcy.)

But as to the exceedingly shitty nature of Trump-haters as well as the Rand-haters?  Well, since right around the time of the posting excerpted above I have made the following abundantly (if not overwhelmingly) documented posts exposing what these creatures are up to.

Trump's haters:

• Philosophy professor on whether Trump is racist (How would responsible philosophers assess putative evidence of Trump racism presented by his haters?)

The left's MAGA hat meltdown and "Progressive" scummery as the Trump-era norm ("Progressives" recklessly smear Covington High School students)

• Dilbert's Scott Adams vs CNN's fake-news "fine people hoax

• What is an impeachable offense?

• Prediction: Trump (or a Republican) will win in 2020 (how today's Dems/leftists/"progs" generally speaking are shitheads, with dozens of documenting links in just one paragraph; the anti-Kavanaugh smears in particular reveal the nature of the present-day Dem/left/"prog" cesspool, and that includes the current top 3, and top 4 out of 5, front-runners for '20, and that goes especially for current front-runner, Scumbag Kamala Harris)

Rand's haters:

• How shitty are Rand-bashers?
• How shitty is Lisa Duggan, leading Rand-basher du jour?

Now, I don't know whether the totality of the evidence presented in these links qualifies as a mountain, but it sure is a heck of a lot of evidence and the essential nature of the phenomena are captured well enough for me to rest my case with utmost certainty that any plausible, not-self-defeating defense of these creatures' MO is nowhere to be found.  They are a bunch of unphilosophical, caught-dead-to-rights, conceited scumbags who deserve the lion's share of blame for what a shitshow the American political "conversation" has become.  The only question remaining is addressed to the remaining decent Democrats whose voices and input have been (inevitably and irreversibly) drowned out by the ever more strident, ever more statist, ever more anti-Western-civ scumbags (a group now spearheaded by an ignorant, toxic moral exhibitionist) who've taken over the party: And you are still a Democrat?

If the Dems/left/"progressives," in the name of the best within themselves (it's in there, somewhere), ever manage to get their act together, that means having to confront the Randian "menace," discover that their fears are entirely unfounded, and become Aristotelians - in short, jump on the team and come on in for the big win, for fuck's sake already.

[Addendum: The potential/future leftist "recruits" for philosophy boot camp could sure use a drill instructor highly skilled in the art of integration/dialectic.  Where might such possibly be found, I wonder?]

[Addendum #2: In the interests of full dialectical non-one-sided context-keeping, the best piece of evidence that Trump harbors animus toward a minority group is his original proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.  The proper term for this proposal would be Islamophobic, not racist, since Islam isn't a race (a point Trump's haters are too stupid or dishonest to grasp).  Trump's haters might have gotten more mileage out of his apparently unqualified Islamophobia (as well as his early 1970s housing company policies) if they hadn't already blown their credibility on just about everything else, as already demonstrated.]

[Addendum #3: I've been getting some pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post where I've been posting it online, but the pushback hasn't been very good.  One objection I am getting is that I'm really hard on Dems/left/"progs" while not being "fair and balanced" enough to acknowledge all the misdeeds and intellectual bankruptcy among Republicans/right/conservatives (with or without scare-quotes), such that I might appear to come off as some kind of partisan GOP shill.  So let me start by saying, the GOP has a shitty track record on LGBT+ rights, and clearly so.  So while the left want to force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings (you see, the left got its well-earned victory with gay marriage, but it just couldn't help overstepping into trampling on others' freedoms, now could it), if the GOP had its way there wouldn't even be gay civil unions.  So fuck 'em on that score, they have a lot of rehabilitating to do to regain the moral credibility squandered there. One can find a good amount of commentary (including polemics) on the GOP under my 'republicans' tag.  One extensive listing of GOP intellectual misdeeds is contained in this post in a long paragraph beginning with "Before continuing...".  Another point of pushback on this wonderfully aggressive post has to with data purporting to show a rise in hate crimes, particularly murders by white supremacists, under (and therefore presumably attributable to) Trump.  One such releasing of data, by the Anti-Defamation League, is relayed uncritically by WaPo writers while being torched by someone who looked into the ADL report.  (Further context.)  This, all in connection with my lead question, "Why hasn't there been a repeat of Charlottesville all around the country since then (close to 2 years now), with emboldened white supremacists running amok and terrorizing non-whites?"  The Dems/left/"progs" would have the American electorate believe that this sort of thing would be a regular occurrence under Trump because of a culture of hatred he would unleash.  As it turns out, the number of what the ADL calls extremism-related murders (using its methods criticized at the "torched" link) in the year 2018 is all of 50 in a nation of 340M+.  39 of those are murders "by white supremacists," whether ideological or non-ideological in nature, and this figure evidently includes the 17 people gunned down in the Parkland, FL school shooting (2/14/2018), which all on its own would nearly account for the increase from 18 "murders by white supremacists" in 2017 to 39 in 2018.  Be very wary of statistics cited by known-to-be-partisan "news" outlets.  Has the worn-out credibility of the anti-Trump media not been made thoroughly apparent yet? ffs  Anyway, there seem to be a number of readers who just don't like to see it being said that vast swaths of today's Dem/left/"prog" crowd have become basically demonically warped morons in their (political) thinking, or that the intellectual culture of the left is essentially a basket case, but that's what the exhaustively-documented facts say, so tough shit.  Just follow the gobs of links I provide in this and other posts tagged 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' for incontrovertible proof of this seemingly hard-to-swallow truth.  It pains me that it is true.  But I offer an undeniably no-brainer solution, goddammit.]

