Flattened Ears

Those primaries sure are tickin' on, huh? Kind of shitshow as far as I'm concerned, what with Bernie's faltering momentum and the Neoliberal Voltron all lining up behind Biden to try and push him into the oval office before he drops dead or calls someone the gamer word or something. All except Elizabeth Warren, the neoliberal who wants to pretend to be a leftist. She's taking her damn sweet time making a decision as to who to endorse, isn't she? Some of us are getting antsy. Others, however, seem to be in no hurry at all, extolling Warren's bravery for standing up as her own person and refusing to bend the knee to either of the candidates who are actually still in the race at this point. She doesn't owe anyone anything, right? Well, aside from the fact that actually, as a public servant whose salary is paid by taxes, yes, she actually does  owe the voting public something, the problem here is that this take obviously comes from such a place of privilege ...

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...

If it wasn't clear from the views I've already espoused on this blog in regard to politics and culture, at this point in my life I consider myself a great many things which can broadly be categorized as "leftist." Specifically, I'm currently a big fan of Pyotr Kropotkin's anarchist communism. But this wasn't always the case, in fact it's a pretty recent development. Prior to this I had a period where I considered myself a "left-leaning centrist" and avoided politics most of the time, and before that (back in and immediately after high school) I was outright conservative. Not just conservative, in fact, but a Randian Objectivist. I know, I know, a goth phase would've been preferable, but that would've required me to go out and buy clothes, whereas all I had to do to get into objectivism was grab a couple books off my (mostly politically-illiterate) mom's shelf. (I was also pretty well primed to accept objectivism due to a lifetime...

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...