Friday, February 28, 2020

A libertarian social safety net


For reasons the merits of which are not altogether clear to me, a great many people have been habituated into the thought that a social-welfare safety net has to be administered, coercively (at the point of a gun), by the state.  We're not even talking here about emergency measures that perhaps only a state-scale entity could take during a deep recession or depression, or during a deadly virus outbreak (there's one I have readily in mind at this very moment), but rather an ongoing, cradle-to-grave, offensive-to-liberty, welfare state.

Consider: the United States had, by today's standards, a very small federal government, outside of wartime, for the first century-plus of its existence.  Somehow the people managed to get by without all of today's largesse; somehow it managed to develop into a world power with a per-capita GDP growth rate not unlike what came after.  As for what has come since, non-military spending at all levels of government (federal, state, local) has steadily increased to over 30 percent of GDP today, even as GDP has expanded many-fold during that time.

On its face, this indicates that it's not some pressing, life-or-death need that feeds the welfare-state mentality, but rather a mentality reflecting a contempt for principles of liberty (to adopt a phrase used in the title of a Walter Williams book).

(As for pressing, life-or-death needs, there will be, for the foreseeable future given foreseeable technological and production frontiers, such pressing needs at the margins.  Even the "successful" (using a specifically statism-inflected moral standard) Nordic-style welfare states still have nonzero poverty rates, e.g., around 5% in "Denmawk!"  And the economically-advanced nations continue to hoard wealth out of the reach of the desperately needy peoples of Africa and elsewhere; part of the prevailing welfare-state mentality is that "universal healthcare as a matter of human rights" doesn't extend to such geographically less lucky peoples.  That is, the pressing-needs-at-the-margins argument that is the wedge in the door welfare-statists use to get us to the 30-percent-of-GDP level we have today, is selectively not expanded to cover the entire world.  The expenses would then supposedly be too unreasonably demanding of the wealth-producers' talents, energies, time, and lives, see - that is, the global top x% selfishly lives high while letting others die.  As for a sustainable, i.e., capital-intensive route to economic development for the geographically unlucky people, transfers of already-produced wealth from altruistic first-worlders, to thereby be consumed by the unlucky ones, won't cut it, however warm and fuzzy it makes the altruistic ones feel.  Only in the era of globalized capitalism has the global poverty rate been declining (dramatically).)

Human beings flourish as members of communities.  That's a point well-recognized by sages like Aristotle.  But it's a category error to lump "community" in with "state" or government.  A sine qua non of state institutions is physical force, i.e., compulsion or threat at the point of a gun.  Under the classic libertarian analysis, physical force must not be initiated or introduced into human affairs; its only proper use is to repel or redress initiated force.  ("But what about x, y, z, this that and the other thing, be it public goods, public health emergencies, depressions, etc.?"  Is it really that such pressing needs and concerns can't be addressed by non-state means, or is there a failure of imagination involved?  And is even a hardcore libertarian analysis not amenable in any way to libertarian interpretations of the invasiveness to human autonomy that is a public health threat?  Are we even really sure that economic depressions come from the operations of a fully free market under fair legal constraints?  Are the likes of David Friedman just out to lunch?)

Now, my vision for an ideal social order is something like this: Aristotelian-eudaimonist-perfectionist ethical norms, under some wide or universal recognition of the idea of better living through philosophy (including philosophy for children), combined with libertarian social-political norms.  (Are there such things as incorporated cities even in an 'anarcho-capitalist' framework envisioned by Friedman et al?  There are incorporated other things, so I don't see why not.  So there may be cities, but perhaps not city-states - presumably the form of polity of primary focus for an ancient Greek philosopher - cities being localized and more under direct control of the territorial participants.  So, would such cities have the (delegated) rights to regulate the size of soft drink you can purchase within the city limits?  More on that in just a moment.)  Under such a social framework, based on eudaimonist or flourishing norms alone, there would be a large private-sector-based social safety net, probably operating under the virtue-based norm of aid that Rand/Galt promulgated in Atlas Shrugged (and which Rand-bashers refuse to acknowledge, having lazily/recklessly caricatured her egoism in base, non-virtue-based terms).

