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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A simple either-or-or (re "educators" and "white privilege")

Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege."  Can this be expected to:

(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way

"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1).  Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are?  Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?

I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes.  The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.

They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.

Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?

The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.

Am I missing anything here?

I'm going with (2).  Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward?  If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?

[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones?  The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks.  No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly.  See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]

Reminder: Leading '20 Dems smeared Kavanaugh

In the polling (not as much the betting markets) the leading 2020 Democratic candidates are: Biden, Harris, Warren and Sanders.

All four of them got in on the act of recklessly smearing Brett Kavanaugh, when the chips were down, when a man's career and reputation were on the line.  It reveals not just an intellectual bankruptcy in the Democrat Party, but also a moral bankruptcy.

I've commented in detail on this before. (the context)  A brief recap:

(1) Biden is quoted by AP (9/28/18) as saying that Dr. Ford, Kavanaugh's accuser, gave credible testimony (9/27/18) and that both he and the country believed her.

(2) Harris appeared on CNN on 9/18/18, two days after Ford's accusation became public, to say she believed Dr. Ford.  This career prosecutor said this before hearing from both sides.  This is in addition to her almost surreal interrogation of Kavanaugh in the main portion of the confirmation hearings (where it turns out Harris wasn't holding any cards).

(3) Warren on her facebook page (9/28/18) referred to "multiple, credible accusations" against Kavanaugh, including the ridiculous Swetnick allegation of serial drugged gang rapes (which not only falls apart on its merits but about which Swetnick herself fell apart under scrutiny).

(It should be noted that all three of the above are career attorneys, charged with the professional duty to assess the credibility of putative evidence with care.)

(4) Sanders, in a 9/27/18 press release on his own Senate website, said he believes Dr. Ford.

Ford couldn't remember details about time or place of the alleged incident.  Not only that, no one else came forward to say where and when this event might have taken place.  Not only that, all of the supposed witnesses to the alleged event, including her friend Leland Keyser, provided sworn statements - statements Biden and Warren, at least, chose unaccountably to disregard - that they have no memory of the alleged event.  Not only that, Kavanaugh supplied what would be exculpatory evidence in the calendar he kept.

All this, while fellow Democrats and their enablers in the media either fed the anti-Kavanaugh hysteria (which exploited and weaponized the otherwise honorable and valuable #MeToo movement) or failed to speak up about the injustice of the smear campaign.  This goes, as far as I can tell, for all the other '20 Democrat candidates.  This goes for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who withheld Ford's accusation for weeks until leaking them to the press at the last minute.  My sentiments are with Sen. Graham.

Well-placed outrage

Donald Trump hasn't forgotten about any of this, and will do whatever he can in the general election to eat them alive because of it.  As far as I'm concerned, these four leading candidates are caught dead to rights in their epistemic criminality, which they conducted for the sake of power and partisanship.  I have some choice expletives for these creatures which I'll refrain from stating here.

What these Demon Rats would have you believe is that their media-frenzy-fed-and-feeding smear campaign is normal and acceptable.  They might have you believe that this smear campaign was necessary because the man accused wasn't just anybody, but someone who would assume a position of great power and therefore needs extra "scrutiny."  And they would gaslight the rest of us when it comes to standards of evidence and credibility.  They then turn around and give fellow Demon Rats a pass under similar circumstances.  And if they're this bad when it comes to this no-brainer, how bad must they be on matters of ideology and policy, pray tell?  This is the best crop of leading candidates this party can come up with?

The only '20 Dem candidate with much of any prominence in the polling or betting markets, who hasn't morally and intellectually stained himself with this ugliness (except perhaps with his silence about this intended injustice), is Mayor Pete.

"But Trump" or "but Kavanaugh's high school yearbook" (whatever that shows) won't save them from the truth of their own sliminess.

What makes them think they can get away with what they did?

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!]

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.

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.

What is an impeachable offense?

President Clinton lied under oath when asked if he was ever alone with 'Miss' Lewinsky: "I don't recall."  Demon Rat congress critters gave him a pass for that.  They gave him a pass on witness-tampering charges in connection with his conversations with his secretary Betty Currie and others.

So why are Demon Rats not willing to give Trump a pass for less than what they gave Clinton a pass for?

