Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hell yeah. Conversations on this topic have gone off the rails, to the point of being flagged, with groups talking past each other, a set critiquing a cheesy blog post or Thiel and another group defending Girard's idea. I haven't read as much of Girard as my library fines for his books might suggest, but what I have read affected me deeply, it brought clarity to ideas I was perceiving in a muggy form that I couldn't…
any book, or entry point you can recommend to start with?
I personally read "The Scapegoat" but Girard is doing literary critique which, like philosophy, can be dense and difficult to read if one isn't used to such texts. Personally, I would like to read "Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure" sometime in the future.