So let's say I am posed the question, "If you could eliminate the ongoing cradle-to-grave welfare state right now, given all its offenses to human liberty, would you advocate for that?"  But under scrutiny, the terms of the question are a moot point.  Hypotheticals or counterfactuals should be treated with all the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, they need to consider not merely the consequent but the preconditions for the antecedent.  (That is to say, hypotheticals or counterfactuals are open to abuse in the absence of proper context-keeping.)  That is to say, there is no conceivable scenario, under proper constraints for conceiving things, in which the welfare state is going to be eliminated right now.  (Properly constrained conceiving - as distinct from, say, imagining - doesn't permit conceiving of pigs who can fly unaided, hence the saying.  No proper concept of "pig" allows for it; it would drop the context of how we came to form and maintain the concept.)  The prevailing norms of American society won't allow for it.  The people would have to be converted to the Aristotelian-etc. principles I note and link to above, or be moved considerably in such a direction, or some such widespread values-alteration.

Would cities or other territorial communities make laws or regulations about soft drink sizes, or sexual practices, or other matters of virtue?  Or is there something about the libertarian norm that reflects and informs how people ought to treat one another generally speaking?  Or more exactly, is it something about what explains, grounds, or informs the libertarian norm (linking again) that involves a perhaps-judgmental yet laissez-faire attitude toward how people conduct their lives?  I mean, let's say that rather than paternistically regulating soft drink purchases, people apply Rand/Galt's virtue-based approach and condition social aid on either past virtuous behavior or on education for future virtuous behavior?  I think that this eudaimonist-libertarian way of thinking, actually present but largely implicit or inchoate in a great number of American people, helps explain what they find so offensive about Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism (which flows over into the mentality behind his highly intrusive "stop-and-frisk" policies, a mentality I don't see being extricated from his worldview all that soon, the same as with the elitist hubris behind his comments about farming skills).  Anyway, eudaimonist-libertarian social norms would emphasize education toward people exercising their best judgment, and then leaving it up to them to exercise their judgment given their own context of knowledge and hierarchy of values.  Like, duh?

To sum up: Like perhaps quite a lot of libertarians, I'm all for a robust social-welfare safety net and other virtues of sociality and community, just not at the point of a gun.  And with enough imagination (fueled by an intellectual perfectionism and/or the kind or quality of thinking behind Nozick's appallingly neglected framework for utopia) as well as ample benevolence, wouldn't it be a better safety net than the one currently existing?

[Addendum: Under a broadly prevailing culture of Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism, would there be even nearly as much need for social safety net institutions, or would people be a lot more self-sufficient in that regard?  I urge much properly-constrained imaginative conceiving in this regard.  Much like Rand, and contrary to the usual lazy caricatures of her, I have a very high view of human potentialities even as regards the less talented; while I don't envision a repeal of the bell curve, I envision a marked 'rightward' shifting of it under culturally Aristotelian conditions.]

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?


(A sequel to the original.)

The enemies of capitalism have a perverse (mis)understanding both of its basic moral principles and of the workings of the free market, which - in light of Rand's integration of the two points in Atlas Shrugged (and in "What is Capitalism?") under the theme of "the role of the mind in man's existence" - come to the same thing.  The way they typically employ the phrase "means of production" indicates their failure and/or refusal to grasp Rand's point that the mind/intellect/reason is the prime mover of the production process, i.e., the source of value-added over and above both technologically primitive means (natural resources excluding the most economically pivotal natural resource, the human mind) and the prevailing economic and technological infrastructure at any given point in time.  (Considerably more than anyone else, there's one man's vision behind Amazon.com.)

The anticapitalist ignorance/fallacies involved are well represented by Bernie Sanders' statement to Bloomberg at the Feb. 19 debate: "You know what Mr. Bloomberg? It wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well. And it is important that those workers are able to share the benefits also."  No one said that Bloomberg created the entire value of his company; what economics experts would say, however, is that the people involved in the running of his business were each paid roughly proportional to their marginal value-added contribution.  Bernie's language would indicate that he thinks there's some kind of (exploitative) zero-sum rather than win-win thing going on here; this kind of language/tendency is pretty widespread among socialists, notwithstanding the dramatic rise in both population and living standards in the era of modern capitalism.

(Sanders followed the above statement with the following, also a familiar one from enemies of capitalism; we'll call it the "alienation argument": "When we have so many people go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs, they feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards as well, so they can have some say of what happens to their lives."  The arguments involved here can't be covered in a brief paragraph of post.  But the gist of this problem, as best as I understand it, is that Bernie and socialists are talking here about a human problem, not a capitalism one, and it's not a problem I see being solved by the traditional socialist solutions about "seizing the means of production (sic)" or other forcible measures of putting "the workers" more in charge of decisions about the running of firms.  That being said, I'm all for voluntary 'worker'-empowerment arrangements that even a Randian 'left-libertarian' like Roderick Long gets behind.  And in any event, how do the rare, entrepreneurial skills of a Bezos get put to their optimal use under socialistic proposals?)