[Addendum #4, in the interests of dialectical completeness: Well, guess what. Here is an alternate, well-supported take on Trump's remarks about Charlottesville. It is decidedly negative. It hits Trump right where he usually or often deserves to be hit, and for which he has been caught out countless times -- his casual relationship to the truth. But what it is NOT is the line of attack that Trump's haters and opposition media have put forward, because that line is absolutely indefensible given the context, which includes multiple statements across a few days in which he condemns in no uncertain terms: hate; bigotry; racism; white supremacy; white nationalism; neo-Nazis; KKK; and "other" hate groups. The only term he apparently left out was: alt-right. (Is Trump ideologically aware enough to know what the "alt-right" is? How many people can pin down the meaning of "alt-right" so that it isn't used as some fast and loose smear, as though that sort of thing would ever happen in politics?) Nowhere in this piece is it asserted that Trump stated, implied, insinuated, or anything else that he considered white supremacists to be "very fine people." That is as much a lie as ever.
And guess what else. This eminently reasonable takedown of Trump on his handling of Charlottesville is performed by an Objectivist (adherent to basically the entirety of Ayn Rand's philosophy, or at the very least all its fundamental principles [and he was one noteworthy player in the "Peikoff-Kelley schism" literature, siding against Kelley on technical grounds within Objectivist epistemology...]). So how is it that an Objectivist can outperform by a mile a whole army of Dem/left/"prog" people, I wonder?]

[Addendum #5: This contains the most brutal anti-Trump comments section I've encountered, with lots of erudition to boot.  But it's a bunch of conservatives doing the brutalizing, not the left/Dem scum who've squandered all their credibility.  Trump's best critics are not to be found on the intellectually bankrupt/collapsing scum-left.]

The intellectual quality of 'Right' and 'Left' today

[The broad category of individuals listed here would be something like "public intellectual figures influential on contemporary mainstream American cultural and political thought."]

For the time being, I'll just drop this list of names and then explain later how the collected efforts of the 'Right' figures can easily wipe the floor with the collection of 'Left' figures listed.  I mean, isn't it obvious to anyone who's done his homework?  (Hint: which side has more overall aggregate wisdom?  [For instance, only one side has authors of books titled: The Book of Virtues; The Road to Character.]  It's a no-brainer, much like how a Golden State Warriors team with a healthy Curry and Durant wipes the floor with otherwise pretty skilled teams.  I'm sorry to say that I don't think that the "left" side rises to the level of the 2017-2018 Houston Rockets in this analogy, because it really isn't close.  The left side is more like a .500 team pretending it's an .800 [66-win] team.  The .900+ [74-8] team on the merits would be Aristotelians-Randians.)  And we're not even listing the not-so-influential but some vastly superior libertarian and Objectivist thinkers.

(I am more closely familiar with the 'Right' stream of American thought and so there are more of them listed; I list only living people with one exception; I leave out those currently working in prominent government positions.)

