(For the positive, the antidote to this idiocy, try here for starters.)
The latest case-in-point making the rounds amongt the reddiots, from radio talk show host Thom Hartmann and former Democrat staffer on Capitol Hill, Sam 'Sad' Sacks. This is a continuation of an inductively-observed pattern discussed previously in this blog.
Gee, a radio talk show host and a former congressional staffer. Prima facie that's some formidable opposition to Ayn Rand right there, huh?
The article's byline provides a link to The Thom Hartmann Reader, which reminds me of a book I picked up the other day, The Quotable Hitch: From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens. Drawing the obviously logical connection from that, I submit that one need only browse through both that book and The Ayn Rand Lexicon to see which thinker was way more profound (distinct from witty and one-linery) than the other. Heck, one need only see Hitch's mentions of Ayn Rand (focusing exclusively on her personal relationship with Nathaniel Branden) to figure out the truly amateurish level on which Hitch was operating. (His colleague and ignorant Rand-basher, Andrew Sullivan, operates more or less on the same level, cut more or less from the same mold.)
Anyway, back to the talk show host and Democrat staffer. First off, I want to distinguish the American intellectual left - confined more or less within the ivory tower (the chief exception being Noam Chomsky, who actually makes an effort - no thanks to the cowardly corporate media and political establishment - to get the word out far and wide) from the American political left. Setting aside direct critique of the former, I'll make the observation that the latter is intellectually bankrupt. (As an indirect critique of the former, one need only pursue the line of reasoning following from the question as to how the political left ended up intellectually bankrupt.) This doesn't mark out the left as unique in this regard: the entire lamestream political dialogue in the country is intellectually bankrupt. Nowhere to be found is Jeffersonian-Franklinian-Paineist dialogue - certainly not dialogue at the level at which these representative Founding Fathers would carry a dialogue. We have instead a lowest-common-denominator caliber of dialogue.
Hell, arguably the most intellectual figure in the mass media right now is Glenn Beck, whatever else one thinks about him, merely for regularly paying tribute to these geniuses on his TV show. (He also discusses Ray Kurzweil on his show; what other major media figure is doing that?) That alone demonstrates that he has some long-range, properly-Americanist vision thoroughly lacking elsewhere in the lamestream media. His very proposal for an "Independence, USA" quasi-utopia demonstrates a greater degree of vision and imagination than found anywhere else in the lamestream.
Is it any surprise, then, that among any of the figures in the major media, Glenn Beck has the wherewithal to have a positive view of Ayn Rand?
I skimmed Hartmann's article and got the basic gist of why Hartmann is useless an an analyst of political trends: he actually thinks that Ayn Rand - author not just of Atlas Shrugged but also The Fountainhead, but also of non-fiction essays such as "For the New Intellectual," "What is Capitalism?", "What is Romanticism?", "The Comprachicos," and "Philosophy: Who Needs It" - has somehow become a decisive influence on our political establishment! To anyone with a clue how ideas do affect a culture, that notion is ridiculous. If some politically-motivated people want to use Miss Rand's ideas out of context, ripped out of the hierarchy of her philosophic system, not integrated with her other ideas, not inductively derived from the vast array of concretes of the sort that informed her philosophizing, then that's not her problem. What evidence is there that our current crop of corporate and political leaders ever took Rand's philosophic message to heart? For that to have happened is for our current crop of so-called leaders to be intellectually-inclined in roughly the same way that, oh, Jefferson and Franklin and Paine were intellectually-inclined.
In essence, I addressed this very point months ago. It simply makes no sense that an intellectually-stunted culture is going to adopt and absorb intellectually-demanding ideas or ways of thinking. (The dishonest rationalization here would be that Rand's ideas aren't intellectually-demanding, despite the real necessity for a lecture course called Understanding Objectivism, which would then allegedly explain her allegedly inordinate influence on our national direction. Furthermore, an economic explanation and reality that the American Left evades is the effect of globalization on income and wealth dynamics at home. That has not to much to do with any effects of ideology on culture but more like a worldwide recognition of the efficacy of markets to raise living standards in the previously non-capitalistic developing world.
The fact of the matter is, no one - left, right, or center - whether in the intelligentsia or in the lamestream political discourse has (much less is able to) both (a) come to grips with what it is that makes Ayn Rand great and (b) provide a compelling rebuttal to the essential thrust of her perfectivist ideology.
I've offered the following concrete example before and I'll offer it again: Jimmy Wales. I've recently discussed "Jimbo" here. Among reasonably widely-known figures on the American scene, Jimbo is (properly) paradigmatic of the sort of businessman who actually adopted, absorbed, and practiced Randian ideas. So why does the Left never confront this evidence? Well, I'll tell you why: he serves as a definitive refutation of the usual blatantly-amateurish characterizations (smears, really) of the Randian bogeyman-figure of the Left's feverish nightmare imagination, and the culture of the political Left is scummy. That's not even to enumerate the many and growing examples of Randian scholars in the academic world, of whom the (intellectually-bankrupt) political Left are totally oblivious. It's like they take pride in being ignorant.
What sets Jimbo apart from the great many other businessmen who might or might not be familiar with some of Rand's work? He's intellectually-inclined. How intellectually-inclined are the likes of Thom Hartmann and his sidekick, the former Democrat staffer? (I referred to these sorts of idiots in my previous smackdown as "so-called liberals," forgetting that they like to call themselves "progressives" nowadays. Same shit, different fraudulent label.)
