Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I'm okay with living in a social media panopticon because you can't Instragram a fart.
UPDATE. Some commenters go to the source, read Goldberg's essay (about how it's great that behaviors can be recorded forever on the internet and employers and schools can use them against you, because character), and come back gagging. "Jonah," asks BigHank53, "you do understand that the Enlightenment was not, in fact, primarily concerned with self-expression?"
For me the most fartworthy aspect of the essay is Goldberg's assumption that if something you did gets you in trouble with a prospective employer or school, it must reflect your bad character, so you had it coming. I doubt Goldberg has ever heard of Hispanics United of Buffalo, Inc. v. Ortiz, a case in which five employees were fired for complaining about their jobs on Facebook, or any of the many other cases like it, but one of the morals of the story is that employers will penetrate as far into their employees' private lives (and that of their prospects) as society will let them, and cheering for further intrusion as a character-building exercise is... well, exactly what I'd expect of him.
Its probably fair. I'm not going to click the link though. Because what if he can?
ReplyDeleteIf they ever do perfect the technology, it won't be an Instagram, it will be a Jonahgram.
ReplyDeleteOh God. That column is so stupid. It's full of stupid. Here's a tidbit:
ReplyDeleteIf Anthony Weiner had simply used the phone as a phone instead of a
handheld peep-show booth, he’d probably be the next mayor of New York.
No, he'd still be in Congress, stupid
...Richie Incognito couldn’t stay incognito because of the ubiquity of cellphone cameras and the permanence of text messages.
Tweets and voice-mail have nothing to do with cameras, nor are they text messages. Stupid.
But they also reflect a much older and broader cultural trend that
celebrates self-expression over self-discipline. That tension has been
baked into the cake since the Enlightenment, and it’s not going away.
(places trembling hands flat on desk, musters courage, adopts reasonable tone instead of window-shattering shriek) "Jonah, you do understand that the Enlightenment was not, in fact, primarily concerned with self-expression? Right?"
All this was plucked, by the way, out of two paragraphs. The stupid, it burns.
But another useful lesson in life is that jerks can avoid the scrutiny of the permanent record-keepers while still being jerks.
ReplyDelete"ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it's time to face
facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord
of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to
prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate
with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you
can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young
fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any
female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to
repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon
to be prepared."
Indeed, the Internet is creating unprecedented opportunities for people of low character to advertise it.
ReplyDeleteThe irony red alert goes off; Captain Doughy of the U.S.S. Pantload ignores it, puts in his headphones and cranks the Night Ranger.
I resent your implication that Doughy likes Night Ranger. Also mentioning them. I feel like Cartman now. ROOOLLLIN, WHAT'S YOUR PRICE FOR FLIGHT, YOU'VE GOT HIM IN YOUR SIIIGHT....
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. I know a "pull my finger" when I read one.
ReplyDelete"...you do understand that the Enlightenment was not, in fact, primarily concerned with self-expression?"
ReplyDeleteOh, come on. A dedication to the supremacy of reason over superstition? Veneration of an idealized whitewash of Roman republican history? If those things don't scream "celebrating self-expression over self-discipline," I don' t know what does. And don't get me started on John Locke and his ceaseless advocacy for abandoning self-restraint.
Offhand, I'd say Doughy lost that battle for self-discipline a loooong time ago. He has never been able to resist the urge to say something idiotic. His brain seems to be hard-wired in such a way that ludicrous=profound. That, I'm reasonably sure, predates the Enlightenment by several hundred thousand years.
ReplyDeleteHe slips in historical references like that to make him appear smart. It usually backfires.
ReplyDelete"Jonah, you do understand that the Enlightenment was not, in fact, primarily concerned with self-expression? Right?"
ReplyDeleteHis thesis begs at least a couple of more questions:
1) Does he favor a theocratic state like those in the West prior to the Enlightenment Reformation which disfavored personal liberty in favor of enforced discipline at the hands of church and state leaders? And how does that square with his fancying himself a libertarian/Tea Party/cheetoh-eating libertine?
2) Is he discounting the Roman Empire and the Nordic/Celtic/Gallic/Anglo-Saxon societies et al, all of which contributed to our society today and all of which placed a high value on self-expression?
Follow up question: is he even aware of those cultures?
As in, "Who sent the Jonahgrahm?"
ReplyDeleteThoughts to ruin your breakfast:
ReplyDeleteJonah Goldberg gets a column in a dead-tree publication. Publisher decides to poot out a special Scratch-n-Sniff edition...
Yeah I think humans have been celebrating self-expression for a long time now.
ReplyDeleteFollow up question: is he even aware ... ?
ReplyDeletePro tip: It saves time if you start with this question.
Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Shame? What's that?
ReplyDeleteA red hand? The de Blasio conspiracy goes deep!
ReplyDeleteWorse a french red hand.
ReplyDeleteMotto: Whoever scented it, vented it.
ReplyDeleteFor Jonah, Instagrunt would be a better social media platform.
ReplyDelete"I bring this up because I’m wondering why we can’t have a Reppertian Jihad. Its namesake would be Lena Reppert, a 105-pound, 95-year-old Florida woman. Her daughter claims Reppert was forced by airport security to remove her adult diaper in compliance with a body search. Reppert is dying of leukemia. She did not have another clean diaper for her trip.
ReplyDeleteThe Transportation Security Administration belatedly denied forcing the removal of the diaper. Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the TSA, insisted that the agency was sensitive and respectful in dealing with travelers, but she also told the Northwest Florida Daily News that procedures have to be the same for everyone: “TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability.”