Republicans / Right:

Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Richard Epstein
Roger Scruton
Glenn Beck
Bill O'Reilly
Krauthammer (d. 2018)
Kissinger
George Will
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Michael Savage
Ben Shapiro
Mark Levin
Dennis Prager
Tucker Carlson
Greg Gutfeld
Newt Gingrich
Dinesh D'Souza
Bret Stephens
David Brooks
David Horowitz
Jason Riley
Heather Mac Donald
Peggy Noonan
Dana Perino
Jesse Watters
Dennis Miller
Jeanine Pirro
Dan Bongino
Candace Owens
Milo Y
Karl Rove
Brit Hume
Jonah Goldberg
Pat Buchanan
Lou Dobbs
Ann Coulter
James Dobson
Michael Medved
William Bennett
Robert Bork
George Gilder
Charles Murray
Andrew Napolitano
John Stossel
Victor Davis Hanson
Rod Dreher
Ross Douthat


Democrats / Left:

Jon Stewart
Stephen Colbert
Chris Cuomo
Rachel Maddow
Cenk Uygur
Chris Matthews
Matthew Yglesias
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz
Alan Blinder
William Galston
Austan Goolsbee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michael Eric Dyson
Cornel West
Noam Chomsky
Jurgen Habermas
Naomi Klein
Slavoj Zizek
Robert Reich
Juan Williams
Michael Moore
Thom Hartmann
Jesse Jackson
Al Sharpton
Al Franken
Bill Moyers
Matt Taibbi
David Brock
Nathan J. Robinson
Nicholas Kristof
Al Gore


Independent/Other:

Jordan Peterson
Andrew Sullivan
Glenn Greenwald
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman
Fareed Zakaria
The Economist (no bylines)
Steven Pinker
Joe Rogan
Bill Maher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
Amartya Sen
Judith Butler

How intellectually bankrupt is the global warming debate?

If my favorite blogger has the gist of it right - and I can't really fathom how it's not basically correct - then the answer would be: pretty damn bankrupt.  Fuck!

This is a very important issue not to be intellectually bankrupt about.

Prediction: Trump (or a Republican) will win in 2020

Mark my words; I'd be willing to bet 10,000 to 1 odds on this.  Details to come.  Gist: the Republican Party isn't morally and intellectually bankrupt (it's part way there, more in the intellectual rather than moral part, I think), but the Democrat Party is (i.e., in a different category - of primarily-intellectual degeneracy and perversity).  Heck, even I, an ordinary joe citizen with common sense and persistence, could wipe the floor with any of these two-dozen statist clowns.  But for Trump it should be plenty easy enough; just look how he dispatched with Crooked Hillary, the most pretend-qualified candidate in modern history (and my implication her cynical enablers, including it appears all the two dozen clowns).

The American people don't want their fucking statism and controls and their "free" this and that for illegals, their increasingly-expensive intellectual meltdown on college campuses, their hubristic contempt, their being the boy who cried racism and immediately assume the worst about their opponents and still haven't learned their lesson with the Trump win, their coddling of warped and destructive public-sector rent-capture, their mendaciously-worded "reproductive freedom / women's health" (OMG where do they get this newspeak facepalm) on demand funded in part by nuns through tax punishments, envy disguised as "compassion," their culpably defying economic consensus and logic with their dogmatic commitment to so-called minimum wage (and these dipshits have the nerve to cry racism at the drop of a red hat?), their equation of morality with politics, widespread illegitimacy among Democrat-friendly demographics, their lackluster to shitty record on (un-bullshitted-up) freedom, their reckless demagoguery on Trump's proposed border wall, their downright demonic smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., all spiraling in a web of doubling down on failure and denial, 'kay?  Not hard to figure out, not hard at all.

===

On a completely unrelated topic, does anyone have any pointers for me as to where I could find the best blog on the internet?  I like to keep an eagle eye out for that sort of thing; but for all my exhaustive-seeming-to-me look at the intellectual landscape today I can't seem to think of any that are remotely in the same league as what this blog here is doing.  And to narrow things down a bit, for there to be such a thing as a best blog on the internet (wait, is there an off-internet blog?) it would have to be a philosophy one, right?

Wouldn't it most likely stand to reason that the 2nd best blog on the internet would also be a philosophy blog?  For that distinction I nominate this one.  It's the one I visit most often for pure philosophical material (where the profession's most popular blog, despite its uses, falls relatively short).  That author there has the leftists' number, too - most likely inductively based on countless exception-less instances of leftist scummery, amiright?  As a nice bonus, he's vastly learned on other subjects as well.

But I don't see that blog very loudly pushing the whole Philosophy for Children/Everyone or (synonymously?) 'Better Living Through Philosophy', either, much less the whole 'Aristotelian' thing consciously and explicitly taking after - in spirit, if not in letter - the most formidable intellect in human history to date.  I don't see any other blog even coming close to what that first-linked blog up there is doing in that regard.  Why in the fuck aren't any of the other blogs (that I know of, but what the fuck do I know, idk) doing that?