It does all come down to intellectuality - how well people use their intellects - and it does (directly or indirectly, take your pick) implicate the Intellectual Class when a nation's cultural and political discourse is of the lowest-common-denominator variety. I've concluded that the pathological condition on display in reddit-land toward Ayn Rand's ideas is not merely with respect to Rand in particular (although it's heightened in her case) but with respect to ideas as such. It's not just Rand that gets dissed on /r/"philosophy", but also in effect Aristotle, whose value and importance also goes egregiously under-recognized there, even though he's arguably more of canonical figure among the philosophers (the other academic departments is another issue) than any others (Plato and Kant of course being the runners-up). That he's as canonical as he is, may well be our culture's saving grace; where indeed would we all be without Aristotle's influence? The only problem is that he's not canonized enough, being the foremost perfectivist in the intellectual tradition and all.
On a closely-related note: the public's seeming obliviousness to the Jeffersonian tradition of the Founders can also be attributed directly or indirectly to the doings of the intelligentsia (and most significantly among them, the philosophers). As it is, I do happen to remember being taught about the Founders to some middling extent from grade school through high school, but after that . . . where do they get taught to people regularly outside of Glenn Beck's show? [EDIT: Or C-SPAN's weekend "BookTV" programming?] It's a rhetorical question on this blog at this point: what would the Founders themselves do in the face of these circumstances? Hell, going to war for independence from the British Crown makes what they would do today a cakewalk by comparison; that's how much the spirit of the nation's founding has atrophied. Thanks a lot, intelligentsia.
Another rhetorical question: why can't all of those in the intelligentsia be more like Aristotle?
"Why can't you be more like Aristotle?" Say, that has a nice ring to it, am I wrong?
Alright, I'm off now to be more like Aristotle....
Showing posts with label leftist ignorance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leftist ignorance. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
Brian Leiter and Ayn Rand
This oughtta show up plenty high in the relevant Google search results. Ain't the budding information age fun? :-D
(It's a bit unfortunate that I have to push yesterday's inauguration day / Ultimate Cliff countdown post downward in order to undertake today's trash-disposal responsibilities, but that's life.)
For those of you possibly out of the loop: Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago, blogs at Leiter Reports, the most widely-viewed philosophy blog on the internets. (He bragged recently about getting some 11,000 hits a day there - a total that well exceeds what this here measly blog gets, although the audience for this one has been growing at a very fast exponential pace in recent months. Gee, I wonder why?) More than any other philosophy blog on the internet, Prof. Leiter's blog propagates news, information and opinion of interest to the nation's (and the world's) ideas-merchants and their students, which impacts the future course of the intelligentsia, which in turn impacts the direction of society-at-large. How well does Prof. Leiter fulfill his obligations in this regard, as a public-intellectual figure?
For those who follow his blog - for me, it's a necessary part of keeping tabs on the goings-on in the intellectual world, although more on the order of janitorial duty (cleaning out the toilet, say) - he has only nasty things to say about Ayn Rand, a figure who - 30 years after her passing - continues to exercise a growing influence on American public life. The latest incident, posted earlier today, continues that pattern, this time linking to that amateurish Salon piece which I discussed a couple days ago. Now, I don't really know how much Prof. Leiter keeps up on this here blog if at all (although if he doesn't, that would indicate a failure to fulfill his intellectual obligations, given that the highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge). His one public acknowledgment of this here philosopher was nearly two years ago in the comments section of another philosophy blog, referring to this here philosopher as "a deranged Ayn Rand fanatic," with no supporting evidence or argument - just a flat one-sentence assertion. I say all this because I am in no position to divine whether or not Prof. Leiter is trolling yours truly with the latest bit of anti-Rand nastiness. Whether he is or not, he only digs himself deeper in the eyes of history.
Prof. Leiter already has a well-earned reputation for conducting himself in arrogant, abusive, bullying ways in his blog and perhaps elsewhere, but his treatment of Ayn Rand in particular is well beyond the pale of minimally decent discourse. This is part and parcel of his characteristically nasty treatment of almost anything and anyone right-of-center politically, including conservatives, libertarians, the capitalist economic system, or proponents of Americanism. (It's abundantly clear to regular watchers of his blog that Prof. Leiter does not particularly care for this country.) In this respect, he's a virtual self-parody of the leftist, anti-American, anti-capitalist, young-mind-polluting academic of right-of-center lore. Were this nation's right-wing media aware of this Leiter entity (as they should be, out of a commitment to journalistic excellence and responsibility to the viewer/listener), and of how he so clearly epitomizes such odious perspectives, they would not only be appalled but you'd probably never hear the end of it. (As it is, not being all that well clued in to the role of the mind in human existence, they have been focusing on a chief symptom of the nation's ills - our head of state - rather than the root cause: the nature of the intellectuals.)