Sanders' statement about the "workers" creating much of the money is standard for socialist-talk and an ingrained tendency toward thinking in terms of a labor theory of value (LTV) under some guise or other.  The most (in)famous proponent of LTV, Karl Marx, had to qualify the LTV in such ways as to make it a truism.  To make a long story short, a CEO of a company qua such (i.e., not qua shareholder in the firm, which I address in a moment) is in the category of highly skilled labor, which represents a multiple of simple or unskilled labor.  And CEOs are known to often make many multiples of the lesser-skilled laborers under his or her command.  But the real villain in the Marxian/socialist framework, the source of alienation and exploitation, is the category of capital (in its privately-owned version, that is).  It's not the CEO that exploits, it's the shareholders (the capitalists) who are in the position to exploit the labor of the CEO and everyone else working in the firm.

Now, Bezos' salary as CEO is a mere $81K.  The vast bulk of his compensation comes from the value of the shares in the company he founded and runs.  IOW, in the Marxist/socialist "understanding," the shareholder-value part of the equation represents exploitation.  And Bezos is only a roughly 1/6 shareholder in Amazon, meaning to the tune of 5/6 of the company's value, Bezos the skilled-laborer-CEO is beholden to shareholder-capitalists.  It's so unfair and alienating.  (Ludwig von Mises among others went through considerable pains to make the point that entrepreneurs and capitalists are beholden to customers.  Is that what's unfair and alienating, in the final analysis?  Is the Marxist/socialist objection really about the inequalities in wealth and income arising from differences in ability to satisfy market demand?)

But the whole Marxian/socialist analysis runs into a problem that Rand solves, when we think through how Bezos qua capitalist/shareholder supposedly exploits the workers (including Bezos qua CEO)?  The question that Marx/socialists fail to answer but Rand does answer, is whether and how Bezos' shareholder-based net worth is a more or less accurate reflection of the value-added he generated as prime mover behind Amazon's success.  Never mind whether or how the net worth of other shareholders in Amazon and other companies reflect how they generated value-added through their skills, savings-and-investing, and savings-and-investing skills or vision.  (Warren Buffett - net worth of roughly $90B or 5th largest in the world - made his fortune through pure investing/finance skills an vision.  What role for a Buffett's finance skills in a socialist-style economy?  And if a highly-and rarely-skilled person holds out not merely for the minimal level of compensation that would bring forth performance, but rather holds out for what the market will bear, is that especially objectionable?)

Anyway, in 2019, Jeff Bezos divorced from his wife, Mackenzie, and as a consequence of the divorce settlement she became currently the 23rd wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of roughly $44B.  She's not the CEO; she's not usually credited with being the prime mover behind Amazon's success.  From 2019 onward, she draws returns from Amazon's productive capacity qua pure capitalist.

So, using Marx/Sanders/socialist logic, does Mackenzie exploit Jeff?

Saturday, February 22, 2020

What does Putin want for the USA?


If I had to guess, Putin wants to sow internal division, discord, and distrust.  If I had to say, Putin is a grandmaster of misinformation and misdirection.  See his non-answer answers to Chris Wallace's probing interview questions.  So, he sees how Trump's presidency sows discord, and Trump's opposition plays right along, probably much to his delight.  (This includes their obsessing for years about Trump/Putin-collusion conspiracy theories.)  He most likely seeded the claims made in the so-called Steele dossier (actually the Clinton/PerkinsCoie/FusionGPS/Simpson/Steele dossier), and the anti-Trump-biased intelligence (sic) community played right along, further sowing distrust of its honor and capabilities.

Now we hear that he might also like to see Sanders be president (consider the ring to that phrase - "President Sanders" - and in light of this) if he can't have Trump; for that, too, would sow much division for obvious reasons.  He sees Sanders' quasi-rabid supporters, and parallels to Trump's True Believers, and figures they'll be adequate to the division-sowing job.  Then again, maybe it's just another piece of misinformation from him that he wants Sanders elected, maybe just to see how Americans react to that notion.