Have you seen the output of that blog in just the past week?  (After a three months' hiatus, that is; what happened in the meantime, thumb-twiddling?  Staring blankly into space?)

If any of you reading this knows of a superior blog to that one, please contact me ASAFP, pretty please with sugar on top, show me a fucking blog better than that one, so that I can emulate and try to catch up.  I'd like to be proven wrong about something for once, for shit's sake.

The guy is kinda an asshole, though, huh?  Am I wrong?  Okay then.  (We play Clintana and O'Rourke next week, they should be pushovers.)

Next thing you know he'll be throwing down the gauntlet to Scumbag Lisa Duggan at 10,000 to 1 odds, amiright? :D

And get me some of that flower he's smokin', huh?  Wow. ^_^

Also, this blog serves a pretty useful content-integrating function.  Why isn't he a nationally recognized hero ffs already, if hubristic nitwits like Another Obnoxious Commie can rise to that status?  Just because he's not on the junior high playground that is twitter doesn't mean he isn't worth following.

[Update: Thinking it through some more, I'm unsure if I'm using the odds-based-challenge idea properly.  What I'm trying to say is, I'm pretty fucking certain, man.  They're pushovers compared to Trump.  Same with Scumbag Duggan compared to that first-linked blogger.]

Is this blog too abrasive?

Someone sent me the questions/input copypasted below, which I'll answer in a follow-up post.

Meanwhile, if any of you reading this is a fat fucking pig and wants to do something about it, perhaps you just haven't found the proper motivation.  (Anecdote: a Church pastor friend of mine shed 100 pounds of fat and added 15+ pounds of muscle in 7 months using simple Snake Diet tricks.  And there's a shitload of other anecdotal cases that would be widely known about if only snowflakes weren't so triggered by truth and go tattling so much to the ban-happy 'net nannies.)  'Snake Diet Wizard' Cole Robinson is a motivational genius.  Stop fucking eating, fatty!

Copypaste:

Hello, I've read your articles of which you've posted recently on [...] I just wanted to make a few comments via pm (Out of respect for you and myself). I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article and quite a few of the links you've posted along with it. I felt that you presented a well defined argument and used valid sources to support your thoughts. My only criticism of it lies within your descriptive language of those you view as your opposition. The rational for describing them in such a way (correct me if I'm wrong) is that of disdain for those that show ignorance and apathy on Objectivism. I can see your views oon this as I've felt similarly with my peers. However, I implore you to reconsider this approach in further writing. Human are rational beings after all. Why do you believe your opponents refuse to see past their own flawed opinions? When you so clearly demonstrate a much better alternative? I will argue it matters in presentation. You arguments carry weight to the point of being attacks on character not just position. Vast generalizations were made upon your opponents in your description of them being intellectually lethargic. I believe you carry great sway with your rhetoric, but so much more is gained when look through their perspective and provide them with the bread crumbs so to speak to lead them toward their own better informed opinion. At the end of the day I see your posts as having more value when used to persuade rather than being used to "win" an argument. I only tell you this as I greatly appreciate your writing and wish to hear less vitriol and more rational understandings. Please do let me know if I'm off base in my criticisms. I don't wish to misconstrue you or your thoughts.
/copypaste

[Update: I already have in mind a title for the follow-up posting to this one: "Q: Is this blog too abrasive? A: Fuck no! (and I'm just getting warmed up, motherfucker)"]

When AOC wept, or: she retweeted the photos

[Point of reference: "When Chomsky wept"]

Another Obnoxious Commie (AOC) retweeted photos of herself weeping at the sight of detained children at the border.  Maybe this insufferable ignoramus just doesn't have enough life experience to know this is in poor taste (presumably someone like Chomsky would know better) - which then gives lie to her pretense to being a know-it-all with the intellectual and moral chops to take down all those right-wing jerks in a single tweet.

Her photo-retweeting amounts to a phony display of moral superiority.  I don't mean that her tears are phony - I'm sure that anyone with moral common sense could weep at the tragically shitty situation these kids detained at the border are in - but that her pretense to moral superiority is.  AOC (and the left's) intellectual and moral compasses aren't superior to the rest of ours.

And since AOC is always on the pretend-moral-superiority march - and she's made clear that factual correctness and knowledge take a back seat to moral correctness (how's that for a fact/value dichotomy, eh? or: how does she know she's morally correct?  or: if she's so factually ignorant and all full of hubris on that count, how morally upstanding is that?  or: if she's so unreliable factually and full of hubris on that count, how reliable is she on moral questions?) - this photo-retweeting thing would be just another instance in a long sequence of phony moral grandstanding.