There is something about Ayn Rand that has the political Left in this country running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. It's like they simply cannot bring themselves to treat her ideas with the respect it in fact deserves, or with the fundamental fairness that ought to be accorded any thinker's ideas. Their bad-faith (to put it lightly) smearing of Rand over her youthful "admiration" (if it could even be called that) for a certain facet of a murderer's personality, completely divorced from the context of her lifelong intellectual progression, should be a tip-off right there that not all is well in the intellectually-inclined ranks of the political Left when it comes to characterizing those they perceive to be on "the other side." But that is only one incident among many. It is a constant, pathological pattern of smears, outright lies, malice, bad faith, evasion, fear, hysteria, incomprehension (often obstinate), ignorance (often willful), mean-spiritedness, mockery, bigotry, hatred, disrespect, abuse, guilt-by-association, context-flouting, selective focus, and what have you. And it appears to be Ayn Rand that brings out the worst in these people, in inverse proportion to the true value of the unknown ideal that resides within the grotesquely disfigured strawman they create.
If you want to get into something like the hermeneutics of suspicion here, to uncover the cognitive and psychological biases that underlie this despicable behavior even among "leading intellectuals," my best guess is that it is a subconscious defense mechanism against a perceived enemy who poses the most potent threat to their leftist paradigm. (And they would be right about that.) They might - and often do - consciously deny that Ayn Rand is much of a real threat in her own right - Leiter has referred to Ayn Rand on numerous occasions as "an intellectual lightweight" and "a pea-brain" - and instead focus on the threat that her influence on millions of readers poses to their leftist paradigm. To rationalize away the merits behind her influence, they have to dig their heels in deeper and attribute that influence to intellectual shortcomings on the part of those millions of readers. "It's a youthful phase" or "it's a justification for selfishness and feelings of superiority that the assholes in society find appealing," and other such worthless ad hominem attacks. In typical partisan and psychologically-projective fashion, the leftists might try to justify their reaction to Rand on the grounds of her admittedly piss-poor attacks on the great majority of historically-significant philosophers (Kant especially). This simply won't fly, because it's glass-house-dwellers hurling stones at a house that is only partially adorned by windows. Polemics is a major blind spot in Rand's case (though the underlying causes of this can be understood if you look at her context - whom she had the opportunity to engage in discussions, the intellectual atmosphere of her time, and so forth; what's their excuse?). But there's nothing in her polemics, save arguably for her analysis of Kant's alleged psychological techniques, that comes close to the outright viciousness that these leftist "intellectuals" engage in. It's suspicious enough when so-called intellectuals ignore or casually dismiss Rand as not being worth their time, but otherwise have the good sense and decency to keep their yaps shut; it's a different level altogether when they behave exactly as hired partisan political goons do, and engage in the lowest of cheap shots and smear tactics. I'm not talking gutter-low here, I'm talking sewer-low. And these thugs have the nerve to call themselves philosophers?
I want to propose a thought experiment of a certain kind, as I conduct for myself on a regular basis. It involves a hypothetical situation (not altogether different from Rawls's Original Position, although it involves actual historical figures) in which this or that set of historically-influential philosophers all gather in the same room (or on the same parapet) and hash things out. The group could be as small or as large as imagination permits. It could be limited only to philosophy's "Big Three" - Plato, Aristotle, and Kant - and the emerging consensus among them would be quite amazing, I should think - perfectivist, even. (Did I mention that you can't refute perfectivism? It would have to be invoked or implicitly relied upon in any attempt to trump it argumentatively. It's no accident that this here philosopher is the one to discover this principle (inductively, of course, as you see by reviewing the array of contextually-fundamentally-similar individuals whom I list in my brief "Perfectivism: An Introduction" article.). This here philosopher is not one to be fucked with, as the likes of Prof. Leiter will come to learn the hard way, in due course.) Another thought experiment involves all those depicted in The School of Athens, although an updated version of that scenario would almost certainly include some ladies (Ayn Rand, for example).
Now, for this particular thought experiment, imagine Brian Leiter showing up at an annual meeting of the Ayn Rand Society. He goes right up to Allan Gotthelf, James Lennox and Fred Miller - three leading scholars of Aristotle, two of them published by the top university press, Oxford (one of them by the ultimate in academic prestige, Oxford's Clarendon Press), and one of them on the faculty of the #2-ranked graduate philosophy program in America (#3 in the world when you include Oxford's) - and he says right to their faces, "Rand is such a lightweight who can't possibly compare to Aristotle, so why do you even bother with her?" He'd be making fucking fool out of himself, would he not? If he had a sense of honor, integrity, decency, and courage, he'd go up to such people (online or in person) and engage them in a mutually-respectful and truth-seeking dialogue. But would he dare? He'd have to clean his act way up first, else he'd look like a fucking fool.
Except that he makes himself a fucking fool doing what he's doing now, on his widely-disseminated blog, by belittling and bashing Ayn Rand in terms that would get him squashed like a cockroach at an Ayn Rand Society meeting, by people who actually know what Ayn Rand really advocated - people who understand Rand in terms she herself would recognize, the way Brian Leiter presumably understands Nietzsche in terms Nietzsche himself would recognize, as against so many ignorant caricatures. (For a sizable list of such Rand scholars, see the literature I list here.)
Brian Leiter is a coward, not a worthy fucking adversary. He might be all great when it comes to Nietzsche or philosophy of law or what have you, but he shits his credibility away when he doesn't consistently integrate his careful scholarly interpretative methods into all his "philosophic" endeavors. A self-styled "philosopher" bashing that which he's too lazy to even try to understand, is a fool. The only question now is who among his professional colleagues has the guts and the wisdom to call him out on his cognitive vice. Who out there does care about her or his intellectual reputation and is willing to do the right thing by speaking up?
