Wednesday, February 18, 2015

FURTHER COMMENT SUPERFLUOUS.

When you see Obama holding up one finger in a photograph, F.W. Burleigh of the distinguished conservative journal American Thinker will have you know, he isn't telling someone to wait a minute, nor calling for attention, nor witnessing for Christ like Archie and the Gang, nor doing the Lindy Hop --
Obama and the Muslim Gang Sign 
Is President Obama a Muslim? A lot has been written about this, but if photographs speak louder than words, then a photo taken at last August’s U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in Washington D.C. might shed considerable light. 
It shows Barack Hussein Obama flashing the one-finger affirmation of Islamic faith to dozens of African delegates...

The one-finger display is the distinctive Muslim gang sign: The index finger points straight up while the thumb wraps underneath and presses against the digital phalange of the middle finger. The remaining fingers are squeezed against the palm in order to highlight the extended forefinger...
There's even semiotic analysis of a grainy photo detail:

The reaction of Togo president Faure Gnassingbe, at the top row second to the left, is less approving. Through his face you can read the mind of this Sorbonne- and George Washington University educated leader. His mind is screaming, “You gotta be kidding!”
I could go on, but why spoil it? If you're a fan of Crazy, this is a treasure trove.

UPDATE. John Bridges, among others, sees the problem.



Tuesday, February 17, 2015

AND THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR WHINING.

I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":
The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.
Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.

No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:
Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument. 
For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”
So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.

My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.

UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:
[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like." 
Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.
Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.

UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."

Sunday, February 15, 2015

ON TO OSCAR, 5.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

The Theory of Everything. As I've said before, the biopic is a minor form that usually tells us why some famous person was famous and doesn't spare much time for the demands of art. The Theory of Everything stretches the formula a little -- it's not just about Stephen Hawking, it's about him and his wife Jane -- but it's still an inspirational famous-person story, with both Hawking and his doting wife rising through suffering to redemption. In some ways it's just the sort of gush you'd expect: for example, Jane doesn't seem to think about cheating on her increasingly enfeebled husband (with her saintly choir director, no less) until well past the halfway point -- and at that moment, hundreds of miles away, Hawking starts spitting up blood. And every so often someone gets the opportunity to tell the world what a genius Stephen is (most melodramatically, a big-time Russian scientist who carries the crowd with him at a crucial turn). The inspira-biopic formula is faithfully followed.

And yet... the Hawkings' relationship is genuinely interesting. Their meet-cute is pro-forma -- he's gawky but obviously impassioned and fun, she's sincere and sweet and too real for those other boys, and their life at Cambridge is sunny and full of promise. But when Hawking begins to have medical problems, their relationship is stepped up -- though Stephen wants to give her an out, Jane insists she's in for the long haul and that she has the steel for it.

The haul is indeed long, far longer than the two years Stephen is originally given to live, and both parties work hard at sustaining it, and at Stephen's career. Jane's other interests are subordinated, and over time it wears on her, as Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, brilliantly shows: She doesn't become shrewish or embittered -- it turns out she does indeed have the steel -- but she does stiffen; she sees that she may break, and begins to look for ways to sustain herself.

Stephen meanwhile is both increasingly driven and dependent, and like Jane is smart enough to find out how to keep from collapsing. His academic success everyone knows about, but his way of dealing with his physical dilemma is more interesting. Eddie Redmayne is great at conveying the effects of Hawking's ALS, and at showing how Hawking uses his wit and charm, even when deprived of most conventional means of expressing them, to avoid despair in both his own life and his marriage. Still, eventually he, too, has to look outside the relationship to sustain himself. (Though putting across delicate and painful emotions while physically challenged is an Oscar-season punchline, I can tell you that in Redmayne's case, when Stephen has to have the marriage-ending discussion with Jane, it absolutely works.)

So this inspirational story is about what from some perspective might be called a failed marriage. The most obvious argument for its success is Hawking's glorious career. As for Jane's success, that's a little trickier; the film suggests that when Hawking finally acknowledges the possibility of God, which for Jane has always been a certainty, it's because she has made God real to him by her devotion. It seems a small enough victory, though you could say that any good relationship between educated people is to some extent an extended conversation, and that Hawking's admission is not so much about Jane winning a point as it is a sign that they have all along been talking the same language.

All the craft elements are very fine, but I especially liked the lushly romantic score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, which in the grand Hollywood tradition not only underlines but exalts the characters' feelings; it's up for an Oscar and I wouldn't be shocked if it won.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting Music Times column handicapping the Best Score race; it's always nice to hear from someone who knows what he or she is talking about, though the author's view that Alexandre Desplat's double nomination won't work against him is contradicted by history.