The question answers itself; we are not in the realm of logic, intellectual honesty or wisdom-loving here.  We are in the realm of politics without philosophy.  And the only thing Nancy Peloser is considering in whether or not to impeach Trump is how it will affect her party in the next election, and not whether it's the right thing to do.  It's the only thing Demon Rats in 1999 cared about when it came to the subject of impeaching Clinton.

This should be blazingly obvious to anyone who paid attention both times around.

We can turn the tables and ask why Republicans are willing to give Trump a pass when they didn't give Clinton one.  Well, for one thing, Trump didn't lie under oath.  (Note I said "less than what [Demon Rats] gave Clinton a pass for.")  For another, Democrats are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior, as they imply with any number of things they say about themselves (including labeling themselves "progressive") and about Republicans ("basket of deplorables/irredeemables," etc.).

It's not exactly like the GOP is hot shit (remember when they drank the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid? how they condone evolution-denial? how they treat cannabis users like children?  how they dogmatically cling to "rights begin at conception"? etc.), but something about the Demon Rats today says: intellectual account overdrawn.

How shitty are Rand-bashers?

I've fucking had it with Rand-bashers.  (Note: I distinguish bashers from responsible critics who make an effort to know what's what.)  Not one of the Rand-bashers operates in good faith; out of countless instances I've never seen it happen.

What do I mean by operating in good faith?

Well, let's start with Rapoport's Rules, recently popularized by Daniel Dennett.  (An aside about Dennett.  He brought up Rapoport's Rules in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, which is 6 years ago now.  There may be no more well-known philosopher in the USA than Dennett.  And yet here we are, 6 years later, and no one seems to have picked up on Rapoport's Rules, not by the philosophically-impoverished "discourse" that's going on in the American lamestream.  Exactly how long should we expect to wait before Rapoport's Rules become a mainstream norm of discourse, i.e., before a critical mass of people have learned about the Rules?  50 years?  250?  5000?  Never?  For this no-brainer?)

Here's the first Rapoport Rule as formulated by Dennett:

1: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way."

This principle is also expressed in Bryan Caplan's proposed Ideological Turing Test (ITT), modeled on the original Turing Test idea which had to do with whether one could tell a computer apart from a person.  The ITT has to do with whether one can "state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents," so that one wouldn't be able to tell the critic of view X from the holder of view X.

Another way of expressing the principle involved is: dialectic.  To make any progress in dialectic we have to be sure that we've established a common ground as to the ideas being proposed by the multiple parties involved.  If one side says that the other side is caricaturing its views, then dialectic cannot proceed or get off the ground.

By the standards expressed here - Rapoport Rules, ITT, dialectic - Rand-bashers have failed abysmally and will always fail abysmally.  This isn't just because Rand's ideas are a lot more plausible and well-supported than the bashers claim; it is because their approach to attacking contrary ideas is so shitty, so ignorant, so lazy, so discreditable, etc.

(I should note, as I have on many an occasion in many a venue, that I find Rand's polemics against such philosophers as Kant to fail by the standards expressed above.  As a result I have been slammed online by the shittier "Objectivists" who basically take the same approach to Kant that Rand-bashers take toward Rand, with as little genuine fruit to show for it.  Hell would freeze over before Kant scholars would consider Rand's characterizations of Kant true, helpful, insightful, etc. - just as hell would freeze over before Rand scholars take Rand-bashers seriously.  Suffice it to say that I think Rand does a much better job formulating her own ideas than characterizing those she despised [or thought she despised, given what she thought those ideas contained].)

Here we are, it's 2019, and a steady stream of professional philosophical literature on Rand - duly compiled in the bibliography at the SEP entry on Rand -  has been emerging for well over a decade now.  You would never know it by listening to the Rand-bashers.  Not only do they not know about this body of literature but all indications I've seen is that they refuse to know.  (I consider intellectual laziness a form of such refusal to know; I distinguish between intellectual laziness - not making an effort to know - from the more extreme form of evasion or intellectual dishonesty, which is making an effort not to know.)  They would rather stick with their ignorant caricature than to learn from those who'd put in the study/effort.