(It's a bit unfortunate that I have to push yesterday's inauguration day / Ultimate Cliff countdown post downward in order to undertake today's trash-disposal responsibilities, but that's life.)
For those of you possibly out of the loop: Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago, blogs at Leiter Reports, the most widely-viewed philosophy blog on the internets. (He bragged recently about getting some 11,000 hits a day there - a total that well exceeds what this here measly blog gets, although the audience for this one has been growing at a very fast exponential pace in recent months. Gee, I wonder why?) More than any other philosophy blog on the internet, Prof. Leiter's blog propagates news, information and opinion of interest to the nation's (and the world's) ideas-merchants and their students, which impacts the future course of the intelligentsia, which in turn impacts the direction of society-at-large. How well does Prof. Leiter fulfill his obligations in this regard, as a public-intellectual figure?
For those who follow his blog - for me, it's a necessary part of keeping tabs on the goings-on in the intellectual world, although more on the order of janitorial duty (cleaning out the toilet, say) - he has only nasty things to say about Ayn Rand, a figure who - 30 years after her passing - continues to exercise a growing influence on American public life. The latest incident, posted earlier today, continues that pattern, this time linking to that amateurish Salon piece which I discussed a couple days ago. Now, I don't really know how much Prof. Leiter keeps up on this here blog if at all (although if he doesn't, that would indicate a failure to fulfill his intellectual obligations, given that the highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge). His one public acknowledgment of this here philosopher was nearly two years ago in the comments section of another philosophy blog, referring to this here philosopher as "a deranged Ayn Rand fanatic," with no supporting evidence or argument - just a flat one-sentence assertion. I say all this because I am in no position to divine whether or not Prof. Leiter is trolling yours truly with the latest bit of anti-Rand nastiness. Whether he is or not, he only digs himself deeper in the eyes of history.
Prof. Leiter already has a well-earned reputation for conducting himself in arrogant, abusive, bullying ways in his blog and perhaps elsewhere, but his treatment of Ayn Rand in particular is well beyond the pale of minimally decent discourse. This is part and parcel of his characteristically nasty treatment of almost anything and anyone right-of-center politically, including conservatives, libertarians, the capitalist economic system, or proponents of Americanism. (It's abundantly clear to regular watchers of his blog that Prof. Leiter does not particularly care for this country.) In this respect, he's a virtual self-parody of the leftist, anti-American, anti-capitalist, young-mind-polluting academic of right-of-center lore. Were this nation's right-wing media aware of this Leiter entity (as they should be, out of a commitment to journalistic excellence and responsibility to the viewer/listener), and of how he so clearly epitomizes such odious perspectives, they would not only be appalled but you'd probably never hear the end of it. (As it is, not being all that well clued in to the role of the mind in human existence, they have been focusing on a chief symptom of the nation's ills - our head of state - rather than the root cause: the nature of the intellectuals.)
There is something about Ayn Rand that has the political Left in this country running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. It's like they simply cannot bring themselves to treat her ideas with the respect it in fact deserves, or with the fundamental fairness that ought to be accorded any thinker's ideas. Their bad-faith (to put it lightly) smearing of Rand over her youthful "admiration" (if it could even be called that) for a certain facet of a murderer's personality, completely divorced from the context of her lifelong intellectual progression, should be a tip-off right there that not all is well in the intellectually-inclined ranks of the political Left when it comes to characterizing those they perceive to be on "the other side." But that is only one incident among many. It is a constant, pathological pattern of smears, outright lies, malice, bad faith, evasion, fear, hysteria, incomprehension (often obstinate), ignorance (often willful), mean-spiritedness, mockery, bigotry, hatred, disrespect, abuse, guilt-by-association, context-flouting, selective focus, and what have you. And it appears to be Ayn Rand that brings out the worst in these people, in inverse proportion to the true value of the unknown ideal that resides within the grotesquely disfigured strawman they create.
If you want to get into something like the hermeneutics of suspicion here, to uncover the cognitive and psychological biases that underlie this despicable behavior even among "leading intellectuals," my best guess is that it is a subconscious defense mechanism against a perceived enemy who poses the most potent threat to their leftist paradigm. (And they would be right about that.) They might - and often do - consciously deny that Ayn Rand is much of a real threat in her own right - Leiter has referred to Ayn Rand on numerous occasions as "an intellectual lightweight" and "a pea-brain" - and instead focus on the threat that her influence on millions of readers poses to their leftist paradigm. To rationalize away the merits behind her influence, they have to dig their heels in deeper and attribute that influence to intellectual shortcomings on the part of those millions of readers. "It's a youthful phase" or "it's a justification for selfishness and feelings of superiority that the assholes in society find appealing," and other such worthless ad hominem attacks. In typical partisan and psychologically-projective fashion, the leftists might try to justify their reaction to Rand on the grounds of her admittedly piss-poor attacks on the great majority of historically-significant philosophers (Kant especially). This simply won't fly, because it's glass-house-dwellers hurling stones at a house that is only partially adorned by windows. Polemics is a major blind spot in Rand's case (though the underlying causes of this can be understood if you look at her context - whom she had the opportunity to engage in discussions, the intellectual atmosphere of her time, and so forth; what's their excuse?). But there's nothing in her polemics, save arguably for her analysis of Kant's alleged psychological techniques, that comes close to the outright viciousness that these leftist "intellectuals" engage in. It's suspicious enough when so-called intellectuals ignore or casually dismiss Rand as not being worth their time, but otherwise have the good sense and decency to keep their yaps shut; it's a different level altogether when they behave exactly as hired partisan political goons do, and engage in the lowest of cheap shots and smear tactics. I'm not talking gutter-low here, I'm talking sewer-low. And these thugs have the nerve to call themselves philosophers?
