…are sexist, and waging a war on men.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
How The World Almost Ended
Apparently we had a very close call in 1883.
It’s amazing to me how unseriously we take this threat, at least judging by our policy choices.
The “Perfect Health Diet”
A new book
It seems to have a lot of good reviews. Here’s another one from an Instapundit reader:
Chalk me and my family up as big fans and beneficiaries of the PHD. It’s been life-altering, literally, for myself and my two daughters.
Given the success of the PHD and other similar diets (like the Paleo Diet and the Primal Blueprint), it’s very likely that most of our chronic health issues in the United States are the result of malnutrition: following the USDA’s dietary guidelines seem to reliably lead to human malnutrition.
Malthus may have been right, although not in the way he thought.
One day people will look back on the late twentieth century nutrition advice in the same manner we view bleeding by leeches. Except the latter will be more respectable.
The DC Economy
Are we living the Hunger Games?
Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.
So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.
I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”
I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.
[Update a while later]
Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.
Girls
…there’s an important difference between Apatow’s work and Dunham’s, and that is that Apatow tells and re-tells stories of growing up, while Dunham shows a group of women who stubbornly refuse to do so. Apatow shows characters learning the importance of responsibility and morality, while Dunham’s characters are largely devoid of the former and uninterested in the latter.
The show’s main character, played by Dunham herself, embodies all of this. In the first scene of the pilot, when her parents tell her they won’t be paying her bills any more, she loses it, and informs them that instead of pushing her out of the nest, they should be grateful she isn’t addicted to pills. Her friends are equally appalled by the prospect of a 24-year-old paying her own phone bills, and, for the most part, they’re equally reckless. For instance, in the second episode, one of them misses her abortion appointment because she’s busy having sex in a bar. And their romantic relationships — unsurprisingly — come in about every possible iteration of dysfunction.
…You can almost argue that Lena Dunham sees President Obama as the perfect surrogate for everything missing in her characters’ lives: He’s their gentle lover, supportive parent, and empathetic friend. He’s special. He won’t let them down. He’s Prince Charming. And that kind of defeats the purpose of feminism.
You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Because feminism was hijacked by the left back in the seventies, despite the fact that campus leftists were some of the biggest male chauvinist pigs around.
Death-Spiral States
Unfortunately, we own a house in one. I’m wondering if we should sell while we have equity, and rent as long as we continue to live here. I wish we’d done that in Florida a few years ago.
Prometheus
The Lileks review (scroll down). He’s not impressed. I’m pretty sure I’ll never waste time watching it.
Mass Transit
…is the new Jim Crow.
It’s funny how so many “liberal” fetishes (e.g., gun control, minimum wage, legal and rampant abortions, welfare) have such devastating consequences on the people for whom they profess to care so much.
[Via Instapundit]
[UPdate a few minutes later]
Here’s another example. The moronic war by the “progressives” on Walmart, which has done more for poor people than any government program.
“Assault Weapons”
The wrong way to argue against bans against them:
Gun control at its root has always been about gun control. Feinstein is a statist, and her laws and regulations will always and forever increase the power of the state. Feinstein sees through McArdle’s argument on cosmetics, which is why her proposed ban includes semi-automatic weapons. There isn’t anything cosmetic about the aims of the gun control advocates.
Arguing that their bans don’t adequately distinguish between weapons leads them to refine their ban. Arguing that there is equivalent lethality between weapons denies aspects of utility and design, and only causes them to ban weapons that have specific utility for home and self defense. And arguing that their regulations were ineffective only embarrasses them to pass even more onerous ones.
The correct way to argue against Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban is to argue that there is no constitutional basis for such a ban, and any new assault weapons ban would be at least as immoral and obscene as the last one was.
Yup.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: Go have a Tea Party by seeing Red Dawn.
Balancing The Budget
Yes, you can do it without raising tax rates.