She's getting eaten alive on twitter for this, which is all too fitting given her charismatic exploitation of that notoriously toxic, anti-intellectual, dopamine-over-truth medium.

Doing a bit of searching on this I came across a couple paragraphs from an opinion piece by David Limbaugh every bit of which rings true:

But here's the good news. AOC is unteachable, because she is unwilling to be taught. Full of hubris, she already knows everything and is the champion of every leftist cause. She leads with her unbridled emotions, happily ignorant of the facts. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi would love to corral her but would not dare even hint at that, shrewdly recognizing the mob attraction AOC enjoys with the Party's shrieking base. Pelosi knows better than to chastise AOC and so ducked the question when asked why AOC never shuts up. 

Well, I'm with Pelosi, for different reasons. Please don't shut up, AOC. We appreciate your drawing a sharp contrast every day between the noxious views of your party, which now dutifully embodies your extremism, and those representing responsible governance. Thank you for liberally exercising your First Amendment freedoms.

The issue here isn't AOC per se - the only reason she's a national figure is that she's a charismatic figure (either a good or a bad thing, depending on the context) who won in a thoroughly uncompetitive, ethnically-gerrymandered district where the "exchange of ideas" is limited to doctrinal disputes among extreme leftists (e.g., exactly how much of the talents/energies/minds-bodies of the rich[*] should be at the disposal of the collective/state) - but rather the issue is what her prominence on the national stage says about her party, its hubris and ideological bankruptcy, and the nation's intellectual bankruptcy.   (Cure: philosophical education, for fuck's sake already.)

[* - Speaking of Comrade de Bozio's "money in the wrong hands" remark, I'm left guessing whether he and fellow leftists envision some $100B pile of cash Bezos has stowed away in a vault, not doing anything for anyone.  Maybe they envision him as Scrooge McDuck, diving into and swimming around in a pool of gold coins?  And speaking of Comrade de Bozio, how on earth did New Yorkers elect this clown?  I thought the intellectual and moral compasses were superior there in the big cities?]

Sooner or later she's going to be asked about Ayn Rand and the answer will not reflect well on her, guaranteed - because all she's ever "learned" about Rand is leftist smears she would have lapped up uncritically from within her Comprachico-ized intellectual milieu.  Under not-far-fetched conditions she could easily have been brainwashed into staunch support for a Commie regime; her intellectually reckless antipathy to capitalism virtually assures it.  If you think Rand's portrayal of the public-sector types in Atlas is some kind of wild cartoonish hyperbole - a bunch of obnoxious commies in essence - you only need imagine what a critical mass of AOC- (or Scumbag Duggan-)types run amok would bring about.  Or, heck, just look at the pitiful intellectual and moral state of the Democrat Party today.

There was a time when the Democrats had intellectually and morally decent figures like Sen. Moynihan; there is no comparable figure in the party today (else we'd all know about it, wouldn't we).  The left as a whole still has intellectuals like Chomsky around, but not for much longer.  Hasn't it ever occurred to these hubristic fools that the very best minds - the very tail end of the political-ideological bell curve, not the merely-clever who might be mistaken for being on that tail end - have migrated over time (probably through attrition, given the sorry intellectual character of committed leftists post-Nozick) to the "right," in particular the libertarian (and especially Aristotelian-Randian) variety of "rightist" thought?  If leftists are so sure of their superiority, shouldn't they be willing to put such a hypothesis to the test?

In sum (and it's a point her twitter hecklers in this age of intellectually-degenerate politics struggle to articulate): the very fact of AOC cluelessly retweeting her weeping-photos undermines her pretense to superiority.

On rape accusations against political figures (and today's left/Dem scummery)

The first rule of assessing rape accusations against political figures (news-cycle context) is: be very, very skeptical.  Why?

I might have thought it should go without saying why.  But to spell it out: Because the consequences of a public believing such rape accusations can have major political implications - and people motivated by political considerations know this.  That gives people with political motivations an incentive to make (or promote/hype) the allegations, at little to no cost to themselves.

It's almost as though - in the political context - we should assume that the person making the accusation is doing so out of political motivation, unless there is clear and compelling evidence to support it.

(There's also this: politicians in great numbers are intellectually bankrupt, cynical, hypocritical, etc. - but it tends to ruin political careers when serious and especially criminal wrongdoing is uncovered.  Despite all the intellectual and moral corruption in politics, there is a vetting process for the really serious shit.)

Otherwise, the rape accusations can be exploited in the expected hypocritical ways by whichever party stands to gain from the exploitation.

