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

From University of California Press - Yikes!

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

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

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damore & Wax vs. anti-dialogue leftists

(Damore context.  For the uninitiated, by leftism or left-wing politics I refer to egalitarian and quasi-egalitarian strains of thought, and the further left you go the more deranged and dishonest it gets.)

At the top of the search results for damore manifesto is an article from Wired that contains some well-reasoned pushback against Damore's arguments mixed in with the whiff of bad faith from the authors about the implications.  (From the looks of things what Google did was not even bother with the well-reasoned pushback - i.e., attempt at dialogue - but instead replaced reasoning with the bad faith part.)

I won't get into the specifics of the science that would be involved in a legitimate back-and-forth on this topic.  That isn't the point.  The point is whether "social justice warriors" and their ilk operate in good faith.  (They do not.)

The whiff of bad faith creeps in more and more toward the end of the Wired article.  Here are instances of such:

What he’s advocating is scientism—using undercooked research as coverage for answering oppression with a shrug.

(This is far and away the silliest use of the term scientism as I've seen, although that isn't important here.)  The authors reach this judgment about Damore's advocacy based on the notion that Damore cherry-picked the science to support what are, more or less, political conclusions.  But how would anyone determine that?  What we do know in retrospect is that there is more to the scientific-studies picture than what Damore presented; the question is whether he should have known about the rest of the picture, i.e., whether he might have exercised further care and diligence in his looking at the scientific literature before making his argument.  (Gee, just imagine if we apply that same standard to the anti-Damore crowd and leftists in general, which is more or less the whole point of this; my contention is that today's leftists routinely are blatant offenders in this regard, not that it's a close call where the motivations might merely be called into question.)

In the specific case of Damore he's almost definitely making an effort to get to the bottom of things and not clearly trying to ignore counter-arguments (as evidenced, for instance, by the numerous qualifications he adds to his statements); the best case that Google and its defenders might come up with is that Damore's intellectual character is faulty enough that he merits his punishment.  But, really, the only way to determine that is to have a dialogue to test Damore's commitments - which Google (in this case) and tons of leftists refuse to have, which reflects poorly on their intellectual character.

More from the Wired piece, where it gets more egregious:

Damore’s dissent, stripped of its shaky scientism [sic], isn’t a serious conversation about human difference. It’s an attempt to make permanent a power dynamic that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If Google was, for Damore, an echo chamber, that’s because his was the only voice he was really willing to hear.

Fucking horseshit!  That's the authors jumping to a conclusion not warranted by anything that came before that.  (Can it be thrown back in the authors' faces, pray tell?  They obviously didn't do their homework before throwing the term "scientism" around like fools, so are we entitled to the sweeping conclusion that they're intellectually lazy and full of hubris?)

I've pointed to the essential problem above, but to reformulate: The authors preceded their closing cheap shot with reasoned pushback.  But that's not what Google did.  It didn't offer reasoned pushback.  It implicitly adopted sloppy caricatures of Damore's point to get to the conclusion that it and the left-activists in the company wanted about his attitudes toward women in his workplace.  Or, put differently, it adopted the same mean-spirited conclusions as these authors without even so much as reasoned pushback, which makes it doubly offensive.

==

The same dynamic was in play with the disgraceful Amy Wax episode (not disgraceful on her part, to be clear).  To recap: Prof. Wax presented an argument about how (among other things) the black-white achievement gap could be closed in great part if the black demographic as a whole did a better job of adopting what she called 'bourgeois values,' among which are things like intact nuclear families which might be expected to help better promote a more solid work ethic, avoid criminal behaviors, that sort of thing.  This resulted in an uproar at her (Ivy League) campus from a mob of students and faculty who virtue-signalled by signing statements (devoid of substantive arguments but long on conclusive claims and "social justice" buzzwords) to the effect of, "These are the views we've determined you hold, and we thereby condemn you, end of story."  There wasn't anything remotely resembling a reasoned dialogue.  One example of the blatant dishonesty is when some of these dickheads turned Wax's appeal to a return to "1950s values" into an appeal for a return to "pre-Civil-Rights" values.  (Compare to the dickheads such as Scumbag Kamala Harris who do the same with Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.)