Among the materials with which the highest-caliber professional philosophical literature on Rand would have to demonstrate familiarity is Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses or at the very minimum the themes addressed and highlighted therein.  They're usually methodological themes, having to do with how to conduct one's mind in acts of cognition.  Among the key Peikoff courses is the one titled Understanding Objectivism.  (This one has been in book form for seven years now.)  Whenever I have brought up this course, Rand-bashers have evaded.  They don't think they need to "waste any more time on that crap."  I suppose they would have an excuse for such an attitude if they ever got Rand's ideas right in the first place, or were so much as aware of the importance Rand and Peikoff placed on methodological issues (the core focus of Sciabarra's thoroughly-researched 1995 book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical).  Rand herself has said that she is not primarily an advocate of capitalism or even of egoism but of reason, and that her conception of reason is contained in works on epistemology she wrote or endorsed (including the full presentation in Peikoff's 1976 Rand-endorsed.

Assuredly, Rand-bashers are in essence ignorant of all this material, hence their main focus on what they think Rand's ethical views are.  (They think they know what Rand's views on capitalism are, but if they couldn't tell you about the themes in Rand's "What is Capitalism?" essay - namely its focus on Rand's whole "role of the mind in man's existence" theme - then they haven't really done their homework.)  And when they get around to talking about her ethics, they're usually terrible at it (according to Rapoport/ITT/dialectical standards).

With that background...

Here's a recent reddit thread on /r/philosophy (sic), in which a bunch of ignorant/lazy/vicious Rand-bashers come out in large numbers.  The thread itself is linked to this piece of shit from the managing editor of the American Philosophical Association's blog.  If it had ever even so much as occurred to that author to run her stuff by Rand's defenders for the sake of accuracy and context, there's no indication of that in the essay.  It is nothing more than the standard hit-piece that Rand fans have seen over and over for decades on end.  (What the fuck is the excuse for this decades-long pattern of shitty behavior?)  The Ayn Rand Society's (ARS) Greg Salmieri wrote a response to that piece at the ARS blog.  If there is a shred of evidence that this made the author rethink her view of Rand, I don't know of it.  No retraction, no contrition, no accountability that I can see.  I think Salmieri is, as a matter of professional necessity and maybe some kind of Aristotelian sensibility as he understands it, is far more cordial than his targets deserve; Rand herself would not be nearly so mild-tempered toward those who basically act like slime when bashing her.

Now, as to that reddit thread.  It's a fucking trainwreck, a testament to "the intellectual bankruptcy of our age," as Rand would have put it.  Next to none of the negative things said about Rand in the thread are true.  I reiterate: this is not even so much about whether Rand's ideas are correct or well-supported, but rather about the method of approach toward ideas/viewpoints displayed in that thread.

We get the usual smears about Rand accepting Social Security benefits ("she hypocritically took welfare, probably ending up in government housing and eating pet food to boot"); only one person in the thread pointed to a well-done Snopes piece debunking the smear.  The others in the subthread just proceed unaccountably as though they know what they're talking about.  Their falsehoods get dozens of upvotes.  (How can reddit be taken seriously as an intellectual format?)

We get the usual smears about Rand's egoism being: cold-hearted, indifferent to others, sociopathic, mean, money-grubbing, narcisstic, simple to refute, and on and fucking on it goes.  Almost zero direct quotes are provided to support any of this.  If any quotes are provided, chances are good they're out of context.

[Note: Numerous comments I made in the thread trying to correct or challenge the smears and strawmen do not show up in the thread, meaning the mods have employed the patently dishonest/malicious shadow-ban technique for which social media mods/admins have earned considerable notoriety.  By doing so they have wasted my motherfucking time and for that they have landed squarely on my shit-list.  Further, one /r/philosophy (sic) mod in particular who for a while went under the user name /u/drunkentune is an especially bad-faith piece of shit on the topic of Rand - for instance, citing Nozick's critique of Rand as evidence she is easily refuted, but not citing the Dougs' rebuttal even thought the latter had been pointed out to him numerous times before.  Another slimy mod, /u/ReallyNicole, was among those wanting to ban Rand threads from /r/philosophy (sic) on the grounds that Rand isn't a philosopher.  These two creatures are/were in philosophy (sic) grad school, well on their way to joining the other dishonest anti-Rand academic faculty-creatures.  By the way, the systematic Rand-related dishonesty is also in full force at /r/askphilosophy.  Indeed, the intellectual culture on any of the "default" subreddits where politics figures heavily is systematically dishonest due to its leftist bias and popularity-contest format.]

