Ilana Mercer, the dimwit I have delightfully skewered for years after she actually said that homosexuality “denude(s) sex of its Randian majesty and meaning” (yes, she meant Ayn Rand), is stepping up to defend John Derbyshire’s racist nonsense.
In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:
“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”
Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine…
Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best…
More so than enforcing conformity – ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity.
As professor Clyde Wilson of Chronicles Magazine has written,“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.” Indeed, Americans cannot abide enormous talent, unless it presents itself in a mindless or uncontroversial field: sports or the hard sciences.
Oh, of course. Derbyshire was fired because he’s just so brilliant. She does have a point here though:
Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers.
Hard to argue with that. It’s a pretty steep drop from Russell Kirk to Rich “Palin’s wink sends starbursts around my living room” Lowry. And don’t even get me started on S.E. Cupp. But then Mercer is her own special kind of stupid and vapid, so she fits right in.
22 comments
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Ing: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream So I Comment Instead
April 17, 2012 at 11:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A Randroid calling foul on a firing? Oh so racial based firing it something for the market to figure out, but THIS is just wrong!
Ray Ingles
April 17, 2012 at 11:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wait, since when have “the hard sciences” been “uncontroversial”? Especially to conservatives?
Modusoperandi
April 17, 2012 at 11:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ing: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream So I Comment Instead “A Randroid calling foul on a firing? Oh so racial based firing it something for the market to figure out, but THIS is just wrong!”
The Free Market did figure it out, and it decided that in-group loyalty was more important than philosophical absolutism. They can be extra absolutist later, to make up for it.
Taz
April 17, 2012 at 11:33 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Apparently the firing of Derbyhire has denuded racism of its Randian majesty and meaning.
raven
April 17, 2012 at 11:39 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If this actually existed, we would all start reproducing by budding off clones or just tossing gametes into the air like conifer trees do.
raven
April 17, 2012 at 11:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Buchanan isn’t an iconoclast. He is a dinosaur from early in the 20th century.
White supremacists crying about the imminent destruction of the white race, racists, anti-Jewish bigots, and Nazi sympathizers were dime a hundred back then. They are still pretty common.
scienceavenger
April 17, 2012 at 11:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
…she actually said that homosexuality “denude(s) sex of its Randian majesty and meaning”
That’s only because she can’t imagine a man raping another man.
holytape
April 17, 2012 at 11:50 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I was denuded once, but I redressed the situation.
“Indeed, Americans cannot abide enormous talent, unless it presents itself in a mindless or uncontroversial field: sports or the hard sciences.”
When I look at a physicist, I say to myself, “What a dolt. He’s wasting his talents by working in such a mindless and uncontroversial field. If he wanted some true excitement,… if he truly wanted to help humanity, he should have become an opinion columnist.”
d cwilson
April 17, 2012 at 11:52 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What’s amazing is that she thinks Buchanan and Derbyshire are the antidotes to the likes of S. F. Cupp and Rich “Palin’s on TV, pass the tissues and hand lotion” Lowry.
Bronze Dog
April 17, 2012 at 12:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There’s something about this that seems more absurd than the usual stuff I read from Randroids. What’s “majesty and meaning” got to do with sex? Aren’t they supposed to see it as just another service transaction, cooperative venture, or something?
Of course, this strikes me as a transparent attempt to disguise “it’s icky, therefore wrong” in fancier language. The Rand part just throws me off.
garnetstar
April 17, 2012 at 12:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Racist pellucid prose at its best…
Chris from Europe
April 17, 2012 at 12:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just look up what Solzhenitsyn advocated. He’s the same kind of freedom-lover as many tea-partiers. Maybe his ideas of the ideal state and Derbyshire’s aren’t that far off. What is Derbyshire’s opinion about Putin’s Russia?
Ms. Daisy Cutter, Gynofascist in a Spiffy Hugo Boss Uniform
April 17, 2012 at 12:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Lackwit:
Just because something is said with erudition and gravitas doesn’t make it not a foul pile of shite. Lots of right-wingers miss Bill Buckley, too, but he was every bit the racist reactionary Derbyshire is.
Raven:
Obvious jokes about “tossers” are obvious.
scienceavenger
April 17, 2012 at 1:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Bronze Dog: sex’s majesty and meaning are supposedly due to it being man’s greatest way of recognizing another person as a high value worthy of it. WHY this act is special, as with so many of the tough questions, never really got answered by Rand beyond the typical “it is what it is” dodge.
Hercules Grytpype-Thynne
April 17, 2012 at 1:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A fact which I’m sure all of them look upon as a point of pride.
Pierce R. Butler
April 17, 2012 at 2:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I can’t find online a copy of a certain review of an Ayn Rand biography, dwelling on the occasion when AR decided to exercise the inherent right of all cult leaders to their choice of booty.
Reportedly, this climaxed in a prolonged scene of mutual recrimination, with Ayn, her husband, her concubine, and the concubine’s wife all running around the Rand house, each arguing a different position but all justifying theirs by quoting from Rand’s books.
Randian majesty all over! Playwrights, your opportunity awaits.
illdoittomorrow
April 17, 2012 at 2:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Feature, not bug, Ms. Mercenary.
Zinc Avenger
April 17, 2012 at 3:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
dontpanic
April 17, 2012 at 11:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
FIFY
stace
April 18, 2012 at 8:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And obviously the Randian majesty and meaning of sex is most profoundly expressed as that between a chain-smoking philosophical novelist and a protege who is 25 years younger.
interrobang
April 18, 2012 at 10:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I never, ever want to hear anyone use the word “Randian” to modify the word “sex,” ever again. Seriously, I think my genitalia just climbed up into my thorax and is huddled there whimpering, which is no mean feat for female genitalia.
Modusoperandi
April 18, 2012 at 11:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
interrobang, so it looks like they ate a lemon?