I want to propose a thought experiment of a certain kind, as I conduct for myself on a regular basis. It involves a hypothetical situation (not altogether different from Rawls's Original Position, although it involves actual historical figures) in which this or that set of historically-influential philosophers all gather in the same room (or on the same parapet) and hash things out. The group could be as small or as large as imagination permits. It could be limited only to philosophy's "Big Three" - Plato, Aristotle, and Kant - and the emerging consensus among them would be quite amazing, I should think - perfectivist, even. (Did I mention that you can't refute perfectivism? It would have to be invoked or implicitly relied upon in any attempt to trump it argumentatively. It's no accident that this here philosopher is the one to discover this principle (inductively, of course, as you see by reviewing the array of contextually-fundamentally-similar individuals whom I list in my brief "Perfectivism: An Introduction" article.). This here philosopher is not one to be fucked with, as the likes of Prof. Leiter will come to learn the hard way, in due course.) Another thought experiment involves all those depicted in The School of Athens, although an updated version of that scenario would almost certainly include some ladies (Ayn Rand, for example).
Now, for this particular thought experiment, imagine Brian Leiter showing up at an annual meeting of the Ayn Rand Society. He goes right up to Allan Gotthelf, James Lennox and Fred Miller - three leading scholars of Aristotle, two of them published by the top university press, Oxford (one of them by the ultimate in academic prestige, Oxford's Clarendon Press), and one of them on the faculty of the #2-ranked graduate philosophy program in America (#3 in the world when you include Oxford's) - and he says right to their faces, "Rand is such a lightweight who can't possibly compare to Aristotle, so why do you even bother with her?" He'd be making fucking fool out of himself, would he not? If he had a sense of honor, integrity, decency, and courage, he'd go up to such people (online or in person) and engage them in a mutually-respectful and truth-seeking dialogue. But would he dare? He'd have to clean his act way up first, else he'd look like a fucking fool.
Except that he makes himself a fucking fool doing what he's doing now, on his widely-disseminated blog, by belittling and bashing Ayn Rand in terms that would get him squashed like a cockroach at an Ayn Rand Society meeting, by people who actually know what Ayn Rand really advocated - people who understand Rand in terms she herself would recognize, the way Brian Leiter presumably understands Nietzsche in terms Nietzsche himself would recognize, as against so many ignorant caricatures. (For a sizable list of such Rand scholars, see the literature I list here.)
Brian Leiter is a coward, not a worthy fucking adversary. He might be all great when it comes to Nietzsche or philosophy of law or what have you, but he shits his credibility away when he doesn't consistently integrate his careful scholarly interpretative methods into all his "philosophic" endeavors. A self-styled "philosopher" bashing that which he's too lazy to even try to understand, is a fool. The only question now is who among his professional colleagues has the guts and the wisdom to call him out on his cognitive vice. Who out there does care about her or his intellectual reputation and is willing to do the right thing by speaking up?
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Ayn Rand vs. ignorant "liberal" idiots
When it comes to Ayn Rand, the self-styled open-minded more-enlightened-than-thou "liberals" in the country today show their true colors, and they aren't pretty.
The latest case in point:
"Ayn Rand is for Children" at Salon.com, dated today.
It's the usual (childish!) silliness passing for hard-hitting analysis, nothing that us veterans of internet culture-wars haven't seen recycled ignorantly thousands of times already and upvoted by the reddiotic circlejerk to the point of self-parody. That link points to the /r/politics subreddit, which is filled to the brim with intellectually-lazy partisans who give not the slightest shit about truth or justice but about what's popular, and reddiot's social-metaphysical upvote/downvote format only encourages it. But wait until you see the /r/"philosophy" subreddit, where there's no excuse whatsoever for this kind of ignoble/vicious behavior. But it gets worse: Even the leading "philosophy" blogger in the academic profession, Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago, and scores of vile little like-minded leftist cronies in that very profession, get in on the disgraceful, shameful act. I think of these particular academic-world assholes as the Lance Armstrongs of the philosophical profession: they have managed successfully to keep up the illusion of objectivity and integrity, but it won't last; it can't last, not as long as the truth can get out and justice prevails in this world. (If they are forward-looking enough, as they're supposed to be as philosophers, they cannot fail to recognize that in the extra-advanced information age that is the coming generation, all their public evasions can and will be fully exposed and assessed, as is happening right here, a good deal ahead of the curve. I can't think of any way around that eventuality short of species-wide technological collapse and/or extinction - and I've been giving this subject a reasonably good deal of thought.)
