03.04.10
I always thought this was a despicable movie, too
Bookworm says she lost respect for people who said they liked the 1990 movie “Pretty Woman.” She uses that as the lead-in to an examination of some statistics about prostitution.
02.28.10
When they do it with science, I get big-time pissed
. . . but, as an academically trained historian, when they do it with history, ICBMs come out of my ears.
02.26.10
Striking a balance between ensuring safety and encouraging exploratory zeal
Charles Krauthammer’s column today, “Toyota and the Price of Modernity,” raises an interesting point.
The fact is that progress – technological and industrial advancement – is about moving into uncharted territory, much like pioneers advancing on the frontier (or astonauts stepping onto the surface of the moon). No one can possibly predict all the variables that will come into play when something new is invented or discovered.
It’s as if we’ve crossed some kind of threshold, and now we have some kind of perception that there is a “system,” like rules of a game, by which we can systemetize the forward push of human ingenuity. The fact is that there is no “system.” As Krauthammer says, we should certainly not trivialize skirting of the pontential for peril that a maker of a product has indeed ascertained to be present. On the other hand, it would be refreshing to see our culture once again nod admiringly in the presence of boldness and robust belief that invention basically leads to good.
02.17.10
Here’s how many human beings live here; now, that’s all the information you’re getting
Walter Williams on the 2010 census.
Does anybody else find the advertising blitz for what’s supposed to be a simple head count of citizens and legal residents a little creepy?
02.16.10
Multiple layers of cultural rot in sixty seconds
Dennis Prager on the Super Bowl Doritos ad.
02.13.10
Perverted and warped
In the course of musing on the Audi ad that ran during the Super Bowl, Mark Steyn coins a new term: “Conformo-radicalism.” And, no, it’s not a contradiction.
There’s another ad along the same lines that grates on me to no end. It’s for some butter-substitute product. It starts out showing a throng of fit and beaming Danes sashaying down a Copenhagen street. The voiceover says that Denmark recently banned transfats nationwide. Then the ad sells the product, winding up with a message along the lines of “We’re as smart as those with-it Danes!”
Now it’s hip to piss away your freedom.
02.05.10
The twenty-first century gets weirder by the minute – today’s edition
Only FHer off-the-chart goofballs could make a political correctness issue – to the point of poisoning the atmosphere with implications of racist caricature – out of foods that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually immensely enjoyed.
02.01.10
The domestic front of World War III comes to our schools – today’s edition
Public school teachers are distributing this to students on our dime.
01.30.10
Ransacking the past
Ronald Radosh looks at the poisonous work of “historian” Howard Zinn, who passed away this week.
01.26.10
Memo to CBS: Don’t kowtow to the pro-death jackboots
Run the Focus on the Family Tebow ad during the Super Bowl.
Glad someone said this
By way of a refutation of Charles Johnson’s (Little Green Footballs) ten reasons for parting with the right, Dennis Prager demonstrates the basic decency and intellectual integrity of mainstream conservatism.
01.19.10
Sometimes the most uncomfortable messages are the ones we need to consider most carefully
. . . such as Dennis Prager’s Townhall column today on whether society is still producing actual men.
01.17.10
Incentives matter
Jennifer Robach Morse does a great job of disspelling the libertarian argument that expanding the definition of marriage to include same-gender couples wouldn’t affect society and culture much.
01.12.10
Unicorns, rainbows, jackboots and gulags
Absolutely essential reading for today: Kim R. Holmes’s essay at Pajamas Media on TCM as a Rousseauian utopian.
Many money lines, among them: “The old-fashioned view of the good life in which as many people as possible can live free and happilyas the government will let them has given way to a vision of society in which no one is happy unless all are,” and “A government that promises health care to everyone at lower cost will inevitably acquire so much control hat it wil make no difference if it doesn’t deliver.”
Here at BN we’ve examined how TCM is the culmination of the whole strain of leftism that has informed the Democrat party since the Progressive era (and which took on a psychedelic sheen when the young radicals came in from the underground as McGovernites in 1972). Homes expands the scope, showing how not only the “public interest” arrow in the nanny state’s quiver but the whole notion that society ought to embark on a grand transformative project has its roots in Rousseau’s concept of a “general will.”
It’s not news to BN readers that I hate the song “Imagine” by John Lennon and hate it more with every passing year. There’s also a quote from one of the Kennedy brothers about one of the other Kenndy brothers – I forget which ones – along the lines of “He looked at what has never been and said, ‘Why not?’” that sells the same snake oil. Holmes does a magnificent job of showing how this zeal to encourage one’s fellows to envision a world unlike any shown us by human history not onlydisconnects us from basic reality but makes the state the only possible vehicle for anyone’s notion of betterment of the human condition.