Friday, February 13, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

  I thought yesterday's First Things article -- about how, thanks to 50 Shades of Grey, BDSM will lead followers to the Church, thereby reversing the usual pattern -- would be an anomaly. But now I see it's becoming a wingnut-Christian trope, executed today by Mollie Hemingway, who I guess is the new The Anchoress. At least Hemingway starts with a perfectly entertaining review of the film; she finds the sex scenes "pretty tame" and names other BDSM-themed stories she prefers, which as a former Catholic I appreciate. But then:
Anyway — if, as a character written by G. K. Chesterton said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” let’s ponder what women who are into this awful literature are seeking.
Ugh, that quote again -- and I might have known it was Chesterton, that's how the more high-class God-botherers always announce themselves.
I want to say this before the days when such statements are branded hate-speech worthy of re-education camp...
And the same goes for ridiculous persecution fantasies.
...but a hell of a lot of women would, if forced to choose, prefer to be in a loving committed relationship with a dude than get successively better office jobs on the way to the corner office.
Also, they'd rather go to heaven and lounge on clouds all day than go to your liberal-secular schools. Thereafter Hemingway just spools out the usual bullshit: Girls who try to make something more of themselves than dutiful wifemothers end up bitter hags with frozen eggs; men are boycotting marriage because of bitter hags with frozen eggs; women don't want feminism, they "want to be lost in a relationship, completely submitting to a man who is dangerous enough to need rescue but loving enough to notice what makes them beautiful," etc. Well, one good thing may come of this; in future, Jesus-friendly films like God's Not Dead will have a lot more nudity, and missals may come with bodice-ripping illustrations and Fabio on the cover as Jesus.

•   I don't usually pimp books here, mainly because I'm sub-literate, but I can say this about Dead is Better, by my wife's friend Jo Perry: If you liked my own neo-noir Morgue for Whores (and if you haven't read that, what's stopping you), you'll probably like this. Actually, that's not a pre-condition -- Dead is less grimy and sleazy than my novel, which surprisingly does not make it less interesting. The narrator is a dead guy, murdered, and he's just getting the hang of the afterworld. He figures out how to locomote in his new "frictionless" plane of existence, and even to hitch rides in cars, pretty quickly, but he's slower to make sense of what he's learning about the people he left behind in meat world -- and of the dog, also dead, who appears to have adopted him. Murder, mystery, redemption -- all that. Oh, and very sharp writing. Have a look.

•   It's become de rigueur for conservatives to defend Scott Walker's college performance -- we Charlie Pierce fans call this "the C-plus Augustus maneuver." Jonah Goldberg ups the ante and defends Walker's punt on evolution. Goldberg calls it "Darwinism," a popular schtick among the brethren, and says no fair you're trying to make us look dumb:
To borrow a phrase from the campus left, Darwinism is used to “otherize” certain people of traditional faith — and the politicians who want their vote.
Same thing with those citizens whose Constitutional right to treat epilepsy with leeches is mocked by them there pointy-heads. Then Goldberg gives his own I-din't-come-from-no-monkey speech on grounds of moral grandeur:
Beneath the surface, the salience of evolution as a political football is ultimately about the status of man. Are humans moral creatures whose actions are judged by some external or divine standard, or are we simply accidental winners of an utterly random contest of genes?
A God that works through evolution -- why, it's too fantastic to even contemplate, just like universal health care. How I'd love to see the big courtroom scene in Inherit the Wind re-written for Goldberg -- especially if they replaced Brady's Bible citations with quotes from Animal House and "he who smelt it dealt it."

Thursday, February 12, 2015

TURN ME ON, DUMB MAN.

As enjoyable as the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon is to make fun of, I haven't read it so I shouldn't really; besides, everyone's entitled to his or her kink (as long as it's consensual, which I guess lets out Andrew C. McCarthy). Still, anything can be taken too far -- Here's Joseph Heschmeyer at conservative Catholic magazine First Things:
Beyond surprise, the series’ success has generated a good deal of alarm, as the book glorifies a sado-masochistic relationship containing rape and sexual violence against women. The series’ popularity testifies to something quite at odds with the traditional Christian vision of love and sexuality. While these concerns are well-founded, there’s another dimension of the phenomenon to consider: What accounts for the series’ sudden popularity? If Fr. Smith, the titular character in the Bruce Marshall novel, is right that “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God,” what are fans of the Fifty Shades series seeking? 
One answer is that there’s a hunger that’s not being satisfied: Namely, for men who are unabashedly masculine, who aren’t afraid to take control, and to lead. That is, there’s a longing (even a lusting) for men who aren’t afraid of what’s classically been called “headship.” To this end, while Fifty Shades subverts Christian sexual morality, it subverts the modern crusade for “genderlessness” all the more.
I have to say, this is a reversal of the process I grew up with, whereby the Tridentine Mass, scratchy uniforms, and mean nuns with rulers awakened fantasies of dominance and submission, not the other way around.

(Give Heschmeyer retro credit, though: It's been a long time since I saw someone cite Free to Be... You and Me as anti-masculine propaganda.)

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

THE SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS.

The Daily Caller's Patrick Howley, one of whose previous efforts for the cause -- a column called "Liberals want to stop men from checking out women," in which he suggested girls longed for him to stare at their tits -- was covered here in December 2013, has not changed his game. His latest is called "Liberal Hipsters Make Race Relations Worse," but before we get an explanation we have to hear how cool Patrick Howley is because he lives among black people:
Now as white people go, I get a fair amount of respect, even with my generally conservative political views. I don’t look like I have way more than other people because I don’t. I live alone, I don’t bother to shave a lot of the time, I’m skinny and mediocre-looking. I dress frumpy. Nobody dates me for very long. I get crapped on by others in my profession while hacks take my material and get famous with it. My adolescent desire to be Norman Mailer didn’t really pan out and I wear the shrugging disappointment on my face.
In other words, I get a pass. I don’t get hassled if I’m chain-smoking outside a Spanish laundromat at two in the morning on a Wednesday. I carry myself like I’m supposed to be there. I keep my head down, I don’t judge anybody, I don’t smile, I don’t make trouble, I don’t let anybody touch me, I’ll give somebody a cigarette if they need it. It’s fine. (THAT’s how you gentrify, kids. Take notes).
THAT's how you get a ghetto pass, kids -- shamble about like vintage Tim Roth and emanate self-loathing. And no touching! Black people respect that.

