Rhetoric
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Blue Team: As you may have noticed, it is possible, sometimes, to tell how someone votes by the arrangement of their yard. I say, “sometimes,” because most yards are neutral. There’s a lawn, probably, and some landscaping. There might be a fence, or a garden gnome. If there are children in the house, there might be…
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This is the third entry in my Antistatism Series. Before I can make my own case for antistatism, I must pause to redress a famously misaddressed letter on a related subject. In 1969 Roy Childs began an Open Letter to Ayn Rand with these words: The purpose of this letter is to convert you to…
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One of the things I find most striking about Objectivism is its subtlety. I’m in the minority. The lucidity of Ayn Rand’s writing, I think, tends to fool her admirers nearly as often as it fools her critics. She reduces complex issues to essentials, casts fine lines of distinction in sharp relief, illuminates the obscure,…
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Imagine this: you wake up one day, and realize you are in an insane asylum. Shortly, you put it together that you’ve been here all your life. There are several reasons why it had been difficult to recognize your situation: The inmates and the staff in this asylum dress and act alike, and it is…
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The blog is a strange creature, from where I sit. Not this blog, but rather the web log as a form of written communication. The modally average blog burns a lot of bits commenting on the “issues of the day” and commenting on others’ commentary on the same. I sometimes think I should do that,…