The chief offenders in this regard nowadays are Democrats.

Watch for the buzzword "credibly accused."  The Demon Rat scum applied that phrase to Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh - a despicable display of Demon Rat intellectual and moral bankruptcy I detail here.  (And as I mentioned in a subsequent post, not only could the accuser(s) not provide specifics as to time and place, but no one else came forward to say what supposed party it might have been that both Ford and Kavanaugh attended.  Shouldn't that fact have jumped right out at the lawyers on the Judiciary Committee ffs?)

Watch for Demon Rats going through mental gymnastics so that they don't have to call on a Democrat accused of rape (or one proven to have worn blackface - something a GOP politician has next to zero chance of getting away with) to resign if it means losing power to Republicans.

Watch for Demon Rats to get skeptical all of a sudden when a Democrat president is accused of rape.

Watch for Demon Rats to immediately assume the worst (i.e., sexual assault) and go out of their way to ignore context when an opposing politician says "grab 'em by the pussy."

Hell, the Demon Rats' cynical behavior on these counts is exactly why rape accusations against political figures should be met with skepticism, else such behavior only encourages politically-motivated false/unfounded accusations.

It's just like with impeaching a sitting president for obstruction of justice: the Democrats blew their credibility when holding Clinton and Trump to different standards.  They are pinned in a corner of their own making, dead to rights.  (Same goes for the generations of socialist/leftist intellectuals who by all rights are roundly discredited by historical practice and sound economic and moral theory; they had their chance and they blew it, on a catastrophic scale.)  Such is the logical consequence of culpable intellectual bankruptcy/corruption.  Until they ever clean up their act, fuck 'em!

How shitty is Lisa Duggan, leading Rand-basher du jour?

[Note 2/4/20: I finish up on demolishing Scumbag Duggan's so-called scholarship and credibility here.]

[A follow-up to my earlier post, "How shitty are Rand-bashers?"]

I've already commented on this despicable creature here, primarily on the basis of how she makes a mockery of the very activity of intellectual inquiry.  As with other leftist losers/scum, by perverting the very form of intellectual inquiry and thereby undermining its integrity, they produce junk content.  The way Duggan replied to me in email when I asked her reasonable pointed questions virtually assures that her "scholarship" is shitty.

Lisa Duggan is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is the latest specimen of an author making the (futile) effort to discredit Rand in book form, with Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019).  (How this piece of shit got published by a university press is a good question.  How low are the standards for the series this is a part of?  What clique of leftist scum is involved?)  She identifies herself on her twitter as a pinko/commie activist.  If Mean Girl is the "best" commentary on Rand the Left can come up with, 62 years after Atlas Shrugged, the left is kaput as a credible intellectual force.

As I pointed out in my commentary linked above, I have not read Duggan's book.  All the signs point to it being a waste of time.  The usual dishonest/slimy/scummy/lowlife/smear/sneer/strawman leftist tactics appear well on display there, and I've seen the tactics a thousand times.  The very title of the book itself is a dishonest smear.

How does Duggan promote her work in excerpt/preview form?  Here we go.  First off, the premise that Rand is "the spirit of our time" cannot possibly be true, for if it were, Duggan wouldn't be holding a university position (or, preferably, would have her act cleaned way up).  (Within the intellectual thug as we know her is an Aristotelian yearning to break out -- but that's up to her.)  For another, if it were true, a critical mass of people would have internalized the themes/content of Understanding Objectivism (i.e., become in essence Aristotelian cognizers).  But let's get to some specific claims she makes, shall we?

For one thing, Duggan is clueless about the history of Objectivist thought.  For instance, she writes:

Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), ad infinitum.

Anyone who does their homework on Rand knows that one of these concrete instances as not like hte others.  Only one of them ran a 1990s internet forum, Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP) and could cite Rand chapter and verse.  Only one of them would have consumed pretty much the entire body of secondary literature on Rand (including Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical [1995], the author of which was a MDOP contributor).  Only one of them debated anarcho-capitalism with David Friedman on humanities.philosophy.objectivism.  Only one of them is aware of the hierarchical primacy of philosophy and how that is demonstrated by the hierarchical structure of wikipedia.

So why would she lump Jimmy Wales in with the rest of these business people as if they were all more or less alike in their Rand-expertise?

She makes the following claim:

Though Ayn Rand’s popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and 70s. 

Since when?  Reputation for what?  Among whom?  It was in the '60s that her cultural visibility was on an upward trajectory while it is true that the '70s was a lull period in that regard.  Anyone who has followed the history of Objectivism would know this.  At minimum this claim is sloppy and deceptive.