It's not even like these "liberal" intellectual thugs care about a fair fight. Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS! What psychological syndrome might explain this pathological pattern of behavior? One libertarian philosophy professor with a great deal of affinity toward Rand once explained to me that it pretty much boils down to politics: if Rand had (incomprehensibly) somehow been on the left politically while everything else about her remained the same, the academy and the rest of the Left would have welcomed her with open arms, especially given her demonstrable intellectual prowess (to anyone who'll look with an open mind - the "workshop" appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology being a nice readily-accessible example if it in action). I'm about 98% sure this professor has it right. (Yet another instance highlighting the sorry state of affairs here appears in a 2012 piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Being the kind-hearted, take-no-prisoners, suffers-no-fools-gladly gentleman that I am, I contacted the author of this piece a few days back (under a real-nym) to correct him on his errors by providing abundant contrary evidence; the response so far has been, shall we say, unsatisfactory, yes? - to put it mildly. Maybe he's too busy; I don't know. But that published piece sucks swamp ass regardless.)
I mean, c'mon: Jimmy Wales is a child, as today's Salon article unequivocally implies?
That these kinds of articles continue to flow even to this day from supposedly enlightened liberal news-and-opinion websites, in light of the growing academic/professional literature on Rand (see the Ayn Rand Society for example - lots of adults there, some of them leading Aristotle scholars, several of them on the faculty of highly-ranked philosophy programs), says a lot more about these so-called liberals than they do about Rand.
About this author:
"David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future.""
Oh, he sounds like he's really got some philosophical chops. Chances are 0% that he so much as emailed or called someone up at the Ayn Rand Institute for comment. These "liberal" pieces of shit never do.
Such so-called liberals' constant hysterical strawman reactions to Rand have gotten to the point of being comical (among those with a clue, or among those who don't evade stone-cold facts). Do they really have nothing better to offer than what the university professors seriously studying Rand have been offering, which has been overwhelmingly positive?
It's too bad Ayn Rand isn't still around, because there's no way these people would would be getting away with this blatant idiocy. How does it happen as it is? It's because of the intellectuals. As they go, so goes the nation. No wonder the public discourse in this country is so fucked up. I'll supplement this supremely judicious rant by quoting Rand from that link about the intellectuals, as it is way too good not to:
The intellectual Establishment of today isn't dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, although it is dominated by a number of bad trends that undercut its usefulness to the society-at-large and its progress toward better conditions. Aside from the ugly political aspect of things, there's that thing about the American intellectuals having been unduly influenced by European philosophy when Aristotelian philosophy has always been the best intellectual paradigm in terms of the health of societies (and home-grown pragmatism hasn't been cutting it - not when it fails to identify eudaimonic self-actualization as the primary aim of ethical conduct and intellectual excellence as the key to all of human virtues). Added to that is the trend among intellectuals to oppose capitalism as if out psychological and sociological instinct. That ties in with Rand's observation that this nation's so-called intellectuals were unable to deal with or grasp the nature of this country. Hell, take a look at prevailing contemporary constitutional jurisprudence in contrast to a commonsense Jeffersonian-Paineist-Spoonerite-Barnettian natural-rights jurisprudence for a sign of the intellectual corruption involved.
(I mean, shit! - Congress could prohibit alcohol if it wanted to, on the very same grounds that the Supreme Court upheld cannabis prohibition in Gonzalez v. Raich (which built upon the bullshitty Wickard decision covering what's-not-interstate-commerce) - even though Prohibition was repealed once already (prior to Wickard, that is)! That's ass-u-ming that SCOTUS wouldn't bullshit its way into some squaring of this screwy circle in order to keep Congress from doing that. This absurd state of affairs could be cleared up quickly and easily on Jeffersonian grounds. But wtf do I know, I'm not a lawyer, just a measly philosopher whose chief credential is a non-peer-reviewed blog. Speaking of "peers," is Scumbag Leiter one of them? Derek Parfit, perhaps? Who "peer-reviewed" Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, anyway? I'm just asking questions here.)
Signs of health in the intellectual community would include the re-emergence of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in the academy (some decades after Rand had been on the cutting edge in this area, mind you) and the decline of Marxism into near-irrelevance. These are no-brainers, however. A chief indicator of dysfunction, on the other hand, I pointed to in a very recent posting: the most-unfortunate failure by the academy to connect with and make itself relevant to the People. The People desperately need education in philosophy - in critical thinking, in intellectual curiosity, and not only Aristotelianism or Randism in particular (although Aristotle and Rand would be the first to do all in their power to mobilize the intellectuals into relevance) - else the populace becomes anti-intellectual and public discourse suffers accordingly.
And that is how widely-viewed websites like Salon.com end up publishing idiotic commentaries on one of the nation's most influential and controversial thinkers of the day, and who knows what else. It is also how our current Head of State comes not understand jack shit about Ayn Rand (although I'm sure he could recite Rawls chapter and verse based on what he absorbed there at Hahhhvuhd). The people all across the fruited plain deserve a decent, fair, well-informed discussion among its leading ideas-merchants - especially those in academe - about societally-influential and controversial ideas that inform their lives and political trends. When the academy fails miserably - and I mean miserably - to deliver on their implicit and explicit promises to fulfill their professional and human obligations in this regard, righteous anger on the People's behalf is a perfectly normal and completely justified response.
