Flattened Ears

The first essay included in The Return of the Primitive centers on the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" protests of the 1960s, and it also forces me to commit a typographical crime in the form of a double end-quote due to how I format my post titles. The reason for this is because Ayn Rand is the Sargon of Akkad of the 1970s. More on that later. The more specific reason for this is because Rand wants to make it clear that she doesn't consider these students to really be rebels, she considers them to be conformists who merely appropriate the image of rebellion for the sake of branding and to feel cool, and for the first couple paragraphs and the title of the essay she'll persist in putting scare-quotes around the words "rebel" and "rebellion" to drive this point home. This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or...

If you care enough about stupid irrelevant internet writers to be reading my stupid irrelevant internet blog right now, you're almost certainly familiar with Bob "Moviebob" Chipman, a stupid irrelevant internet writer of somewhat greater note than myself, both for having some moderately successful movie review and cultural criticism series published via The Escapist, and for being a hilariously petty, self-aggrandizing technofascist. Indeed, everyone's acutely aware of the underpinnings and implications of Bob's political statements except, seemingly, Bob himself. And this particular aspect of denialism and self-delusion about one's own political beliefs is hardly unique to Bob, indeed it's endemic to the political landscape, in which the vast majority of participants will never truly engage with criticism of their viewpoint and will simply go on believing that whatever they currently believe is the "sensible," "default" viewpoint, an...