It's by no means a stretch to believe that if an Ivy League school is pulling this kind of shit, then (given the ideas-networks necessarily involved) this dynamic is pervasive throughout academia.  (Compare the 2000s episode where Harvard's then-president Larry Summers dared to suggest that sex differences might explain the male-female imbalance in STEM professions.  The very topic is off-limits, precluding dialogue and coercing agreement, i.e., without the autonomous cognitive processing and weighing required for objectivity as opposed to intrinsicim.  [Is there anything more ugly, dangerous, and anti-intellectual about the dynamic in question than this?])

Now, after that dishonest uproar/condemnation, the ever-honorable Heterodox Academy hosted an actual substantive discussion about Wax's argument, including this lengthy article by John Gelbach.  The likes of the Gelbach article is what the screaming University of Pennsylvania leftists should have put forth (along with allowing Wax a response - heck, why not bend over backwards in this regard just to be sure) before they reached their definitive determinations.  But they already showed their malicious hand.

Now, my question: in what relevant respects do the anti-Damore and anti-Wax reactions differ, given that reasoned pushback was quite evidently available to be had?  If they don't really differ in essentials, then my suggestion that a similar dynamic is in play in both cases holds up.  (I don't see any relevant or essential difference between these two episodes in that regard.  The only really interesting difference is that tenure protected Wax from firing, else I believe it would have gotten uglier.)

Now, what if I told you that the same essential dynamic is in play in the way the American left portrays Trump as a racist?  Surely if it is, there should be plenty of overwhelming evidence of the dynamic in play.  Since you're either clued in or basically clueless there, I won't bother elaborating in this here post and will leave the rest as an exercise for readers with pointers to this blog's "trump," "race," and leftism-related tags (for which see below).

In sum: the prevailing dynamic of contemporary leftism involves sloppy constructions of opponents' positions - usually in the worst possible light, usually without respect for nuance - followed by no dialogue/dialectic but rather declarations of condemnation.  (The blatantly dishonest dynamic is also at work at various major media outlets.)  And that's why they are, as Noonan points out, the most hated group in America today, and perhaps the most dangerous.

[Addendum: Just to dredge it up yet again as yet another example of the blatantly dishonest dynamic in question, the left's reckless smearing of Brett Kavanaugh - its one-sided presentation of his accusers' stories as the full story (even Swetnick's obvious lies in some (prominent) instances, if you can fucking believe it) and in its utter disregard of the rebuttals from the other side.  So when I bring up how dangerous these deranged dishonest people are, just imagine if they had the run of the place and what would happen to the likes of Kavanaugh then.  The parallels with the Title IX campus kangaroo court procedures are clear.]

Music to my eyes: Noonan on "progressives"

(imagery and sound I might associate with such a smackdown would be the album cover and sequence beginning here)

I can't recall Peggy Noonan (WSJ, 1/4/20) laying it on quite so hard on anyone before, and she's absolutely fucking spot on:

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives [sic] who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism.  In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them.  They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over.  They never have a second move.  Bow to them, as most do, and they'll accuse you of even more of newly imagined sins.  They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral.  Actually they're not.  They're mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.  [Unable to achieve on a level field of play: Cowards! Weaklings! BUMS!  Brandt will fill you in on the details.]

Everyone with an honest mind hates them.  Someone will finally move effectively against them.  Who?  How?  That will be the story of the '20s, and a good one.

As to who might pull this off and how, I have a bit of an idea, at least with regard to the "how" part: an indispensable part of any maximally effective strategy for standing up to these cowardly bullies is to go right to the source: the goddamn cancerous Academic Left and its systematic, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt intellectual dishonesty.  These destructive, anti-capitalism, commie-sympathizing, anti-America, anti-commonsense scum have built into their very MO (or, if you will, their intellectual DNA) every which tactic in the book to shit all over the basic principles of fair and decent dialogue.  They insist on caricaturing and smearing their political opposition at every opportunity, and on ignoring the toughest challenges from same.  They pretend to themselves and (insultingly) to others that their idea/arguments are no-brainer winners over the competition (and hence that the competition must be the dumb/despicable ones).

Not nearly as bright as they think they are; chock full of hubris/conceit/smugness; more clever than wise and not very clever at that; ignoble and base; unserious; unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit; intellectually reckless, lazy and wasteful; evasive under challenge; dogmatic; fanatical; beholden to cult/groupthink; authoritarian; proto-totalitarian; ugly of soul and spirit; chronically hateful; and philosophically vacuous and illiterate (for which the win-win solution is right under their very snooty noses).  Oh, who might face down these putrid motherfuckers, indeed....