But some cats can't hang --
But lo and behold, this other white guy in line at Wendy’s was reading a book. Some frilly little kind of book. It could have been Emily Dickinson for all I know. He was dressed in smug glasses with a little scarf and some kind of twee little indie petticoat... 
He ordered some kind of salad-type thing and a chicken sandwich with all kinds of preconditions: no this, no that, like, uh, no I don’t want that on it. Whatever. It was thoroughly disgusting. I felt the angry eyes of other people in line linking me and this loser together as though we came as a socioeconomic couplet. I almost had to apologize to the crowd.
I half expected Howley to swagger up and offer this young gent from cubesville some new colors for his paintbox. Then I remembered: No human contact!
How did this person turn out this way? Is he really so oblivious that he can’t even go to a downmarket Wendy’s without stoking an undercurrent of racial tension that everybody went to the restaurant on a Sunday to just forget about?
You could feel it, brah. Dudes be like "damn!" What? No, they didn't say "damn" -- it was in the undercurrent!
Is he actively trying to be a punchable asshole?
And here’s the bitter irony: THAT guy is probably some kind of liberal blogger who makes his living accusing Republicans of being racist.
Wait. Waaaaaait.
He didn't just --
Okay I double-checked, he did.
THAT guy is exactly like the kind of dweeb who would Tweet at me after this column runs and tell me I’m making all sorts of culturally insensitive “microaggressions.” 
Also the kind of dweeb who'd hog the couch at this party, talking to this chick when I'm tuh-RY-ing to get with her, TODD!

Much has been made lately of Felix Salmon's advice to young journalists, but really, the best thing to tell them is this: Angle for a wingnut welfare sinecure, and pray for a boss who's too busy to read your copy.

UPDATE. Comments are just too good. From Another Kiwi:
Moby Dick by Patrick Howley. Call me Ishpatrick. A fucking white whale, are you kidding me? In this neighbourhood? Man, get your frilly petticoat ass out of here before the black folks take to you with torches and pitchforks. Me, I'll be down at the Sudz 'n' Spin ignoring all those dumb fucks. Now watch some bastard steal my writing, yeah, it figures.
Also enjoy dex's comment, which begins "i don't say he's a great man. patrick howley never made a lot of money..." and several others.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES: AN ONGOING SERIES.

Haven't looked in for a while on Acculturated, the culture-war jump school for would-be Douthats that has given me much pleasure in the past. There's currently a post-Grammys piece there by Mark Judge, the artist formerly known as Mark Gauvreau Judge, beginning thus:
Don’t make Sam Smith gay. 
That is to say, don’t make Sam Smith a representative of the gay community and a symbol for all things gay.
See, Judge hates it when people see sexual orientation -- that is, when gay people recognize gay people -- and also when people see color -- like when black people tell Iggy Azalea to fuck off. It all goes back to a youthful trauma:
When I was in college, the British duo the Pet Shop Boys were key contributors to the soundtrack of my young life. The Pet Shop Boys are gay.
[Blink. Blink.]
When I heard their first album Please in 1986, I felt that delirious swoon of falling in love with a piece of musical art...
I followed the Boys for years, but something started bothering me: they increasingly became known as a gay band and not just a band. Great songs like “King’s Cross,” “Liberation,” and “It Always Comes as a Surprise” were subordinated to the larger theme of homosexuality. The Pet Shop Boys were not brilliant songwriters who could touch the hearts or people all over the world—they were “queering pop.” It was like only selling Van Morrison’s music in Irish pubs...
I was a suburban kid at a Catholic university who occasionally snuck a look at Playboy. If I was to listen to the journalists, and the political club goers, and the subculture police, I would have turned myself away. Because I wasn’t the target audience.
The Gay Gay Gay took my babies away! The subculture police with their phallic nightsticks tried to drive Judge out of the disco, just as the black radicals tried to spoil his appreciation of Motown, I suppose. I'm surprised he survived with his perfectly-unexceptional tastes intact.

This is a high point of the issue, though you might also enjoy Acculturated's "Celebrities Behaving Well Award" nominations, including "Taylor Swift for reaching out to one of her adoring fans to give her real, thoughtful, honest advice about an unrequited love," "Kate Middleton for maintaining a certain level of class and decorum in the pop-culture sartorial scene," and "Justin Timberlake for his unprecedented awe and humility during his recent visit to Israel" (by which I assume they mean he didn't come onstage wearing a BDS shirt and a keffiyeh). "The winner of our contest will be announced on Monday, February 23," Acculturated says, "and we will award their charity with a $2,500 donation." $2,500! Dunno who's giving this ad-free site its wingnut welfare, but if they can come up with that kind of scratch  for a contest, I'd be happy to explain to their readers (for a reasonable fee) how my heart was broken the day Camryn Manheim became a fat activist.

UPDATE. In comments, tigrismus encapsulates Judge's problem: "He gets to decide what's universal, and quelle surprise, it's him."

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

AXELROD, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD.