We just don't really know for sure what's a trial balloon from him, and what's for real.  'Reality' for Vladimir Putin seems like a rather fluid notion, in a political context anyway, since the norms of rationality touted (and practiced to varying degrees of imperfection) by philosophers and scientists are not the norms (if they can even be called that) of political discourse (warring by less violent means).  His state-TV apparatus is self-serving propaganda/lies, after all.  He learned it at the KGB, ffs.

Knowing all this, why on earth should anyone pay serious attention to who Putin supposedly wants to win in the USA, or whether he even thinks discord and distrust in the USA serves his own political interests or not, and focus instead on the merits of each candidacy?  It's just a distraction, which for all we know is what he wants.  I mean, does he want more attention/scrutiny focused on him and his fundamentally dishonest and gangsterish nature, or not?

But what should really humble Trump's opponents is the thought that they may very well be willing if not eager dupes of Putin's puppet-mastery.  But I don't expect such a level of thoughtfulness from them, at this point, they are that pathetic and dishonest themselves.  Also, Trump as a matter of basic honesty and accountability/transparency should make clear to Putin that he wants him to stay away from election-meddling efforts.  But Trump likes to troll his domestic opponents too much (and they're pathetic enough to go right along with that, as well), so I don't expect that from him, either.

Did I mention there's an antidote to this shitshow?

Friday, February 21, 2020

Ranking some philosophers


Ranking is, using Rand's terminology, teleological measurement.  It helps keep one's mind limber.  One ranking I've spent maybe too much time thinking about is the following:

Babe Ruth
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Ty Cobb
Honus Wagner
Mickey Mantle
Hank Aaron
Barry Bonds (pre-1999)
Mike Schmidt
Lou Gehrig
Rogers Hornsby
Stan Musial
Rickey Henderson
Joe DiMaggio
Yogi Berra
Johnny Bench
Joe Morgan
Albert Pujols
Ken Griffey, Jr.
Pete Rose

(Where Mike Trout fits in here yet is not yet determined, but I assume it is probably in the top five.  And pitchers seem to require a separate ranking.)

Or there's this ranking:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wolfy Mozart
Gustav Mahler
Dmitri Shostakovich
Franz Schubert
Anton Bruckner
Jean Sibelius
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Joseph Haydn
Johannes Brahms
Bela Bartok
Igor Stravinsky
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Frederic Chopin
Claude Debussy
G. F. Handel
Robert Schumann
Gyorgy Ligeti

(I don't know where to rank opera composers (e.g., Wagner) or atonal composers (e.g. Schoenberg.))

But a (teleologically) more important ranking would be one like this (more or less aggregated from numerous sources):

Aristotle
Immanuel Kant
Plato
David Hume
Rene Descartes
G. W. F. Hegel
Ludwig Wittgenstein
G. W. Leibniz
Baruch Spinoza
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Locke
Thomas Aquinas
Gottlob Frege
Karl Marx
Thomas Hobbes
J. S. Mill
Bertrand Russell
Martin Heidegger
Michel Foucault
Soren Kierkegaard
Arthur Schopenhauer
Edmund Husserl
C. S. Peirce
John Dewey
W. V. O. Quine
Augustine
Plotinus

(For the above aggregation-based ranking I'm not including Ayn Rand, and although I gather that Chrysippus might very well be top-3 material, there are almost no extant works by him.  (A parallel case might be Negro Leaguer Oscar Charleston, for whom no good stats/records are available.)  Also what about Socrates?)

So, I've studied the ideas of Rand for quite some time, enough to be an expert I'd say.  That includes all of the original materials.  For the other figures I've relied a bunch (or in the case of Hegel, entirely) on secondary materials.  Among the secondary materials on some of the highest-ranked philosophers above, the ones I've found really helpful are the Oxford Handbooks series.  I've gone through a half dozen Handbooks so far, and have another half dozen or so in the reading queue somewhere.  For the top dozen listed above, there are two (Kant and Locke) for whom Handbooks have not been published yet.  I'm just over 3/4 through the Nietzsche one; I put the Leibniz one on pause about 30% of the way through; in the queue are Wittgenstein, 'Descartes and Cartesianism', and Aquinas.  That leaves the following which I've gone through, and for which I provide a ranking based on my overall impression of each philosopher's merits (to be explained in due course):

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Nietzsche
Leibniz
Hume
Spinoza