She writes:

Rand’s ideas are not the key to her influence. [!] Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism, though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are at the heart of her incalculable impact.

So if I understand this correctly, Rand's ideas can be separated from her novels.  That would come as news to pretty much anybody.  How sloppy a thinker is Duggan, anyway?

There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand’s novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present—from Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.

So Duggan can rattle off lists of Rand fans from this or that sector of the culture.  So why doesn't she rattle off the list of philosophy professors and other intellectuals influenced by Rand?  By not doing so she conveys the impression that those influenced by her don't include intellectuals and philosophers.  This is prima facie dishonest.  How can someone with the research tools at Duggan's disposal fail to notice the body of secondary literature from philosophers on Rand?  She cites Sciabarra's Russian Radical in the bibliography to Mean Girl (yes, I checked out the bibliography to see how selective it is . . . which it is, very much so . . . and it's heavily titled toward the biography-related, gossipy-level, intellectual-lightweight-level resources), so she can't but be aware of the very serious and comprehensive treatment Rand's ideas receive there.  (She says she consulted it for the biographical info therein.)

Let's say that a philosopher influences a bunch of scumbags who go on to wreak destruction on the world.  Karl Marx is one such philosopher.  But leftists counter that with "oh, but that's not Marxism proper and those are bad people, how about you pay attention instead to Luxemburg, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm [whose Man for Himself is excellent, BTW], Cohen, Harvey, et al."  Good luck getting these same folks to acknowledge Hospers, Gotthelf, Miller, Den Uyl, Rasmussen, Sciabarra, Salmieri, Tara Smith, et al.  For leftists, their readings of Rand reign supreme and to hell with how other readers (who must not be very bright/reflective/critical) receive Rand's writings; but turn the tables on Marx/Marxism and they scream foul.

Duggan continues:

But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement.This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.” Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” Rand’s sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight. Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal conditions “cruel optimism”—the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses. Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.

This is not a serious analysis but a mere pretense of one.  "Contempt and indifference toward social inferiors" is not Rand's position but Duggan's (and all Rand-bashers') fevered imagining of Rand's position.  Here's how that fevered phenomenon goes: Rand denies there is some duty to serve others irrespective of one's own interests; she speaks of "the virtue of selfishness" (which she explains the meaning of throughout her book of that title); she advocates laissez-faire capitalism as premised upon and packaged together with her-idea-of-selfishness; leftists view capitalism as an inhuman system premised on their-idea-of-selfishness; and so it must be the case that Rand is a defender of an inhuman system because that's the expression of "selfishness."  That's it.  That's the entire extent of how leftists "grasp" what's going on in Rand's writings.  And they have zero grasp of her wider philosophical principles beyond the political or ethical.  About the only thing they get right about Rand is: she advocates laissez-faire capitalism.  But they have zero in-context grasp of her reasons for supporting it.

One of Rand's wider philosophical principles -- well, in a sense the fundamental one uniting all the rest -- is the necessity of integrating one's mental contents properly, placing them within their proper context and hierarchy, perhaps using the likes of Aristotle as a guide/inspiration for how it's done (most perfectionist-like).  By doing so, one should - with enough practice and input - be able to more readily identify phenomena by their essence, which is to say, in Randian terms, the most explanatorily fundamental to the phenomena.  And if you're going to get into the topic of sense of life, you might as well get into Rand's view of the subconscious and its relation to the conscious level, a topic for psycho-epistemology (covered most indepth explicitly in such places as Binswanger's lectures).

Here's part of an explanation for how someone like Rand - or Marx, or Aristotle, or other big-impact thinkers - have the influence that they do: the power of mental integration.  Taking Atlas Shrugged (or Das Kapital) as an example: the author integrates a vast sum of material that no other authors integrated to nearly such an extent.  There's nothing nearly like Atlas Shrugged in existence; perhaps the most comparable case would be Mises' Human Action, itself an integration of vast material.  (Let's not forget the work of the sole longtime student of both Mises and Rand, Reisman's mammoth Capitalism.)  She covers a vast range of subject matter, tightly hierarchically ordered, with application to a vast range of avenues of human activity.  And it isn't just the Galt speech that is the product of an integration or organizing of vast sums of material; it's the integration of plot, characterization, theme, and style into a unity (the theme of Atlas Shrugged being "the role of the mind in man's existence" and all the applications of this all-encompassing theme).