This stuff should be a no-brainer. Scholars at the Ayn Rand Society have figured this stuff out. (Rand had it figured out more than 50 years ago, for crying out loud!) Why can't the rest of the intelligentsia? The sooner they get their act together, the sooner we all reach the cultural, technological and whatever other Singularities. Foot-dragging is not an acceptable option. It's not some goddamn mistake that ultimatephilosopher.com points right to this here expletive-filled blog, which has "ayn rand" and "integration" as the largest-lettered labels in the sidebar and a link to incestuous lesbians in the "about me" section, not to mention a treasure-trove of wisdom spread out over some 250ish blog entries now. Now how about getting fucking clue, any of you professional intellectuals reading this - and that goes especially for you so-called high-minded liberals among you - and get your asses in gear for the sake of the future well-being of humanity. At the very least, think of the children! ;-)
What would Aristotle do (aside from wiping the floor with Rand-bashing idiots and himself-point-missers)? (Remember, kids: boundless intellectual curiosity as the root source of great-souledness.)
Now go, go, for the good of the city!
("Yes, UP, for the thousandth time, integration is fun. :-|")
P.S. For an example of an honorable leftish-liberal media figure, try Glenn Greenwald. He's had the very good sense (as is standard for him) not to enter the Rand-criticism fray or to so much as mention Rand beyond his demolition of Paul Ryan, a politician (ew!) and Romney-sidekick (yuck!) who, as Greenwald correctly mentions, bears little resemblance to a Randian hero. Greenwald was the primary draw, for me, to Salon's website on a regular basis, before he moved over to the UK Guardian. For anyone who has observed Good Guy Glenn in action, he never loses an argument. Why? Because when he speaks on a subject, he knows what the fuck he's talking about. There's a key rule for how to win arguments: know more about the issue than your opponent does. It's worked for me: I've never lost an argument about Rand, for instance. Something something impossible to refute perfectivism....
The latest case in point:
"Ayn Rand is for Children" at Salon.com, dated today.
It's the usual (childish!) silliness passing for hard-hitting analysis, nothing that us veterans of internet culture-wars haven't seen recycled ignorantly thousands of times already and upvoted by the reddiotic circlejerk to the point of self-parody. That link points to the /r/politics subreddit, which is filled to the brim with intellectually-lazy partisans who give not the slightest shit about truth or justice but about what's popular, and reddiot's social-metaphysical upvote/downvote format only encourages it. But wait until you see the /r/"philosophy" subreddit, where there's no excuse whatsoever for this kind of ignoble/vicious behavior. But it gets worse: Even the leading "philosophy" blogger in the academic profession, Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago, and scores of vile little like-minded leftist cronies in that very profession, get in on the disgraceful, shameful act. I think of these particular academic-world assholes as the Lance Armstrongs of the philosophical profession: they have managed successfully to keep up the illusion of objectivity and integrity, but it won't last; it can't last, not as long as the truth can get out and justice prevails in this world. (If they are forward-looking enough, as they're supposed to be as philosophers, they cannot fail to recognize that in the extra-advanced information age that is the coming generation, all their public evasions can and will be fully exposed and assessed, as is happening right here, a good deal ahead of the curve. I can't think of any way around that eventuality short of species-wide technological collapse and/or extinction - and I've been giving this subject a reasonably good deal of thought.)
It's not even like these "liberal" intellectual thugs care about a fair fight. Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS! What psychological syndrome might explain this pathological pattern of behavior? One libertarian philosophy professor with a great deal of affinity toward Rand once explained to me that it pretty much boils down to politics: if Rand had (incomprehensibly) somehow been on the left politically while everything else about her remained the same, the academy and the rest of the Left would have welcomed her with open arms, especially given her demonstrable intellectual prowess (to anyone who'll look with an open mind - the "workshop" appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology being a nice readily-accessible example if it in action). I'm about 98% sure this professor has it right. (Yet another instance highlighting the sorry state of affairs here appears in a 2012 piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Being the kind-hearted, take-no-prisoners, suffers-no-fools-gladly gentleman that I am, I contacted the author of this piece a few days back (under a real-nym) to correct him on his errors by providing abundant contrary evidence; the response so far has been, shall we say, unsatisfactory, yes? - to put it mildly. Maybe he's too busy; I don't know. But that published piece sucks swamp ass regardless.)
I mean, c'mon: Jimmy Wales is a child, as today's Salon article unequivocally implies?
That these kinds of articles continue to flow even to this day from supposedly enlightened liberal news-and-opinion websites, in light of the growing academic/professional literature on Rand (see the Ayn Rand Society for example - lots of adults there, some of them leading Aristotle scholars, several of them on the faculty of highly-ranked philosophy programs), says a lot more about these so-called liberals than they do about Rand.
About this author:
"David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future.""
Oh, he sounds like he's really got some philosophical chops. Chances are 0% that he so much as emailed or called someone up at the Ayn Rand Institute for comment. These "liberal" pieces of shit never do.
Such so-called liberals' constant hysterical strawman reactions to Rand have gotten to the point of being comical (among those with a clue, or among those who don't evade stone-cold facts). Do they really have nothing better to offer than what the university professors seriously studying Rand have been offering, which has been overwhelmingly positive?