Some inchoate remarks: I liken Aristotle to Babe Ruth; he's like the god-status figure of philosophy. [Note: adjustments need to be made for era (as per baseball historian Bill James) in which a philosopher/player flourished.]  Plato was the first systematizer and recognized the inherent dignity of philosophical activity over and above mere drives, pleasures, inclinations, opinions, or the 'mundane.'  Hegel is something like an abstruse version of a modern-period Aristotle in matters of pure philosophy.  (More context/details.)  Nietzsche's career was cut tragically short at age 44; how might the world have turned out differently otherwise?  (After enough time how would he have avoided a reckoning with Aristotle?)  Leibniz is a serious metaphysician (conversant with Aristotle) whose range of learning/expertise might be compared to Aristotle's.  Hume is a philosopher of 'common sense' and 'mitigated skepticism' with no pretense to metaphysical speculations.  (Blackburn's essay in the Hume Handbook was most useful and one I'd go back to.)  Spinoza requires you to accept his definitions if you're going to accept the system he purports to spin from them; his career was also cut too short.

I'd put Rand at least on the level of (shortened-career-)Nietzsche or Hegel; her mostly-lousy polemics only bolster the proposition that she developed so many common sense positions on the strength of first-hand inductions independent of the 'canon/tradition.'  Her key strengths are in method, aesthetics, political philosophy, and ethics.  She's a plainspoken 'popular philosopher' and as such performs an extremely valuable service to a philosophy-starved public or a newcomer seeking a springboard into the world of 'advanced, technical' philosophy with the aid of her/Peikoff's methodological strictures.  It's hard to imagine a more unjustly smeared or dismissed figure in the history of ideas (on the basis of motivations that IMO are quite nakedly political and therefore highly toxic).  I see no excuse for the professional (sic) neglect of her aesthetic theory much less her theory of method.  She's probably unsurpassed as a political thinker and it's really hard to overstate her contribution to the strongest variants of contemporary libertarian thought (see here for some details).  She also had a fine grasp of the importance of philosophy to the flourishing (or lack thereof) of a culture, and as such she (and Peikoff) should be taken seriously as a metaphilosopher.  (I can only assume that based on the now-available inductive evidence of the viability of philosophy for children, that she'd be all over that at least as much as anyone else - with, I am sure, some qualifications, e.g., that philosophical activity (even of the most 'speculative' variety) should proceed on an inductive/concretizing and context-keeping basis, and consciously and explicitly so.)

Now, if I were to include in the ranking the other top-half-dozen philosophers for whom I've yet to read an Oxford Handbook, as well as Rand and Socrates, my current impression is that the ranking might turn out roughly as follows:

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Rand
Nietzsche
Kant
Leibniz
Aquinas
Locke (probably Rand's equal as a political philosopher?)
Wittgenstein
Socrates
Hume
Descartes
Spinoza

You might tell that I'm not exactly a fan of rationalism as methodology; almost surely that dislike was effectively beaten into me by many hours of Peikoff-course listening.  (Also, I'd like to raise the distinct possibility of Hume's being a methodological rationalist while not being a substantive empiricist.  He sure seems to be doing some dubious deducing about 'sense impressions' as definitive of all we have access to.  As for Cartesian mind-body dualism as I understand it, it reflects a destructive methodology, quite explicitly in reaction to Aristotelian dialectic and (therefore) hylemorphism.  Dualisms like mind/body and is/ought seem to suppose that if you can't eliminatively 'reduce' one to the other, they have to be kept separate.  But what about mind as, say, supervening on sufficiently complex natural/physical stuff?  Or in the case of is/ought, the ought as supervening on sufficiently complex natural facts?  (Or suppose that the 'ought' supervening on an 'is' is a species of potentiality supervening on actuality?  We wouldn't, after all, have trouble with the 'is' lining up nice and neat with actuality; this leaves us with whether we should conceptualize 'ought' in terms of potentiality, and whether what is and what ought to be are one and the same - that they reach a sort of 'dialectical unity' as it were, instead of some unbridgeable duality or dichotomy - when some species of potentiality is being actualized....) That's a prospect that Parfit quite disappointingly doesn't investigate in On What Matters (well, I still need to get to Volume Three...), instead pursuing some line about non-natural truths that might not even exist in "an ontological sense," whatever that's supposed to mean.  I think Aristotle might very well go for a supervenience sort of explanation on such things; incidentally, Hurley mentions supervenience early in Natural Reasons, but she loses me pretty quickly after that.  I mean, would you look just at those sentence constructions, much less what's in them?  I'm not worthy, I guess.)  Also, very high up in my reading queue is the Handbook for Marx, although higher still and to be read very soon is the Handbook on Virtue.  Speaking of which, how thoroughly/completely/perfectly will it cover the place of perfectionism in the virtue-ethics tradition?  I really, really want ethical philosophers to get this one right.  After all, how does one possibly improve upon perfectionism, and Aristotelian/intellectualist perfectionism in particular?  I glean an explicitly intellectual-perfectionist strand from Aristotle, Aquinas and Rand, but not so much from all that many of the others ranked above, however much they were pretty much all putting the principle into practice....