This is masterful trolling:
Barack Obama was "bullshitting" his opposition to gay marriage and support for civil unions during his 2008 presidential campaign, according to a new book authored by former senior White House adviser David Axelrod. 
Time magazine reported Tuesday that the longtime Obama confidant said in his new book, "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," that he counseled then-senator Obama to soften his position on gay marriage for political reasons. 
"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod wrote, as quoted by Time...
"I’m just not very good at bullshitting," Obama told Axelrod after one of those events, as quoted by Time.
Normal people will go, "Yeah, so?" Even Lincoln was doing the "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" thing as late as 1862. Getting elected President in a nation always verging on a majority makeup of Snopeses requires some finesse.

But among the abnormal, by which I mean conservatives, it's a different story. So roll out the argh-blargh and mutter-sputter! Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart.com:
OBAMA’S GAY MARRIAGE LIE WAS A LIE ABOUT HIS FAITH, TOO... 
"Obama Misled Nation” is almost a perennial headline–it applies to nearly everything the president does. Yet it is important to be clear about the nature of this particular lie. 
Obama did not just pretend to oppose a controversial position. He pretended to hold that view as a matter of his Christian faith
Thus he made Christians look bigoted -- by acting the bigot and thus getting them to vote for him! HE IS THE FATHER OF LIES! Next, Noah Rothman at Hot Air:
Obama... spent the next 16 years hiding his politically inconvenient opinions from the public until they became acceptable to a majority. There’s nothing especially shocking about that, but the fact that this fails to astonish is itself a lamentable condition. 
[Blink. Blink.]
...This level of cynicism, the expectation that obviously our political leaders would mislead us about what they truly believe, cannot be healthy in the long run. 
Yeah, the first two hundred years of knowing that politicians lie were alright, but now it's getting a little old. I know, let's elect that Duck Dynasty guy.

Most of the brethren apply their traditional Crisis of Credibility bullshit -- "It’s liars all the way down in this administration," hehindeeds Ole Perfesser Instapundit; "Obama lied about opposing gay marriage, contrived the 'God’s in the mix' stuff, isn’t an Honest Politician," huffs Guv'nah Charles C.W. Cooke; "Obama Adviser Says Obama Repeatedly Lied About Gay Marriage for Political Gain... Related: They Lied: Obamacare’s 12 false premises and broken promises," report those lovable libertarians at Reason (read the comments for extra libertarianism, by which I mean loss of faith in humanity).

But we see their point -- the political repercussions could be severe: Maybe word will spread to Alabama, and the Democrats will have a hard time winning elections there!

UPDATE. Oh man:


That monster! Or maybe the Daily Caller doofus who wrote this thinks Sasha and Malia are the monsters, for helping Nobama pretend he used to be regular Christian fag-hater in order to hornswoggle the American People into gayness. Just look at them in the picture, acting like a regular family!

Next we have neo-neocon. The entire tortured mess is hilarious -- sort of Murder in the Cathedral meets Blood Feud -- but there are two stop-the-show moments:
Over the years Americans have become cynical about lying presidents. Some date that cynicism—or at least a great leap forward for that cynicism—to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the fact that Clinton survived it. The left, of course, says “Bush lied” about WMDs, but the right points out that Bush relied on intelligence reports around the world that were mistaken, and that is different than a lie, and that a lie would have been wrong.
So what if he turned a formerly functional Middle East republic into a slaughterhouse and killed thousands of innocent people? He may be a war criminal, but he's not a liar!
[NOTE: I haven't seen any reactions from the black religious community yet, but it's possible they might be quite displeased at this news. It's one thing to change your mind on something; it's another to lie to religious people about your religious beliefs.]
"Why is that white lady staring at us from the bushes? It's like she wants ask us something but she's scared."

Monday, February 09, 2015

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT!

You read Bob Dylan's great MusiCares speech, right? Remember the part where he talks about the grand tradition of folk and blues and how it affected him? Excerpt:
For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once. 
If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
Dylan is so clear about this that you wouldn't think he could be misunderstood. But then you'd be forgetting libertarians! Take it away, Ed Krayewski at Reason:
Bob Dylan's Makes the Case Against Today's Copyright Climate
In a 20 minute speech, Bob Dylan explains how copyright is detrimental to cultural heritage without mentioning the word
Ain't even kidding.
...Were these different folk standards composed in a legal climate such as today's, they would never be "standards." They'd be copyrighted and would lose their status as musical currency that can be passed around, performed, revised, and rewritten and so forth.
And some old black men might have gotten paid. I wonder if Krayewski reached out to Dylan and told him he was on the right track, and should now read some Hayek and oh, yeah, put his catalogue into public domain to stimulate freedom. He might also try that on Kid Rock, Nick Gillespie's latest libertarian rock star -- see how he goes for the idea that copyright is "detrimental to cultural heritage."

These guys have got me believing in life on other planets because they can't possibly be from this one.

Sunday, February 08, 2015

ON TO OSCAR, 4.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.

There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”

This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.

So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.

If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.

This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.

Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.

One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.

Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.

I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.

(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)

Friday, February 06, 2015

NEXT WEEK: PINOCHET WAS NO ANGEL BUT AT LEAST HE WASN'T A SOCIALIST.

There's plenty of argh-blargh over Obama mentioning the Crusades and the Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast, on the apparent grounds that Christians aren't like that any more, whereas all Muslims are ISIS sleeper agents waiting for the word of the Prophet to leap out of their taxicabs and convenience stores and do jihad. (Also Obama mixed in slavery and Jim Crow, and that was totally the Democrats!)