We might start with revoking any supposed claims these nincompoops have to the labels "woke" or "progressive" or anything of the sort.  Those words they don't get to claim for the hot mess they've made/become.  No, they don't need to be removed, destroyed, or defunded by an angry mob of taxpaying Americans -- not as long as they clean up their fucking act.

[Addendum: more common sense along these lines from another newly-discovered blog.  (Again, how didn't I discover it earlier, rather than have my attention directed toward (e.g.) the twitter cesspool?...).]

Planned Parenthood and NARAL: "Believe Swetnick"

This is absolutely beyond the pale of honest discourse:

Planned Parenthood Action‏Verified account @PPact

We still believe Julie Swetnick. #BelieveSurvivors

1:14 PM - 25 Oct 2018

NARAL retweeted this.

All evidence points to Julie Swetnick being a fucking liar and her story on its face not being believable.  There were serial drugged gang rapes and she just got around to reporting them nearly 4 decades later?  And no one else managed to report it?  This is believable even after she fell apart in TV interviews (as any reasonable person should have suspected if not expected outright would happen)?  Even after Kavanaugh presented what is prima facie exculpatory evidence with his calendar?  Note that Oct 25, 2018, is nearly a month after the Ford & Kavanaugh testimonies, so there was time to mull it over responsibly.

How fucked-up does someone's belief-formation processes have to be in order to find Swetnick believable?  What's particularly dishonest about PP's tweet is that it's a statement with no support, just an assertion that we're also just supposed to have belief-formation processes fucked-up enough to believe as well, I guess.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

And if anyone believes Dr. Ford's accusation, even after Leland Keyser's refutation of it; even after Kavanaugh's calendar was presented; even after it was made evident that the two simply didn't travel in the same social circles - then such believers, too, have belief-formation processes that are FUBAR enough that they shouldn't be taken seriously when they assert their beliefs.  This includes the three leading '20 Demo-rat candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren; presumably Buttigieg as well considering he called for Kavanaugh's impeachment last October along with Sanders, Warren, and other pusbags).  One of those candidates - Sen. Warren - claimed to find Swetnick believable as well.  (I've provided links to these candidates' beyond-the-pale assertions time and time again and I'm growing sick and tired of doing so; anyone can do their own fucking homework on this pretty easily.)

The Kavanaugh hearings were nothing more than politically-motivated #MeToo abuse by Demo-rats and their allies/enablers.

This is no brainer stuff.

So, again: what the fuck is wrong with these people?

And what the fuck is wrong with those who could call out these fucks for what they are and yet fail to do so?

Latest on the cancerous Academic Left run amok

Surprise, surprise - lots of obvious race and sex discrimination has resulted from the UC's "diversity statement" protocol.

Given the demographics involved - women and many of the favored minorities are more likely to be politically on the left - the so-called required diversity statements at Berkley/UC are veritably designed (in an evolutionary-mutation sort of way) to increase the presence of leftists on campus.  I mean, it was fucking obvious from the get-go what the agenda is here.  This is the Academic Left doing what it does - enforcing ideological conformity by whatever means it can get away with.  They're commies at heart, purging the impure elements to get down to a hard core of the ideologically inbred, research quality be damned.  (Their own versions of Lysenkoism couldn't be far behind - could it?)

And without legalities getting in the way - as is likely to occur under our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (these pathetic fucks would call that a racist dog whistle, or something) - they would keep on doing it more and more until they've created a completely discredited intellectual trainwreck.  They just can't help themselves, can they.

If you don't see a connection between this trainwreck-in-the-making and the scummy history-rewriting (currently in the process of being discredited by appalled historians) going on at the NYT, then maybe you suck at pattern recognition.  This is the same shit being played out in (only slightly?) superficially different ways.

This is what happens when American leftists as we now know them have the run of the place.  Ultimately it'd be all AOCs all the time, a thorough brainwashing with all opposition dismissed as racist/fascist/sexist/capitalist/imperialist.

For fuck's sake, like there wasn't a nonstop avalanche of evidence of this meltdown already?  Just watch - if/when the UC ideological-conformity statements run into too many legal challenges, the ideological-conformity motherfuckers will do what they can to weasel around them with something even more outrageous, offensive, and twisted.  It's what they do.

