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 quite communicate. If mimetic theory seems silly, I think it's worth reading it from Girard, rather than from primates such as myself, chattering incoherently about happened in their head when they read his ideas.