Most of the brethren are content with ordinary, meretricious bullshit ("Obama uses National Prayer Breakfast to compare Christianity to ISIS," lies Some Guy at RedState); but making everything worse as usual is Jonah Goldberg, who has a long history of defending the viciousness of the Church (particularly toward Galileo, which Goldberg describes as a sort of innocent misunderstanding among friends) and, roused by an Obama news hook, stumbles onstage with his Inquisition Was Not So Bad crib notes:
As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.
It's like when your friend says that boring lecture was "torture" -- just a figure of speech! Yet libtards get mad when you subject a Gitmo detainee to the equivalent of a boring speech.
I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.
Hitler has a bad rap but if only you'd seen him with his dogs, etc. The thing you have to remember about this yap is, it's not meant to convince normal people, who will be giving it that Springtime for Hitler stare, but to soothe whatever vestigial sense of shame is left among the true believers. (Goldberg even brings up Martin Luther King to defend Christianity, which for conservatives is definitely like knocking down chairs behind you when you're on the run from the cops.)

Goldberg also says that Inquisition stuff was a long time ago, but take a look at Goldberg himself and all the freaks and monsters with whom he associates; you just know that if the coast were clear, if the effects of the Enlightenment (including the founding of this Republic) were completely dead and faded, they'd be burning and beheading to beat the band.

UPDATE. I am grateful for the reminder from Chauncey DeVega at Alternet that, regarding the Big Long Time Ago objection to speaking ill of the godly, some horrific lynchings of black men were performed within living memory. Klansmen didn't burn giant question marks on people's lawns, y'know, and Bizarro Jesus is often an honored guest at outbreaks of American mayhem.

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson has spoken:
Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is.
He's got a point. There's no evidence that Obama beats his children, fucks his cousin, goes out of his way to make other people miserable, seethes with hate at the unfair advantages enjoyed by the poor, or many of the other traditional hallmarks of Christendom. Being a politician, though, he does lie habitually, so maybe he can be redeemed.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

MAKES A PERFECT GAG GIFT.

Look what you can get for as little as $1,699:
Join Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit and one of America’s foremost Second Amendment Scholars, Dana Loesch, author of Hands off My Gun as well as Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Mark (Rip) Rippetoe, Roger Simon, Helen Smith and Kevin Williamson for a weekend dedicated to the Second Amendment. 
In addition to scintillating seminars we will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights at a luxurious hunting and shooting retreat. Rough Creek Lodge not only has world-class hunting and shooting opportunities, but a wide range of other activities available to our guests. 
Because of a very low speaker to guest ratio (1:9), guests will have the opportunity to schmooze, eat, drink, ride ATVs, go zip lining, shoot model rockets, use the golf driving range, hunt and shoot with our speakers.
A weekend at a richie resort with the worst people in the world! Not sure why they're booking so far in advance, though -- by December the Obama apocalypse may have come, and all the deposits will have been made in worthless government fiat scrip. (There is, believe it or not, no provision to pay your way in gold or bitcoin.) Know what else seems wrong? Check out the "free activities":
Zipline And Rock Climbing
Watch A Movie
Catch And Release Fishing
"Catch And Release Fishing"? What is this, some eco-Nazi love-in? Real men and their ladies' auxiliary catch those suckers and stare them down as they thrash out their last breaths! Also:
Petting Corral
Come on, now. There's also a shitty blog ("I couldn’t wait to leave NYC when I graduated law school. In California I met my first real gun owners"), but maybe you just want to wait for the police reports.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

EVERYTHING IS POLITICS TO THESE PEOPLE, PART ONE GAZILLION.

I ignored the Super Bowl on Sunday, and a good thing too, as Ed Driscoll tells me if I had watched I would have been subjected to a barrage of liberal propaganda. No, this isn't the old Rush Limbaugh idea that the NFL itself is left-wing; it's about the commercials:
So starting with one of the first Super Bowl-only ads, the legendary Ridley Scott-directed 1984-inspired Apple advertisement to launch the Macintosh, Madison Avenue ad reps began to use the platform to have fun. Ad reps created brilliant demo reels for themselves, and buzz for the clients’ products, which sometimes, with a little luck, even translated into increased sales.
That formula began to grate a bit in the postmodern naughts, as a formula began to evolve that featured men as the butts of jokes, part of a larger trend in the media overculture that Glenn Reynolds and others were first commenting on well over a decade ago. But those seem like pretty carefree days compared to what we witnessed last night...
Even worse than dumb husband jokes? Steel yourself, my friends:
By my rough count, there were at least two ads featuring people with no legs, one with a missing father, one with misogynistic anti-male crack from comedienne Sarah Silverman, and one ad bullying a ten year old boy because he said someone “plays like a girl.” (The horror.)
The ads with people with no legs, I suppose, were meant to make you feel sorry for them, which is a classic Democrat trick, and the father was probably missing because of no-fault divorce.
And perhaps most infamously based on comments on Twitter and even the London Daily Mail, one dead ten year old boy, thanks to Nationwide. (And if you don’t approve of this understandable media gruel, you’re an Internet “hater” — says Coca-Cola?)
I'm not sure why the famous dead kid ad is left-wing: was he murdered in the womb?
A friend of mine watching the game at my house last night, a fellow member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bivouacked behind enemy lines in Deep Blue Socialist California, dubbed it “The Nanny Bowl.” He’s definitely on to something. As journalist Kevin P. Craver tweeted to me last night, “I fell into an alternate universe in which the party that loses the November election gets to write the Super Bowl ads.”
Actually, the people who write the ads do so because they are paid by clients, who carefully vet the ads and then pay millions of dollars to get them on during the game. Contrary to Driscoll's paranoid fantasy, they aren't doing it so the ad guys can have fun, or as a donation to the Democratic Party; they do it so people will talk about their brands, and then remember them when they go shopping. It's as pure a capitalist spectacle as can be imagined. The League, the network, and the sponsors can hardly help it if no one ponied up for a #Benghazi infomercial.
Rush Limbaugh has been talking for years about how hard the left has been trying to undermine football...
OK, this is where we came in. Oh, wait: Driscoll eventually gets someone to explain the dead kid-Democrat connection:
The modern left’s ideology is one big Nationwide ad. Submit to our practices or your kids will die. Only our mandated health insurance will treat your Bain cancer or protect you from global warming...
It's like he had a mole in the focus group! I look forward to Driscoll's column on how the left was responsible for Daniel Bryant getting screwed in the Royal Rumble.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

