Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

“Art”

8 Comments

A screed:

I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.

If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.

Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.

Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.

No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

General Kaus

12 Comments

He takes the lead in fighting this stupid bill on “comprehensive immigration reform”:

It’s time for the ants to swing into action. The Gang of 8 bill can still be stopped. But there are not many days left to scare away the fence-sitting senatorial swing votes. Again, it’s not that they don’t know what the issues are. It’s not that they don’t have a pretty good understanding of what the polls say about public opinion (voters are split on the idea of reform, but they overwhelmingly want border enforcement to come first). It’s that they are insufficiently scared that a vote for the Gang’s complicated mess-whatever they think of it – will bring them punishment at the polls.

They need to be scared. Here are two ways to do it.

Go read it all, and get off your butts.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Syria And Egypt

2 Comments

They can’t be fixed:

Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.

That first sentence could apply to us, on the route we’re on. If we allow the Democrats to remain in charge, it will be our fate, and sooner than later. We just have to hope that we’re not there already. And then there’s this:

This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber” consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.

Except it’s not funny. At all.

Business, Economics, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Gardening The Universe

8 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a gathering to hear the latest from Howard Bloom in downtown LA, but I had a conflict. But David Swindle attended, and has a report. (I did talk to Howard briefly a few days later, in San Diego.)

This –>

It became apparent again that I was the odd man out in the room. Most of the questions were phrased in explicitly secular terms.

Afterwards as Howard and a group of us sat around discussing, I raised my objection to the soulless, materialist focus. I drew a parallel between the groups who had sought to explore and settle the North American continent in the 1600s and those who should now seek to place their mark on the Moon, Mars, and the earth’s orbit.

I reminded Howard and the others that people came to the New World for varying reasons — capitalists eager to make money, the Crown eager to maintain power (primordial corporatists), science-minded explorers eager to discover what was out there, and one group unrepresented at the talk tonight, save for yours truly: the fanatical religious radicals wanting to live free of persecution as they built a godly, happy, counterculture community. It was this mix together that enabled the American experiment to begin and succeed.

People of faith — whether they interpret the Bible through Jewish, Christian, or mystic lenses — are called by God to transcend nature and rise upwards. The earth is not holy; it’s not our mother. As I’ve blogged about before, inspired by Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, the earth is just a rocky death trap. We can grow a better one ourselves.

To the degree that I have a religion, that’s pretty much it.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Modest Abortion Regulation

7 Comments

Professor Althouse has a suggestion.

While I don’t have a strong position personally on whether or not abortion should be legal (other than it’s none of the federal government’s business, either way, and that Roe was a constitutional atrocity), I’m always struck by the callousness of the “pro-choice” movement, which seems to be more of a pro-abortion movement. For instance, they don’t even want to get “bogged down” with the apparently inconsequential issue of whether or not a developing child can feel pain in the womb. And as Yuval Levin notes, as with other issues on the Left, they won’t even grant sincere good will to their political opponents:

The headline in the print edition [of the NYT] is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election.

The article itself offers no sense at all that the pro-life cause has any moral component, no notion that perhaps this isn’t just about this or that election. Just a perfect confusion about why anyone would want to spend time worrying about this issue.

“The re-emergence of abortion as a driving issue among the conservative base has left some moderate Republicans baffled,” the article notes. Has it really? Baffled?

The Times sometimes changes the headlines of its stories when they go online, and I wondered if maybe the online editors saw that this particular headline was ridiculous. So does the story have a different one online? Yup: The online headline is “G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base.”

Even better.

In a similar vein, KLo writes about the pain of Penelope Trunk:

…it’s almost as if we prefer abortion. It’s an expectation. We’ve adapted our lives to it. And so a whole ideology needs to exist to insist it’s okay, that women and men aren’t feeling what they’re feeling. That this is good, when not very long ago we absolutely knew better. And it was not just priests or self-identified pro-lifers who knew better.

It’s all of a piece with the death merchants of the Left who think that humanity is the world’s biggest problem.

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Is Our Teachers Learning?

4 Comments

I am completely unshocked to hear that schools of education do a terrible job of teaching teachers:

“We don’t know how to prepare teachers,” said Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of a scathing critique of teacher preparation. “We can’t decide whether it’s a craft or a profession. Do you need a lot of education as you would in a profession, or do you need a little bit and then learn on the job, like a craft? I don’t know of any other profession that’s so uncertain about how to educate their professionals.”

You don’t say.