Maverick Philosopher

No Day without Cultural Appropriation

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Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand

Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering":

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)

My posts on Miss Rand are collected here. 

Here is Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Miss O'Connor is exaggerating, but she is essentially correct in her literary judgment. Both women are firm adherents of worldviews that inform their novels, and in the case of O'Connor, short stories.  

The difference is that . . . well, you tell me what the difference is. Why do I have to do all the work?

Defeatism

It's a pretty good article until the final paragraph:

I don’t think the election of Donald Trump in 2024, if it were to be allowed, would make any fundamental difference in The System. He couldn’t change it in his first term, and he wouldn’t be allowed to change it in a second. At the same time, I completely understand the desire of many Americans to instinctively support someone who at least appears to be hated by The System.

This is just  plain stupid. Did the capture of SCOTUS by conservatives during Trump's first term make "any fundamental difference in The System"? The question answers itself. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have occurred had Hillary been elected. And that is just one of Trump's numerous accomplishments. Trump has proven himself as president. If Trump wins the White House in 2024, he will immediately reverse most of Biden's unspeakably destructive policies, the most traitorous of which is the open border policy. He will have the people behind him and the political savvy he acquired in his first term. The filthy Dems understand this, which is why they wage illegal and extra-constituional lawfare against him. But don't take my word for it. Listen to those lions of the law Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, both (unaccountably) still Democrats. 

And what's with the last sentence? Trump "at least appears to be hated by The System"? Nothing is clearer than that the oligarchs hate Trump in adamantine fact, as is shown by their willingness to overturn democratic norms to save 'our democracy' in their Orwellian way of putting it.

We need to collect more examples of political defeatism. Here is an old chestnut from Geraldo Rivera. "Build a twenty-foot wall, and the the illegals will show up with a twenty-five-foot ladder."  Can you think of others?