NEW MEME: LESBIAN MOTHERS HATE WOMEN, STEAL BABIES!

Children-of-gay-marriage-against-gay-marriage really may actually be a thing. In addition to Katy Faust, whose case we examined yesterday, we have The Federalist's Rivka Edelman. Unlike Faust, Edelman doesn't describe her gay-mommy childhood positively ("My mother, you know, she had some of that pornography around and the books and stuff..."), so from her we don't get the absurdity of a happily-raised child of gays arguing no one else should be raised that way. We do, however, get a heapin' helping of bad faith and bile:
LBGT Demands For Other People’s Children Are Misogynistic
The misogyny of the LGBT movement flings women backward to a dark era, when the rule was prejudice against single mothers and unintended pregnancy... 
The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children, often claiming that if gay adults can marry the children they are raising will benefit from broader “protections.” This is doublespeak. The “protections” consist of the gay adults’ access to and control of children as commodities.
Edelman engages the Supreme Court case in which two lesbians adopted a child who had been given up by his homeless birth mother:
Daughtrey is sure to note of the biological mother, “She surrendered her legal rights.” How did the birth mother do this if she was “impaired”? The unstable and impoverished mother is a useful trope in misogynistic and classist discourse. I wonder what was done to find this biological mother housing so she could in fact leave the hospital with her son. It is likely that few if any good-faith attempts were made to keep “N” with his mother, let alone find his father and enforce child support or at least compel some kind of connection so “N” could know his origins...
That's some gooood trolling: You libtards say you care about homeless people, well how come you let the State steal their children and give them to dykes?
The new social justice dictum is that society owes LBGT people the flesh and blood of other people’s children because they are “married” now. Let’s be honest. Love does not make a family in this case. Human trafficking does.
It's like, look, she's gay -- now will you listen to our gay baby-stealing stories? I hope some conservative movement types are grooming Edelman for a larger role in the gay-marriage fight; I'd love to see what Mr. and Mrs. America make of her argument. I guess the ones who are willing to countenance baby-stealing stories about Jews and Gypsies might go for it.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

Rod Dreher:
It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent... 
The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.
Throughout his post, you will find hundreds of words about how Dreher is really just talking about proper communication, and hey, he softens his accent when he goes on the radio so what's the big deal, and "who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered 'white'?" etc. He seems to be afraid the big bad multiculturalists want to make his beloved NPR sound like a ghetto barbershop.

But it's the quoted bit that really lives for me. Imagine Dreher bristling as some insolent Dominican pronounces his own name too Spanishy! I suppose he gets it from this:



The rest of his posts are about political correctness, natch.

Monday, February 02, 2015

MY GAY PARENTS RAISED ME RIGHT, AND MUST BE PUNISHED.

Remember the "My Daddy's Name is Donor" movement, in which adult children of sperm-bank poppas pleaded for Congress to force their fathers to reveal themselves, because you can't put your arms around a turkey baster? Here's something else in that line: From the Witherspoon Institute, a nuthatch from which we have derived pleasure before, comes Katy Faust, the daughter of a gay couple who says, with love in her heart, that her two mommies raised her wonderfully, and the Supreme Court should prevent something like that from ever happening again:
When you emphasized how important the voices of children with gay parents are, you probably anticipated a different response. You might have expected that the children of same-sex unions would have nothing but glowing things to say about how their family is “just like everyone else’s.” Perhaps you expected them to tell you that the only scar on their otherwise idyllic life is that their two moms or two dads could not be legally married. If the children of these unions were all happy and well-adjusted, it would make it easier for you to deliver the feel-good ruling that would be so popular. 
I identify with the instinct of those children to be protective of their gay parent. In fact, I’ve done it myself... 
I cringe when I think of it now, because it was a lie. My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. While I did love my mother’s partner and friends, I would have traded every one of them to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is willing to remove the politically correct lens that we all seem to have over our eyes.
If you weren't politically correct, you'd see how Faust suffers! (She also tells us, "many are of the opinion I should not exist," just to up the victimization ante.) Anyway, gay unions like the one Faust grew up in may look nice, and Faust has many kind words to say about her own blended family (perhaps to decrease the tension at holiday get-togethers), but they're really evil, because "the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents." Really, they prosecute football players for whipping a kid, but they let parents separate? How does that make sense?