Integrating vast sums of material into a compact/condensed/essentialized form is the aim of my own work, as evidenced in my existing book (see "About Me" above) and in the scope and ambition of my current 'Better Living Through Philosophy' project.  (The principle of integration is at work just from the unit-condensation function of all the documenting links I provide in my blog posts.)  If ever there is a legitimate product of Rand's influence it's in my own work and/or the sensibility that drives its formation (to whatever degree of perfection in result).  I have an eagle-eye out for the principle of integration at work in whatever phenomena where it might be identified.  I find Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle, which covers fundamentally important subject matter as treated by two of history's most searching minds, necessarily must be integrated with the Randian project (although tons of promising leads are already there in Sciabarra, which integrates vast sums of material as reflected in his bibliographies).

I could go on.  Point being, this is the sort of project someone like Duggan is too intellectually lazy to undertake.  Aristotle and Hegel would rightly be disgusted at her intellectually small MO - a case to learn from in the how-to-avoid-intellectual-bankruptcy sense.

As to the key and central claim of Duggan's book - that Rand promotes meanness and cruelty and indifference toward others - I don't know how many goddamn times I have to quote this but here it is again, from Galt's speech:

"Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his right to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. Be to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values."

And what is virtue, the basis upon which such help is warranted?  It is - in essence - putting forth the effort to use one's mind to the fullest:

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.

So how much thinking and use of Duggan's mind went into writing Mean Girl?

Duggan continues:

Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest.

Pathetic.  Since the theme of her largest novel is the role of the mind in man's existence, her novel is meant to illustrate that in myriad applications.  And she has many examples to go on in the history of business.  Today she would point to the examples of companies such as Amazon, as being guided by the integrating/organizing vision of Bezos.  (Today's business titans may be ideologically mixed or indifferent, which is beside the point: no one else qua businessman seems to integrate quite at Bezos' level today.  [More here.])

Duggan:

[Rand's novels'] logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on racialized beauty and physical capacity—perceived ugliness or disability are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.

Quite the chutzpah to use the phrase "hierarchy of value" in connection with Rand and then completely bastardize how Rand applied that concept, huh?  The dishonesty of injecting race into this should go without saying.  And it gets lower still (hold your noses; we're descending from the intellectual gutter into the sewer):

Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Nation through the lens of industrial capitalism. They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels’ fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes. 

Identification with dominant historical forces?  What the fuck is she talking about?

Where are we now? Is the long career of optimistic cruelty, of contempt and indifference to human inequality, at its height? Or is the culture of greed surrounding zombie neoliberalism so pronounced now that it is effectively exposed and may finally be displaced as an acceptable political feeling? Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has argued that Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism, her excessive overidentification with it, only serves to make its inherent ridiculousness clearly perceptible.

(The one piece by Zizek I could stomach to read all the way through was his Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) article, "The Actuality of Ayn Rand," which Duggan cites in her bibliography.  Opening up to a few different pages of his Living in the End Times I find the prose of a pretentious twit.  Early in his Less Than Nothing: Hegel and... this "leading cultural critic of the left" cited the conversation between Mahler and Sibelius as follows: "Mahler emphasized how a symphony has to encompass the entire world, while Sibelius pleaded for restraint and reserve."  His statement about Mahler is accurate but his statement about Sibelius is completely idiotic on its face.  (I count Sibelius's 2nd and 7th symphonies among my very favorite, with the 6th not far behind; Tapiola is arguably his greatest work.)  Sibelius's actual statement as reported was: "I admire the symphony's style and severity of form, as well as the profound logic creating an inner connection among all of the motives."  After encountering this piece of sloppiness from the pretentious and unreliable Zizek, I put down Less Than Nothing and have since sought out Hegel scholarship such as Ferrarin's, Houlgate's, and the Oxford Handbook.)

What's telling about Duggan's intellectual character here is that while she cites Zizek's JARS article, she doesn't show any particular concern to cite or study any other article in that journal.  Shouldn't that sort of thing be a red flag on its face?  A careful and attentive reader would look at her bibliography would notice that there is this thing she cites from called the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the only article she cites from that journal is from a non-Objectivist leftist - as though there were no other articles of interest in that journal that an academic writing for a university press on the subject of Rand might have discovered.  Did she make an effort to go beyond the Zizek article so she isn't just some leftist citing another leftist, all echo-chamber/circlejerk-like as is the standard leftist MO now?  When she saw that there was a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was she curious enough to find out whether there were other insights in that publication to draw from, that might have made her work more useful and informative?  Clearly not, because Duggan is an intellectually dishonest piece of shit whose aim is not to learn about Rand, but to smear her.