(BTW, there's a chapter on order of rank in the Nietzsche Handbook, but the chapter I'd rank the most highly among the book's first 26 chapters is almost surely the one by Jacob Golomb about what Nietzsche meant by 'will to power.'  (Oooh, there's an article by him about Nietzsche contra Trump in search results.)   Also, I just so happen to have my eye on the newly-published Handbook on Expertise.  1300 pages, eh?)

#1 antidote to cultural and political shitshow

Little Big Minds: Sharing Philosophy with Kids

I don't really have anything new to blog at the moment after realizing that I'm out of my element trying to read S. L. Hurley's Natural Reasons (the back-cover praise notwithstanding, etc. - although I was able to keep up well enough with one of the praisers' recent masterwork, On What Matters).  (In a discussion a while back with a philosopher friend, on the subject of who might compare to Robert Nozick in smarts, depth and breadth of philosophical learning, Hurley's name came up, and Natural Reasons specifically.)

But I do know enough to know that many, many human ills can be cured by what is, by far, the biggest no-brainer in human history, about which I provide a reminder:


(The book shown above is the one book I've read on the P4C subject, and it proves its case beyond a shadow of a doubt.  And that's just one of the approximately 100 references - books, articles, and periodicals - at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page for P4C.)

I wonder if maybe I should go "on strike" from blogging again, until such time as this monumental no-brainer is adopted and implemented?  After all, what value-added is a philosophy blog - any philosophy blog - going to have compared to this monumental no-brainer?  (I mean, I can't even master Natural Reasons yet ffs.  (I've been spending too much research-time on things like reddit threads, see.  Could there be some kind of dialectical coming-together of themes about humanity one might glean both from reddit threads and from Natural Reasons?  How about Hurley's discussion of evidential akrasia, for starters?  Also, I've spent considerable amounts of research-into-the-human-condition time on things like the Howard Stern show.  Those poor/philosophy-needing wack-packers, huh?))  Or . . . is a definitive P4C book and/or blog the ultimate solution?

(But what, then, about P4E - Philosophy for Everyone?  As I've said before, it stands to reason that if kids can study philosophy, so can adults.  But we know for a fact that kids have plenty of free time that the adults may not have, and return-on-investment seems perhaps a lot more promising when you start 'em young.  A goddamn shame this isn't happening all over the place already.  What's the holdup?  Where's the weight of the philosophy profession and educational establishment on this monumental no-brainer?  Just think: if a critical mass of the starting-young philosophy students could also compose a work at the level of sophistication of Natural Reasons by age 34 as Hurley did, then . . . ?)

[Addendum: And just to ensure with a high degree of confidence that the child-philosophers don't end up as the dialectic-destroying monstrosities we see in politics and (horrifically) on campuses nowadays, they should be introduced right from the get-go to the Rapoport/Dennett Rules for honest criticism, in whatever age-appropriate fashion (but you might be surprised just how well they grasp the Rules just as presented).  Isn't it high time that all credible standpoints get a fair hearing in the free and open marketplace of ideas?  Anyone else grown sick and tired of all the blatant flouting of the no-brainer Rules?]

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Impeachment and philosophy: addenda

Following up the earlier post.

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

A 79-year-old, heart-attack-having socialist...


...is apparently who the Demo-rats would most prefer as the candidate to end up in the White House come 2021, based on betting markets.  (He's about 18 or 19 percentage points ahead of the next candidate as of today.)  That's: (1) 79 years old; (2) an avowed socialist; (3) who recently had a heart attack.  This combination should tell you something about just how off-the-rails this party has become.  They don't appear interested much these days in listening to reason.

He and the party don't seem all that interested in a serious discussion about how globalization - the greater spreading out of capital flows from the first-world to the poorer world - is a key driver of greater economic inequality in the USA (the capital goes, the returns come to those still in residence); instead, increasingly, they (e.g., AOC) prefer to attribute this trend to some inherent dynamic in capitalism toward greater inequality (universally or globally, full-stop).