As for the so-called "studies"  that say gay parents are great, Faust's got this compelling counter-argument:
Does being raised under the rainbow miraculously wipe away all the negative effects and pain surrounding the loss and daily deprivation of one or both parents? The more likely explanation is that researchers are feeling the same pressure as the rest of us feel to prove that they love their gay friends.
Just like them climatologists! In a few years, the only scientists conservative will not have accused of making it all up for the Politburo will be the guys who come up with new boner pills.

The big thing that jumped out at me, though, was this: She's 38 years old? Isn't it about time she stopped whining about this?

Sunday, February 01, 2015

ON TO OSCAR, 3.

American Sniper. As I suspected, the political obsessives were watching, through their Zhdanovite lenses, a very different movie than the one I saw, which is both more interesting and weirder than what they describe.

Chris Kyle is a good Christian Texan whose father taught him to shoot and that the world is made up of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (basically a more Christian version of the dicks-pussies-and-assholes analogy from Team America: World Police). Kyle internalizes the lesson, including the contempt for both sheep and wolves contained in it; when U.S. embassies are blown up in 1998, he quits his fun but purposeless cowboy life to sign up with the Navy Seals (yeah, it does seem weird; Eastwood rushes through it); Nineeleven finally sends Kyle into combat in Iraq, where in the ruins of the cities he more or less gives up on sheep entirely and just tries to kill Iraqis who are trying to kill his fellow sheepdogs. Oh, in between '98 and '01, he meets a lady who likes him, marries her, and gets her pregnant (don't worry, I'm not eliding many grace notes there).

This all happens very quickly, bookended by a flashback from Kyle's first kills: First a child, then a woman try, surreptitiously at first, to blow up his comrades. Kyle takes them out from a rooftop. Another SEAL tells him as he prepares to fire that if he's wrong he'll get his ass thrown in Leavenworth; but he's not wrong, he saves his men and his illustrious career as a sniper and (this word gets thrown around enough to become loaded) "legend" is launched.

This first part of the movie teaches us everything we're going to learn about Kyle -- that he's capable of intense focus, charming when he wants to be, believes in what he's doing and isn't afraid to say so. In other words, he's like a Clint Eastwood hero, except for one thing: No sense of humor. He does have some mildly funny lines, but nothing on the order of "make my day" or "there are two kinds of people -- those with loaded guns and those who dig." There's no irony to him, nor the reflectiveness than gives a man irony. He does what he does, and never questions himself for a minute.

And that's why, throughout the remainder of the film, Kyle doesn't see a lot of things that Eastwood makes very obvious and that even other servicemen, even his own brother, are able to see: That they're only defending each other, and Kyle is only killing so many people in defense of them, because they insist on coming back, over and over again, to a place where no one seems to want them. He also can't tell that he's suffering from massive PTSD attacks (and by the way, I don't think anyone's shown transient mental illness better than Eastwood does here). I'm not even sure that, when he begins his mercy missions among wounded warriors near the end, Kyle knows what happened to him. And he gives no indication that he's expecting what's going to happen to him at the end.

Once that first section is over with, the movie gets really weird. A seminarian turned SEAL reveals to Kyle that he's lost faith in his God and this war; later, when he's killed in an ambush, his mother reads his anguished letter about the war aloud at his funeral -- it's barely coherent, as his mother is breaking down with emotion; later, Kyle, apparently in the midst of another stress attack (and therefore pretty much devoid of emotion) says it was actually the letter that killed his comrade.  Then there's the scene where Kyle calls his wife on the phone from the middle of a firefight -- a firefight he caused because, against orders, he had to take a magic mile-long shot to kill his nemesis, which alerts all the local jihadis to the squad's presence -- and tells her tearfully that he's ready to come home. When he does get home he sits in a bar watching a basketball game; his wife calls and he tells her, "I just need a minute."

And there's the scene where Kyle's goading a severely disabled vet, in the easy, friendly way he goaded his own comrades back in the field, to get his shots to hit a target. The goading works; "I feel like I got my balls back," says the vet. He keeps making shots, and gives Kyle a look that doesn't seem entirely friendly. "Who's the legend now?" the vet tells him.

But the legend is Kyle, of course; as the credits begin we see archival footage of the real Kyle's coffin borne along the Texas highway, lined with people saluting and waving flags. They see things the way Kyle did. Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs; do what you have to do and don't cry about it. Eastwood knows his Ford, and what Ford said about what to do when the legend becomes fact. I'm not shocked the movie's such a hit.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

TODAY IN BULLSHIT.

At National Review, Heather Mac Donald tells the story of de Blasio and the cops. It's full of grafs like the following, about de Blasio's famous comment that his black-skinned son had to watch himself around the police:
At the time, those remarks — based in thorough ignorance of the facts about policing and crime — were a body blow to the rank and file. But after the Ramos and Liu assassinations, carried out in the name of Eric Garner and Ferguson teen Michael Brown, they became a source of visceral rage, as they fed the atmosphere of escalating cop hatred that led to the killings.
So de Blasio's remarks were like a time bomb, or rather a time-traveling bomb -- after officers Ramos and Liu were killed, the remarks "fed the atmosphere of escalating cop hatred that led to the killings." That's propaganda, baby -- by which I mean, the author is so committed to bamboozling you that she's willing to embarrass herself with incoherent prose to do it.

