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...

Content warning: References to politically- and racially-motivated violence, and quite a bit of coarse language directed toward gay and transgender people, including a slur which you can probably guess pretty easily. One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements. I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infu...