This cancer has taken over and just about destroyed the Demo-rat Party and the moderates don't know what to do; they've all been schooled in America-is-racist and capitalism-is-evil memes by the Academic Left and that's what contextualizes their areas of disagreement.  Just how much wealth and privilege of white males needs to be expropriated, exactly?  Exactly how much do corporations exploit the non-CEO workers who create all the value?  Exactly how flimsy do sexual assault allegations against white males have to be before they can be disbelieved at long last?  That kind of shit, not the stuff that middle-Americans disagree about.

The Dems' least-unqualified candidate at this point, the least ridiculous-looking when put up against the Racist Power-Abusing Sitting President, is an old, white male.  The presumptive future of the party is AOC, an obvious trainwreck situation; I'm not sure even Mayor Pete can stem the far-left tide here.

The Blue States' public-union-controlled budgets and always-escalating minimum wages are being sustained by prolonged and solid economic growth; what's their backup plan for if/when the shit hits the fan there?  Blame capitalism/Republicans/white privilege yet some more and hope/pray swing-state voters and not just Academic Leftists will find them credible?

Lastly: Is there any prominent, outspoken figure on the Academic Left these days who isn't a piece of shit?  Because if he/she is not calling out the Academic Left for being the giant cancerous mound of shit that it clearly is, then he/she is part of the problem.

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?]

Greenwald vs. Comey's Crooked FBI (Plus: the scummery of the Left)

Scumbag Comey

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald for doing as Greenwald does for well over a decade now: calling out Swamp corruption for what it is, and those who enable it for what they are.  And it vindicates Trump when it comes to the need to drain the very Swamp that used the very Swamp-like means to try to take him down.

Trump's instincts in firing the non-contrite James Comey turned out to be right: Comey's either an incompetent piece of shit, or a willfully corrupt one.  (And it only further proves Trump's point that Comey's enablers would react to his firing as they did, by launching a bullshit investigation that it appears Mueller's team had good reason to believe back in 2017 would not turn up what it was digging for.)  It doesn't really matter which at this point whether Comey was crooked or incompetent; what matters is how other folks - namely, Demorats and their allies/enablers (including their talking-points outlet, MSDNC) - enabled his behavior and continue to enable it still.

The enablers are on the "best" team the American Left is able to field any longer.  And here's the philosopher's smackdown: without contrition for peddling falsehoods and a good-faith effort to clean up their acts to avoid such fuck-ups in the future, then they are liars retroactively.  They fail to call out their earlier selves for their falsehood-spreading, thereby falsely certifying themselves as reliable truth-tellers.  The likes of Greenwald and myself don't let them get away with it.  (Indeed, what would it make me if I failed to call out their corruption and sliminess and intellectual dishonesty in no uncertain terms?  What if I don't call obvious motherfuckers obvious motherfuckers?  How would I live with myself?)

During the GWB years, the Demorats had an ally in Greenwald because he went after the motherfucking behaviors of GWB officials (& enablers/allies) with all the necessary documentation/links and cold hard logic.  If Greenwald says you're a motherfucker, it's because he's got overwhelming proof that you're a motherfucker.

This here post is the very, very last opportunity I am giving today's Demorats/enablers to redeem themselves and own up to their enabling of Comey's FBI's motherfucking behavior.  Slinking away in silence would (of course?) not be good enough; doing so itself is motherfucker behavior reasons that should be clear by now: they are unwilling to acknowledge and condemn their own bad behavior.  And it isn't just some triviality, some white lie or mishap: this is a powerful law enforcement agency running roughshod over citizens' rights.

I would take issue with this statement from Greenwald, although perhaps as an attorney he is more closely familiar with what he's talking about than I am:

Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.
The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.

It does appear easy enough for the NSA and FBI to abuse their surveillance powers as long as they act like crooked motherfuckers, and as Greenwald says earlier in his article:

About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, “found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.'”

Apparently Greenwald considers it unrealistic to expect FBI actors to behave scrupulously?  (The measure of scrupulousness should be something like, "Assume that you're the one that the FBI is seeking to surveil."  Like, duh?)  Apparently the supposed safeguards in FBI policy against this kind of abuse just aren't good or reliable enough?  What if heads roll when this sort of abuse happens?  There are fuck-ups and crooked actors, but the key here seems to be accountability.  And it's motherfuckerly to oppose accountability or to run interference for the crooked and the fuck-ups, as Demorats/enablers appear committed to doing.