The top-voted comment in the entire thread?  I'll quote from it:

Every two months, some blowhard makes an article about how Ayn Rand is being "ignored".
She is not being ignored. Every college ethics textbook mentions her by name in the opening chapters. They describe her ethical system with something called Ethical Egoism.They then usually just say the system is unworkable as an ethical system. Then the book moves on to greener pastures. She is sometimes compared to Machiavelli and maybe Clausewitz.
That's it. There is no problem here.
Look -
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/#EthiEgoi

So instead of being pointed to random internet smears, we are pointed to "ethics textbooks" where Rand is covered in the "egoism" section.

Well guess fucking what: Rand scholars don't accept those textbook treatments as even close to adequate in representing what Rand actually thought.  (Link is to Irfan Khawaja's article "Randian Ethics: Time to Get High.")  Now, people can differ in their interpretations of texts - it happens all the time in philosophy - and it's pretty safe to say that Rand's critics and Rand's defenders aren't on the same page as to what they're talking about.  But the important question then is: how do Rand's critics react to this fact?  Are they basically willing to engage, or do they dishonestly evade?

I've studied Rand's egoistic theory enough to have published on it in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  That, along with being able to almost cite chapter and verse from Peikoff's Objectivism courses (I've listened to the biggest ones at least twice each: Understanding Objectivism; Advanced OPAR Seminars; The Art of Thinking; Objectivism Through Induction), is good evidence that I have an expert-level understanding of Rand.  The "egoism" being attributed to Rand by the haters in that thread and elsewhere is not the one I recognize in Rand, not even close.

I haven't read the thread far enough yet to see if the usual Hickman smear comes up, but outside of that thread the Rand-bashers have comported themselves like fucking scumbags on this point.  Follow the links and discover for yourself how they operate when they think they have Rand nailed on something.  It's basically the same story as with the "Rand took welfare" smear - reckless disregard for things like context, or not making an effort to get a different take on the story (from those who probably know a lot more about it than they do; me, I was aware of Rand's journal entries on Hickman over twenty years ago and knew well enough how to assess its relevance to Rand's mature thought, and so you might imagine my disgust when clueless scumbags come along years later, like a child wandering into the middle of a movie, and use them to smear her).

Without exception, from my experience, when Rand-bashers are presented a different take on Rand from theirs, they either slink away without any acknowledgment that they were mistaken, or they double down and get nasty and evasive.  Every fucking time.  It's what Rand-bashers do, given their natures.

Given that my main focus here is on how Rand-bashers operate, the question arises: wherever would these creatures have gotten the idea that operating that way is normal or acceptable in intellectual discourse?  Well, we might have a clue as to that from another reddit thread within the past year (which I found as I was searching for the Khawaja article above) on the /r/AcademicPhilosophy subreddit.  Now, the participants in the thread are presumably academic philosophers or closely interested in the subject.  (The sub doesn't get much traffic.)  Ask yourself whether the Rand-bashers in that thread are proceeding in good faith.  Did any of them address the Khawaja article that headlined the thread?  Nope.  Look at all the downvotes for user Sword_of_Apollo's comments that contain reasonable, documented defenses of Rand.  (I don't support Sword's dismissive attitude about Kant; might I recommend any number of these books?)  Unaccountable, anonymous downvoting.  How is reddit supposed to be taken seriously as an intellectual format, where higher-voted (i.e., more popular) comments get more exposure/attention?  How are philosophy subreddits that look this supposed to be taken seriously?  (55 upvotes for a comment consisting only in "At least Machiavelli's systems actually make sense and work"?  How much more anti-intellectual does it get?)  More on social media toxicity here.

Now, this being the year 2019, one might have thought that were some Rand-basher to come out with a book right now, it would contain some intellectually-respectable reference to the growing body of academic literature on Rand.  One would especially come to expect that from a book on Rand published by a university press.  So, what is the best book that Rand-bashers seem to be able to come up with, 62 years after Atlas, etc.?