He says that no one really knows how much his bigger-govt schemes might cost, so he won't even bother to provide projections.  He recently tweeted, "Abortion is healthcare."  Anyone who listened carefully to the last 2020 Demo-ratic debate could notice that his proposals and style are pie-in-the-sky; how do he and his supporters expect his pretty-transformative proposals to get past a GOP-majority Senate, for one thing?

As a piece yesterday in the WSJ points out, Sanders was in favor of nationalization of industry in the 1970s, and defended Ortega and Cuba in the 1980s.  He's now more of a staunchly "progressive" 'New Dealer' and/or Scandinavian welfarist type with an agenda of generous economic 'rights' (education, housing, healthcare, etc.) and lessening the influence of money in politics.  But if the one not-bullshitty piece of evidence of racism on Trump's part - his company's housing policies from nearly 50 years ago (for which it/he didn't admit wrongdoing, etc.) - can be held against him today, so can Bernie's hardcore-socialist politics from 40 years ago.  If.  Right?

But even take out the socialism part, however one defines 'socialism,' as though that's not troubling enough.  There's still the heart-attack-having 79-year-old part.  What are these people thinking?  They want to get rid of the "corrupt, racist, trillion-dollar-deficit-making, etc." president so badly that they can't accept any other outcome with a semblance of equanimity or proportion, and yet this is the alternative they most prefer to present to the swing voters of PA, MI, and WI?

And why can't they come up with a seriously viable candidate who isn't over 70 or under 40?  (I think Plato might have something to say about putting people under 40 in charge of things political; do these politically-oriented lightweights care?)

[Addendum: to get some idea of how clueless these people can be, lefty Robert Reich asks why America is so divided now, and then proceeds to explain: "Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos...".  Can it be that part of the division is attributable to people like Reich insisting on dubiously, one-sidedly framing things this way, without any sense of irony, and that those on the right are sick and tired of it?]

[Addendum 2/21: I'm somewhat amazed that, all my attention-paying so far notwithstanding, I've not seen Bernie being called to explain his supposed ideological transition from hardcore communist to 'Denmawk'-style social democracy.  How lazy/incompetent do his debate opponents and the media have to be for this not to have happened yet?  You'd think we'd all like to have an explanation, lest we possibly end up handing over the nuclear codes to a crypto-commie or something?  Am I the crazy one here?]

[Addendum 2/22: It should be noted that from polling averages the definitely-leftist Sanders + Warren numbers come to about 40%, while the more moderate Biden + Pete + Klobuchar + Bloomberg numbers come to about 50%.  This raises the good question as to why on earth a not-very-convincing plurality of support should vault someone into a nomination - not altogether dissimilar from how Trump managed to get the '16 GOP nomination in the face of quality competition from at least 5 other candidates.  IIRC he didn't poll much above 35% until all but a few other candidates dropped out.  Still, he did win the general election by appealing to enough swing voters, and there is much talk of a contested '20 Demo-rat convention.  The betting markets (now putting Sanders at nearly 50% and about 30 points above the next candidate) don't seem too deterred.]

Monday, February 3, 2020

Authoritarian regimes vs. knowledge/honesty

The basic gist goes something like this: Authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (see here for some of the horrors they're up to under the current dictator), defunct Communist regimes, the Nazi Party, and the Iranian theocracy rule by heavy censorship and punishment of dissenting voices.  This means, I believe, one of two things:

(1) "Ideas so good that they're mandatory"

(2) These regimes tacitly confess that their ideological dictates can't win in the free, fair and open marketplace of ideas, which means their dictates are likely fundamentally flawed or false, with evil/destructive consequences to be expected for so many concerned/affected.  By being forcibly imposed, these ideological dictates have not received a proper vetting to accountably distinguish mere opinion from knowledge.  This being so, the likes of Xi Jinpeng don't know that they're "leading" their nations in a good or healthy direction; as far as they know, they're doing just the opposite.  The coronovirus outbreak is the tip of the iceberg, and that's just this one authoritarian regime.

You might readily guess which of these two interpretations I subscribe to.  Heck, do any conscientious philosophers disagree about this?

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

From University of California Press - Yikes!

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

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

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

  • Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
  • Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
  • Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
  • Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
  • Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
  • Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
  • Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith
I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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