I have a hypothesis, a hunch, or what have you about the American Left and its Demorat team-on-the-field: They've been rotten and motherfuckerly for a while, that they've been getting increasingly worse over time, but the candidacy and election of Donald Trump sent them over the edge and put their rotten motherfuckerliness way out into the open for all (well, all of those with a clue) to observe and draw their disgusted conclusions from.  I wouldn't have expected an entire political party and its enablers to prove themselves to be such a bunch of pathetic pieces of shit, but a mountain of overwhelming evidence points me to this unavoidable conclusion.  I have to call it out as my inner daimon urges me to.

And, since I already did know what a bunch of pathetic motherfuckerly pieces of shit they are when they've recklessly smeared and belittled even so titanic a figure as Atlas Shrugged's author over the course of decades - showing their true colors when the chips are down - it couldn't exactly come as a surprise to me when they turn the same tactics on a president that triggered them just right.  (Kudos to Trump for the rope-a-dope?)  I guess the main difference is that they didn't devote all their resources to smearing Rand given her limited (so far) influence on the culture and polity; but with Trump they feel the necessity to do so and debase themselves in no uncertain terms in the process.  But they would go all-out on Rand in just the same way if/when they consider it necessary.  They are, after all, behaving just like the intellectually bankrupt pieces of shit responsible for the dystopian conditions in Atlas.  I think I might be able to build an incontrovertible case that they're even worse than the statist scum of Rand's fictional portrayal.

Scumbag so-called philosopher

This brings me to the Academic Left.  I now consider the Academic Left to be the nearest thing to irredeemable deplorables as we have in this country, a bunch of dishonest parasites hell-bent on smearing their opposition and destroying honest dialogue.  (See Rand's comment about the potential of intellectuals to be either the most beneficial or the most parasitic of all social groups.)  It may well be that a fully-documented, dead-to-rights smackdown of the Academic Left and the intellectual culture of Leftism generally has to be part and parcel of a wider 'better living through philosophy' project, since the Academic Left serves as such a glaring contrast case - an example of what happens when those with the letters "PhD" after their names manage (in a concerted, systematic, institutionalized fashion) to bastardize philosophic inquiry, with all sorts of sophisticated rationalizations to boot.  To do philosophy perfectively one has to pursue metaphilosophy perfectively, and part of the latter involves being able to reliably and systematically distinguish real philosophic activity from pseudo-philosophic activity (the pseudo- part involving clever rationalizations for systematic biases).

Pseudo-philosphic activity seems especially devious and toxic when there's a political agenda involved; I mean, were they allowed to run amok, how would today's Academic Left behave differently than Marxist movements of the 20th century that grabbed power and murdered millions, time and time again?  (You should immediately be suspicious when you hear Marxists/enablers protesting that Marx's vision was never truly or properly implemented, i.e., that it was psychopaths - time and time again, somehow - who misappropriated Marxian doctrine for reliably murderous totalitarian ends.  To explain that one away, we'd need a really good, BS-free explanation for how Marx's dismissive attitude toward "bourgeois rights," for instance, wouldn't lead to atrocities committed time and time again - an unmistakable pattern - by avowed Marxists.)  What are the differences between these two groups of ideologues, exactly?  Get someone like a Trump or an Amy Wax to trigger them just right, and out come their true, hard-to-distinguish-from-Red colors, particularly with their eagerness to rush to shut down the Prohibited ideas, or to smear them beyond recognition.  (That the silence/punish/smear-Wax effort occurred at an Ivy League University says it all.)

So I've fucking had it with the Left in its current incarnation, its systematic bad faith and dishonesty, its totalitarian methods, its refusal to learn from or atone for past errors/misdeeds.  (See Alan Charles Kors on whether we can ever realistically expect the Academic Left to own up to the spectacular and bloody record of failures of efforts to implement socialism, efforts they supported for decades on end.  Failure to do so makes them what else than motherfuckerly apologists for totalitarianism?  This also goes for the "leading" so-called philosophy blogger with a long track record of reckless smears of non-leftists such as Rand.)