We have an answer: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.  It is published by University of California Press.  So naturally there is some expectation of quality given who wrote and published it.  On her twitter page, Duggan identifies herself as "pinko commie" - in other words, a leftist embedded within an academic sub-culture of leftists.  Is the intellectual culture of leftism today a healthy one?  Certainly not, if Duggan is representative of it.

The title of the book, just by itself, is a red flag.  Ayn Rand, mean?  Either that is a basically correct assessment or a basically clueless one.  And no expert in Rand studies would take the "mean girl" thesis seriously.  Now, my question is: Did Duggan so much as make an effort to run her book by Rand experts, for the sake of accuracy, context, intellectual integrity, etc.  Based on the "exchange" I had with her via email, the safe answer is: Fuck no!  I don't think I need to reproduce my goodreads review here, so I'll just link to it; it contains the "exchange" I had with Duggan so you can see for yourself the dishonest/scummy/lowlife way she operates.

And I wouldn't expect much of anything better from the rest of the Rand-bashers.  The two main problems for them: (1) The theme they're pushing - that Rand is a mean bitch, not a real philosopher, etc. - is not defensible in the final analysis, not even close; (2) Their intellectual MO is all fucked-up, lacking the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility.

Here's the really big problem.  The shitty behavior by those on /r/AcademicPhilosophy speaks for itself, but what about all the shittiness on the main /r/philosophy thread?  Many of the participants there have gone to a college or university where they were supposed to learn the Rapoport/ITT/dialectical sensibility, but that didn't happen.  Why?

Next up: My timeline of key players in the history of Randian thought, which I've had sitting in the queue for months now; it should serve as nice background material to reference on the subject of 'Rand and philosophy.'  The Rand-bashers, and capitalism-bashers - clueless little shits - are only falling further behind the curve.  I'll start talking more nice about them when they start being intellectually honest.

[Edit: Fortunately, there is some serious/honest/respectable academic dialogue on Rand that's happening recently, in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series, where non-Objectivists give fair critiques of Rand and Rand defenders have the fair opportunity to respond.  Elsewhere, especially where Rand-bashers (who are willfully oblivious to the existence of such dialogue) run amok, it's pretty much a shitshow.]

Alternet idiocy, or: the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left

The latest from the very well-known leftwing news-and-opinion outlet, Alternet.org:

The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand's Vision of Paradise

Tennessee lawmakers have elevated hatred for government and disgust for poor people to an art form.

Just so that things don't become too repetitive around here, I'll refer readers to my previous posting, in which Paul Ryan (a United States congressman) is contrasted with Leonard Peikoff (the person in the world with the biggest clue as to what Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy is all about), and simply note that Les Leopold, author of the above hit-piece (and whom I've never heard of before), is also not Leonard Peikoff.

Ayn Rand's vision of "paradise" was presented in Atlas Shrugged, particularly the first two chapters of Part III, where the social ethics of Galt's Gulch is made plenty clear.  (A few months ago, I had also uncovered an insightful statement from the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick on the nature of the Gulch, which I discussed here.)  Anyone with a clue can easily recognize that the Gulch does not resemble present-day Tennessee in the relevant respect(s).  The eminently interesting and important question in this connection is: What are the intellectual-cultural preconditions for such a society to ever come about, and how do they differ from those preconditions that generated the present-day circumstances (in Tennessee and elsewhere)?  If the gap between these two sets of preconditions can be bridged, then we have a blueprint for utopia.

The Left has thoroughly, pathetically defaulted in this regard - not only in regard to its ridiculously bad approach to Ayn Rand's ideas which I've documented on countless occasions here already, but also in presenting a remotely compelling vision of the requisite intellectual-cultural prerequisites for achieving a utopian social order.  The "best" representative of any such vision that the Left has had on offer for 40 years now, is the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.  Rawls drew heavily on Kantian moral theory, which is to say, he missed the mark something terrible.  The correct mark is Aristotelianism, and Ayn Rand, in her presentation of a neo-Aristotelian vision of life, was some decades ahead of the leftist intelligentsia.  (They have yet to catch up, still.)  It is on the basis of an Aristotelian (also Jeffersonian) ethos that a realistic blueprint for utopia can be offered.