With his steady voice, cool demeanor and good fortune to have the perfect ethnic makeup for appealing to Americans’ desire to feel good about themselves, TCM is supremely qualified to traffic in grandiose visions like none of his FHer predecessors. It takes the most vigilant of minds to remember what reality is actually like and not get caught up in a desire for that which is the stuff of fantasy, thereby selling one’s birthright for a single-payer system or a carbon credit exchange.
01.06.10
The castrata’s token not-as-far-in-the-bag-for-tyranny-decline-and-perversion-as-self-identified-”progressives” sniffs concedingly at the rousing of the rubes
Three great ass-kickings of that simpering, pasty-faced east-coast-chin-rubbing dweeb named David Brooks over his latest NYT column.
12.26.09
Look to this quartet for a lot of the nonsense we’re having to refute now
The latest print-edition issue of National Review is one of those magazines physically lying around the house that needs to go into some kind of permanent file.
The cover story is actually comprised of four related articles. Taken together, under the title “The Four Horsemen of Progressivism,” they provide a very timely look at the question of how we got here that VDH explores in his own fashion in he link in the last post.
Along with the pioneers of progressivism examined in each of the articles – Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Richard T. Ely – the reader is inspired by choice references to go back and bone up on such figures as Auguste Comte and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Each of the four NR articles at one pont or another delves into biographical data, and it’s here that one can see that a lot of our current cultural forces go back a long way. Both of New Republic founder and Promise of American Life author Herbert Croly’s parents were New York journalists. The dad was into some kind of kooky movement to loosen up society to the point of being cool with premarital – and, I think, extramarital – sex, and the mom was an ardent feminist.
There is much examination of the German influence on the development of American progressivism. Several members of the first and second generations of the faculty of Johns Hopkins, for instance, studied at German universities in the mid-19th century under pioneering scholars in such new fields as sociology.
This leads me to a personal reflection. I remember one professor in particular when I was working on my master’s degree in American history in the 1980s who, while he did try to deliver his lecture content with a credibly objective tone, nonetheless, it is clear in retrospect, spoke glowingly of the above-mentioned figures, in addition to Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard. I was being fed PC propaganda, no doubt about it. (On reflection, it does seem as if he brought a bit of dismissive tone to his mentions of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.) This teacher was keen on impressing on us what an intellectual trailblazer Germany was at that point.
The overall impression one gets from the sum total of the four articles comprising the cover story in the latest NR is that this archetype of the American progressive goes back a long way: a professed empathy with the “struggling” or “disadvantaged” classes and demographic groups, which must be juxtaposed against an actual snobbery that borders on contempt for the actual human beings in those classes. You see, Croly, Dewey et al looked down their noses at devout Christians who put personal faith above the state, people who were at home working with their hands and backs, and those who had profit among their considerations when thinking up ways to benefit humankind. They preferred the east-coast chin-rubbers, the oh-so-judicial / sensitive / culturally-up-to-the-minute types that comrised the entirity of their social and working circles.
The rest of the issue is of this caliber. Mark Steyn’s back-page column on Nuaru’s recognition of Abkhazia, as well as Theodore Dalyrimple’s look at what Conan Doyle contributed to our culture with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, are two more examples of why you ought to avail yourself of a copy.
12.25.09
The great leveler
Excellent Victor Davis Hanson column (but then I’m being redundant) on the cultural strains that made for the current regime’s hijacking of our way of life and national character. Hanson identifies three particular elements:
1.) equality of result
2.) multiculturalism
3.) the Chicago way
So what we have is a worldview that says all people deserve equal outcomes no matter what choices they make in life, that there has been a glaring inequality characterizing our society, and that this is due to a caste of white male Christians enjoying a top tier of a hieracrchy (and the United States exercising an arrogant hegemony in its international relations), and that the regime is going to by God force its vision down our throats even if it has to resort to blatant thuggery.
12.23.09
One of those small indicators of just how late in the day it is
Legal Insurrection has started an ongoing series of posts called “Please Tell Me This Is Not So.” The latest installment focuses on some ornaments to be found on the White House Christmas tree.
12.07.09
The war’s education front
Like Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, John Holdren, Carol Browner, and Kevin Jennings, this monster must be given the Van Jones treatment. Unaccountable “czars” per se are undesirable, but it has become quite clear why TCM is so keen on the concept. It’s a highly effective vehicle for implementing his mad, perverted vision of a grim, grey totalitarian world in which dignity and common sense have been utterly eradicated.