Mac Donald portrays de Blasio as an out-of-touch elitist social justice warrior -- "[New York's] long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor who sees his base as the anti-police Left" -- but does not mention even once the polls that show most New Yorkers siding with de Blasio  against the NYPD. Mac Donald does seem aware of them, though, because instead of larding in anonymous quotes from humble citizens begging for Giuliani to come back, her anonymous quotes are all from alleged cops who agree with her ("'Liu and Ramos would have turned their backs as well,' asserts an official at One Police Plaza").

Mac Donald also defends the force's work slowdown as justified because they felt like it:
Ideally, and usually, cops perform their duty regardless of their attitudes toward the civilian authority under which they operate. That this tradition of neutrality cracked in this instance shows how deeply de Blasio violated their trust.
The next time a public service union feels itself disrespected and goes on strike, I wonder if we'll see Mac Donald at the barricades.

Boy, that libertarian moment seems like a long time ago, huh?

UPDATE. There has been some misunderstanding about my first complaint, which is not that de Blasio's comments came after the cops were shot -- they came before -- but that Mac Donald wrote about it as if time itself were fluid, and the Mayor's remarks had been weaponized by the shooting, then sent back through time to do their lethal work. Regarding the notion that de Blasio's expression of concern for his black son had anything to do with the nut who shot Liu and Ramos, commenter Ellis_Weiner laments that "MacDonald has never recovered from the trauma of discovering that the Beatles killed Sharon Tate."

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

JUST A FEW NOTES...

...on the Jonathan Chait bullshit, because for the most part Pareene has dealt with it ably and I only have this to add:

1. I assume all the very public complaints against "political correctness" raised in Chait's wake were smuggled out of liberal gulags on toilet paper as samizdat, right? No? Then what's the fucking problem?

2. Every single conservative response to Chait I have seen has been too incredibly stupid to take seriously -- and since many of them call Chait a p.c. hypocrite because he said bad things about conservatives (which is the same thing as a fatwa, apparently), I guess that makes me p.c. too. Hmmph! My many services to freedom of speech count for nothing, I see.

3. OK, one example: Here's a key section from Ace of Spades' offering on the subject:
Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case. 
They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other. 
Thus, in a very real sense, to insist on the standards of rational discourse with such people does in fact predjudice them; it is the same as insisting a horse walk on two legs to enter a race. It is the same as disqualifying them outright.
Behold the enlightened discourse of which we would be deprived by some leftists on Twitter! I wonder if the editors of Der Stürmer ever thought of complaining that protests against their caricatures (carried out in the early-20th-Century version of social media, which I guess would be graffiti in cabaret bathrooms) were in fact assaults on their free speech. If not, we should congratulate the brethren for advancing the form.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

SELF-AWARENESS DROUGHT CONTINUES.

Obama was in India and chewed gum during a parade. The Times of India had some fun with it:
NEW DELHI: In an ungainly sight, cameras caught US President Brack Obama chewing gum during the Republic Day parade on Monday. 
In the picture captured by cameras and posted on Twitter by some users, Obama was spotted removing his chewing gum while PM Modi was seen trying to explain something to the US president... 
Comments on Twitter included remarks by author Shobhaa De, who said, "Barack bhai working his jaws overtime and chewing gum! At least it isn't gutka. But seriously - gum during a formal parade?".

"Glad to see @BarackObama is so human. Like most Americans, he chews gum. Anyone know what brand?," was how noted film-maker Shekhar Kapur reacted.
I suppose you can say Allahpundit of Hot Air also had "fun" with the incident, though it's more the kind of fun that lonely and unliked children have with razor blades:
Video: Semi-retired president gonna enjoy his gum during major photo op with important ally
Not sure what the dialect-humor provenance is of "gonna enjoy his gum." Maybe it's a blah thing, I wouldn't understand?
To cleanse the palate, I believe formal diplomatic protocol in this situation requires him to offer Narendra Modi a piece of his Bubblicious. Two points. One: Is it Nicorette he’s chewing? That would explain, at least, why he couldn’t refrain from smacking away despite knowing he’d be on camera for hours with India’s PM during a formal state parade. How bad is this guy’s smoking habit, though, if he couldn’t make it through an afternoon without a hit of nicotine?
Wait, was it Bubblicious, or Nicorette? I don't know why Allahpundit missed the equally plausible options of ghat or black tar heroin.
Remember, this isn’t the first time recently that he’s been criticized overseas for chewing gum at an international summit. Indian media obviously noticed his “ungainly” display, as you’ll see below. Either he was jonesing awfully hard for a smoke or today’s the day he moved officially from the YOLO phase of his presidency to the WGAF phase.
This, I remind you, is about the guy chewing gum. Allahpundit goes on quite a while like this ("Does O chew gum during formal events here at home too? He’s done it a few times, if memory serves...") Here is the best line:
Two: This is the sort of trivial faux pas that the media would have hyperventilated over had it come from Bush...
Leaving aside the propriety of complaining about hypothetical offenses that you're in the very midst of committing in real life, I'd say if Bush had been seen chewing gum at a foreign event, it would have been portrayed as a bold example of American exceptionalism, like not dipping our flag at the Olympics.

Hey, anyone remember when the knock on Obama was that he showed too much respect for our foreign allies?

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "[Obama's] such an egghead, he was probably also walking at the same time."