(Speaking of this so-called philosophy blogger, a reckless smear of Sesardic that only proves Sesardic's point: "Sesardic is a right-wing crank who has even written a whole book expressing disbelief that philosophers might not all be anti-Marxist zealots like he is.  [UP: Actually, Sesardic's point is that there are provably too many leftist zealots even in the history of "rigorous, analytic" philosophy than is warranted by the quality of the arguments for leftist ideas.  Anyone who's gone through Sesardic's book knows this.]  I even make a brief appearance in the book, based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of a post on this blog.  [UP: Actually, there are without question dozens of posts from which Sesardic draws for his depiction of this so-called philosopher; see here for some further context.]"  For a "Doctor" who chides Sesardic for lack of argumentative rigor, some self-healing is in order.)

My educated hunch is that a mountain of overwhelming, dead-to-rights, no-holes, no-escape case against the Academic Left can successfully be built, if it hasn't been done already.  As I state above, I may have to build such a case myself as part of my project.  (PHILOSOPHER'S QUESTION: What more would I need to show than what I've peppered this here blog with already, or what any honest reader would reasonably induce from it all?  What more does it take to prove what a sick puppy the Left is?)  Of course, the target audience for such a case won't be the Academic Left, which I suspect has unlimited ability to evade or explain away even mountains of evidence they don't like (and the ones who don't possess that ability would have ditched the Left already); the intended audience will be those, such as mainstream Americans, who have an incentive to fight and remove parasitic destruction of American institutions and traditions.

Perhaps the main challenge remaining, assuming that what I've already peppered the blog with tells any reasonable observer all they need to know about the intellectual and moral character of the Left, is to connect the two things, to demonstrate how one led to the other: the Academic Left's anti-philosophical nature on the one hand, and the Demorat/enablers' enabling of FBI corruption on the other.  Would you be surprised if such a connection could be demonstrated beyond all doubt, or that if any media outlet carries out such a demonstration it would be this here blog?  Do I have to get saganized and see where my saganized inner daimon leads me?  Is that what has to be done here?

I mean, fuck.  The pattern is the same: Demorat-allied media propagating smears against Republicans (e.g.) while excusing and running interference for scummy Demorat behavior, all under the guise of professional journalistic objectivity; and the Academic Left propagating smears against opposing ideas while excusing the bad ideas that appear to lead inexorably to totalitarianism when applied, all under the guise of professional scholarly rigor.  All with the hope and wish for impunity and unaccountability.  And lots of overlap between these two groups.  How could there not be a deep connection between how these groups operate?

[ADDENDUM: How about this little gem I encountered via searchwords "academic left".  When the institutionalized dishonesty and malice overtake the philosophy (sic) profession, what hope for integral academic honesty is there?  It was nothing short of an ultimate litmus test - Leftism vs. Philosophy - and in today's academic environment, Leftism won.  And note - surprise, surprise - that the further left you go, the more malicious, scummy, and Red-like the behavior.  If this isn't dead-to-rights shit that should make every decent person fucking pissed, then what is? [Edit: Of course, given a lot of recent evidence regarding the reliability and reproducibility of social science studies, surveys, methodologies, etc., this study should be approached with as much skepticism as one approaches any study of this sort.  See the more downthread comments here, for instance.  (So I jumped the gun somewhat here, and that's not acceptable to this here intellectual perfectionist, although my inner daimon isn't pointing me toward the assessment that I'm a motherfucking piece of shit for having done so; this has to be weighed against the entirety of this blog - just as it would only be fair to weigh the scummery of contemporary leftist intellectual culture against the widest context of behavior by leftists; while they may routinely be motherfucking pieces of shit when their cognition and behavior are politically-oriented, their non-politically-oriented cognitions and behaviors may have some redeeming value.  But what did I say the other day about acting like a decent person one moment and a scumbag the next?  I'm not quite yet prepared to resolve the tension between propositions here.  Either their duality of cognition/behavior from one moment to the next is itself still fundamentally scummy, or the leftists are only scummy for sure qua contemporary leftists.  I'm really not sure which.  Gee, if that's what any reasonable disagreement comes down to, the assessment of contemporary leftism as an anti-philosophical shitshow stands either way,)  But . . . what if a body of overwhelming anecdotal evidence exists to establish essentially the same basic assessment of the Academic Left's nature as this study (if largely true and accurate) suggests, as I think such body of evidence does?] ]