It's too bad Ayn Rand isn't still around, because there's no way these people would would be getting away with this blatant idiocy. How does it happen as it is? It's because of the intellectuals. As they go, so goes the nation. No wonder the public discourse in this country is so fucked up. I'll supplement this supremely judicious rant by quoting Rand from that link about the intellectuals, as it is way too good not to:
[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society’s unemployed and unemployable.From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals—with very rare exceptions—were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.
The intellectual Establishment of today isn't dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, although it is dominated by a number of bad trends that undercut its usefulness to the society-at-large and its progress toward better conditions. Aside from the ugly political aspect of things, there's that thing about the American intellectuals having been unduly influenced by European philosophy when Aristotelian philosophy has always been the best intellectual paradigm in terms of the health of societies (and home-grown pragmatism hasn't been cutting it - not when it fails to identify eudaimonic self-actualization as the primary aim of ethical conduct and intellectual excellence as the key to all of human virtues). Added to that is the trend among intellectuals to oppose capitalism as if out psychological and sociological instinct. That ties in with Rand's observation that this nation's so-called intellectuals were unable to deal with or grasp the nature of this country. Hell, take a look at prevailing contemporary constitutional jurisprudence in contrast to a commonsense Jeffersonian-Paineist-Spoonerite-Barnettian natural-rights jurisprudence for a sign of the intellectual corruption involved.
(I mean, shit! - Congress could prohibit alcohol if it wanted to, on the very same grounds that the Supreme Court upheld cannabis prohibition in Gonzalez v. Raich (which built upon the bullshitty Wickard decision covering what's-not-interstate-commerce) - even though Prohibition was repealed once already (prior to Wickard, that is)! That's ass-u-ming that SCOTUS wouldn't bullshit its way into some squaring of this screwy circle in order to keep Congress from doing that. This absurd state of affairs could be cleared up quickly and easily on Jeffersonian grounds. But wtf do I know, I'm not a lawyer, just a measly philosopher whose chief credential is a non-peer-reviewed blog. Speaking of "peers," is Scumbag Leiter one of them? Derek Parfit, perhaps? Who "peer-reviewed" Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, anyway? I'm just asking questions here.)
Signs of health in the intellectual community would include the re-emergence of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in the academy (some decades after Rand had been on the cutting edge in this area, mind you) and the decline of Marxism into near-irrelevance. These are no-brainers, however. A chief indicator of dysfunction, on the other hand, I pointed to in a very recent posting: the most-unfortunate failure by the academy to connect with and make itself relevant to the People. The People desperately need education in philosophy - in critical thinking, in intellectual curiosity, and not only Aristotelianism or Randism in particular (although Aristotle and Rand would be the first to do all in their power to mobilize the intellectuals into relevance) - else the populace becomes anti-intellectual and public discourse suffers accordingly.
And that is how widely-viewed websites like Salon.com end up publishing idiotic commentaries on one of the nation's most influential and controversial thinkers of the day, and who knows what else. It is also how our current Head of State comes not understand jack shit about Ayn Rand (although I'm sure he could recite Rawls chapter and verse based on what he absorbed there at Hahhhvuhd). The people all across the fruited plain deserve a decent, fair, well-informed discussion among its leading ideas-merchants - especially those in academe - about societally-influential and controversial ideas that inform their lives and political trends. When the academy fails miserably - and I mean miserably - to deliver on their implicit and explicit promises to fulfill their professional and human obligations in this regard, righteous anger on the People's behalf is a perfectly normal and completely justified response.
This stuff should be a no-brainer. Scholars at the Ayn Rand Society have figured this stuff out. (Rand had it figured out more than 50 years ago, for crying out loud!) Why can't the rest of the intelligentsia? The sooner they get their act together, the sooner we all reach the cultural, technological and whatever other Singularities. Foot-dragging is not an acceptable option. It's not some goddamn mistake that ultimatephilosopher.com points right to this here expletive-filled blog, which has "ayn rand" and "integration" as the largest-lettered labels in the sidebar and a link to incestuous lesbians in the "about me" section, not to mention a treasure-trove of wisdom spread out over some 250ish blog entries now. Now how about getting fucking clue, any of you professional intellectuals reading this - and that goes especially for you so-called high-minded liberals among you - and get your asses in gear for the sake of the future well-being of humanity. At the very least, think of the children! ;-)
What would Aristotle do (aside from wiping the floor with Rand-bashing idiots and himself-point-missers)? (Remember, kids: boundless intellectual curiosity as the root source of great-souledness.)
Now go, go, for the good of the city!
("Yes, UP, for the thousandth time, integration is fun. :-|")
P.S. For an example of an honorable leftish-liberal media figure, try Glenn Greenwald. He's had the very good sense (as is standard for him) not to enter the Rand-criticism fray or to so much as mention Rand beyond his demolition of Paul Ryan, a politician (ew!) and Romney-sidekick (yuck!) who, as Greenwald correctly mentions, bears little resemblance to a Randian hero. Greenwald was the primary draw, for me, to Salon's website on a regular basis, before he moved over to the UK Guardian. For anyone who has observed Good Guy Glenn in action, he never loses an argument. Why? Because when he speaks on a subject, he knows what the fuck he's talking about. There's a key rule for how to win arguments: know more about the issue than your opponent does. It's worked for me: I've never lost an argument about Rand, for instance. Something something impossible to refute perfectivism....
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