Category Archives: Popular Culture

Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Generation Web

Beloit College looks at the class of 2015:

O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Jim Carrey has always been bigger than a pet detective.
They’ve always gone to school with Mohammed and Jesus.
John Wayne Bobbitt has always slept with one eye open.
There has never been an official Communist Party in Russia.
“Yadda, yadda, yadda” has always come in handy to make longFaux Christmas trees have always outsold real ones.
They’ve always been able to dismiss boring old ideas with “been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt.”
The bloody conflict between the government and a religious cult has always made Waco sound a little whacko. stories short..
Jimmy Carter has always been a smiling elderly man who shows up on TV to promote fair elections and disaster relief.
Women have always been kissing women on television.
Their older siblings have told them about the days when Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera were Mouseketeers.
Unlike their older siblings, they spent bedtime on their backs until they learned to roll over.
Music has always been available via free downloads.

And to them, tales of men walking on the moon are like stories of the depths of the Depression to me. And many of them probably don’t believe them.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Tactic

14 Comments

Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:

Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.

Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.

It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Weirdos

27 Comments

I agree, there’s nothing weird about going to strip clubs, particularly if you’re on the outs with the girlfriend (though I’m probably weird in that I’ve only done so once in my life, dragged there by some other guys), but thinking that Lady Gaga is hot pegs the weirdometer for me. As he says, she may be quite attractive if you toss her in a shower and get all the paint off her, but I don’t know who she’s trying to appeal to with her public persona.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Next Stop, Space

44 Comments

This underwater hotel in Fiji looks pretty neat. I think that a lot of its clientele would love a room with an earth view.

One thing I see missing, though — no (obvious) curtains on the windows. I’ve heard that there have been problems with underwater hotels in the past, because the dolphins liked to voyeuristically look in the window and watch couples engaged in amorous activities.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Bam’s Glam

13 Comments

…is gone. Thoughts on the loss of the president’s glamour, from the glamour expert:

What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”

This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states … and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”

There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous — powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.

What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.

That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.

Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”

It was pretty obvious to me what he was from the get go. His faux pas with Joe the Plumber was a big tell.

[Update a while later]

Isn’t it time we grew up?

I want to underscore the fact that it is not just Barack Obama who is living in la-la land. It’s the whole apparat. The suits in Washington have ingested and then regurgitated the neo-Keynesian socialist pabulum that mesmerized elite opinion some time in the 1960s and has never let go.

But we are letting go. By “we” I mean the people who these fools and scoundrels in Washington have misled. They couldn’t help it. They don’t know any better. How cruel it is going to be when the mentally-challenged Joe Biden is exposed as the Grecian formula empty shell that he is. And Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.

On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.

It is deeply ironic that so many in the media have referred to the president as “the adult in the room.”