(It should be noted that Rawls was also considered by perceptive scholars to be a utopian of sorts, but notably as it pertained to his writings on international relations.  (Hint: for there to be international peace, there needs to be worldwide democracy, as, empirically-inductively speaking, democracies never go to war with one another.)  Nozick, for his part, offered his own libertarian idea of a utopia - also not premised in Aristotelian intellectual-cultural preconditions, and therefore that much more deficient - in part III of his Anarchy, State, and Utopia.  But there is a very astute inductive generalization to be drawn here: the two "leading" political philosophers of our time were utopians!  WTF, right?  Where does that come from?  What's with philosophers and utopia?  And, most pressingly: how do we best and most quickly get from the philosophers' theoretical castles in the sky to a real-world utopia?  Hint: Aristotelianism, which also means Randianism, and Nortonianism, and Jeffersonianism.  Or, put another way: perfectivism.)

Anyway, how did the Left in America sink to such a low state, that it can't or won't address the likes of Peikoff, or Sciabarra, or the Ayn Rand Society head-on, so as to supposedly expose the gaping flaws of Objectivism in a compelling fashion?  (Hint: they just can't.  Hey, once you go Understanding Objectivism, you never go back.  It's inductively certain.  But I guess I'll just have to leave that one up to the doubters to establish in their own minds, independently and objectively, of course.  But at least I've done some part in leading them to the water.  Another hint: the Ayn Rand Society is chock full of Aristotelians.)  I submit that this ignorant deficiency goes all the way to the top.  Had Brian Leiter done the intellectually responsible and honest thing when it comes to Ayn Rand, the cultural discourse would be that much more moved along at this point.  But he defaulted on this task something terrible.  He may know a shit-ton about Nietzsche, but he doesn't know jackshit about Ayn Rand.  (Hint: here's what a Nietzsche scholar with a clue about Ayn Rand has to say about these two.)  But this phenomenon isn't limited only to Brian Leiter; it's a pervasive ignorant deficiency in the left-wing academy and intelligentsia.  Here's a suggestion as to why: lack of Aristotelian influence.  Today's "leading" academic ethical philosopher, Derek Parfit (The Leading Brand[TM]), barely mentions Aristotle in his recent mammoth treatise in ethics, On What Matters.  Rawls gave some attention to Aristotle, and there's something to be said for that.  (Rawls was a fairly comprehensive thinker in his own right - as a thinker focused primarily on political philosophy, that is.  His main philosophical treatises are centered around the subject of political liberalism and "justice as fairness."  Aristotle-like thinkers, on the other hand, of which there have been very few historically, present a comprehensive view of humankind and its relation to existence.  Ayn Rand is one such example, and her Aristotelian-intellectualist-perfectionist-eudaimonist ethics blows away the competition, more or less.  Which is to say, Aristotelianism blows away the competition.)

So, instead of being governed by an Aristotelian ethos, today's intellectual, academic, cultural and political Left in America is mired in a very damaging selective ignorance.  When its leading ideological professors aren't smearing or ignorantly dismissing Rand (who is a - perhaps the - key representative of Aristotelian-style thinking in the last century, her shitty polemics notwithstanding), its media outlets send out no-name jabronis like Les Leopold to do hit-pieces. [EDIT: As to the leading living "intellectual of the Left," Noam Chomsky, whose specialty in any case is linguistics, I've addressed his ignorant comments on Rand here.]  Sad.

Checkmate, assholes. :-D

Eight days left before 4/20, the date I go on strike . . .

P.S. Also, let's not forget - let's NOT forget - that, aside from amphibious animals as a domestic, uh, within the city not being legal, let's not forget that in year 1922, when all the trendy lefty intellectuals were embracing socialism, there was a man - I'll say a hero, and a man for his time and place - who stood up against all that lunacy and proved that socialism wouldn't work.  He checkmated their asses real good!  Story of 20th century political economy in a nutshell, dudes.  Worthy fucking adversary.  Rand is next up for vindication; either you're with her, or you're with the terrorists.  Poor little leftists, what ever are they going to do?  (They might start by doing their homework, the intellectually lazy bastards - just for once, at long last, for a very refreshing change from the pathetic charade they're putting on now.)  Whatever they do, they better not fall down from my obstacle; that would break my effing heart!