And that’s what brought to mind Dune’s Butlerian Jihad. The holy war against machines was also a war against a mindset. “The target of the jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” a character explains. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.” In the aftermath, a new commandment was promulgated: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
It seems the first commandment of the TSA is that every mind must be trained in the likeness of a machine. “Garbage in, garbage out,” is how computer programmers explain the way bad inputs determine bad outputs. Likewise, if TSA workers are programmed not to use common sense or discretion — surprise! — TSA workers won’t use common sense or discretion.
Why not? One reason is we’ve institutionalized an irrational phobia against anything smacking of racial or religious profiling. Once you’ve decided that disproportionate scrutiny of certain groups is verboten, you’ll have to hassle everyone equally. Thus we’re told that a 95-year-old woman’s diaper is just as likely to be the front line in the war on terror as a 22-year-old Pakistani’s backpack.
Defenders of the TSA insist we can’t abandon such mindlessness because, if we do, clever terrorists will start using adult diapers as IEDs. Others say we know that profiling isn’t effective because the Israelis don’t use it."
Jonah got his jihad in LAX.
"It usually backfires."
ReplyDeleteThat's something he knows a lot about.
Wasn't that a Nick Cave song?
ReplyDeleteYou should get ahead of the curve and post that to urban dictionary. I did the same for the benefit of calling all toasters, who came up with the nigh-untoppable "Jonanism" several years ago.
ReplyDeleteI never knew that cavemen invented spray paint. No wonder they always get pissed off in those Geico commercials.
ReplyDeleteSomeone with video skilz really ought to give Jonah a treatment like this.
ReplyDeleteHeh. Cole posted a tweet on that tune a few days ago. About all that can be said in favor of it is that it's not Seven Mary Three's Cumbersome.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Author of The Tyranny of Cliches, a lede:
ReplyDelete"Character is what you do when no one is watching.”
It’s a bit of a trite saying, attributed to coaches, motivational speakers, and fortune-cookie writers (by the way, whose idea was it to replace fortune-cookie predictions with treacly aphorisms from the “Successories” reject pile?).
As BigHank53 chose his small tidbit and neatly dissected everything down the "a" and "the", I couldn't get past the open without wanting to scream into an unfeeling, trickster world about just how cruel it is, in case it didn't know.
His "motivational" cliche pins the irony meter for me, seeing as how his entire life and his mother's entire life show nothing but a lack of character by this definition alone. But then he segues right into neo-Seinfeldian stupidity with the subtlety of a wet fart and all of the deft of an adult typing with mittens pinned to his sleeve.
He really is the worst.
Dude, we should partner up and launch InstaSkree.
ReplyDelete♫ Gimme a bottle o' Lysol, man
ReplyDeleteOpen all the windows an' start the fan
My eyes is cryin'
My nose is dyin'
Ol' Jonah,. he scent me a letter ♫
Fine. Maybe you'd like it better if you hear it how I do in my head: MÖtorhead, what's your price for flight....
ReplyDeleteBTW, isn't that the tune that's playing in the crazy drug dude's house, that he's air-guitaring and singing along to in Boogie Nights when the shit hits the fan?
ReplyDelete[Jonah, typing. He stops, looks at the screen.] " 'Richie Incognito couldn't stay incognito.' GOD, I'm good!" [Farts. A wet one. Grins, continues typing.]
ReplyDeleteI realize this is a redundant observation, but that column is some lazy, by-the-numbers shit. I know a guy who does internet freelance writing, and he once laid out for me how it's done: state theme, get at least one expert quote, cite study, summarize.
ReplyDeleteI am calling it right now: Jonah's column was written by a fucking intern.
Ehhhh....in Jonah's case, I don't think that a formulaic piece bearing all the hallmarks of authorship by an intern can be definitively ruled as having been written by an intern. Because, Jonah.
ReplyDeletethat column is some lazy, by-the-numbers shit.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's Jonah Goldberg. This is new?
In fact, it contains some of Goldberg's trademark witticism substitute (he's the funny one, you know).
But they also reflect a much older and broader cultural trend that
ReplyDeletecelebrates self-expression over self-discipline.
As though that's a dichotomy. As though it doesn't take discipline to express oneself effectively. Well, in Jonah's case, okay. But for most people, the opposite of self-expression isn't "self-discipline." It's repression and self-censorship.
Some of the commenters aren't as sanguine as the 'Load. Sample:
ReplyDeleteJimmy Kimmel is being lambasted recently for a politically incorrect comment made by a six year old in one of his bits. Well, 12-13 years from now when that kid applies to colleges, that comment will be there for an admissions officer to ask whether he is somehow dangerous or undesirable because of that.
"Dangerous." "Undesirable."
Funny that this should come up. For one of my projects, I've been researching life in China during the early days of the PRC. Having done that, this all makes sense to me - these people think they're living in the Cultural Revolution. Well, the FEMA camp people do - the rest are just pretending really hard, but six of one...
But here's why that doesn't quite work. Who were the people that were targeted during the Cultural Revolution, and the Hundred Flowers reform that prefaced it? Teachers. Academics. Educated people. People were taught to pay homage to the common man, and anyone who came across as too worldly was viewed with suspicion. The party was worried that educators might be teaching things that ran contrary to common values, so occasionally they would just pull all of the teachers out of a school and replace them with party flacks.
The people in that thread want to think of themselves as martyrs, harassed by the party into silence. But here's a hint, guys - it ain't my side of the fence that's terrified of grade school teachers.
(This was way off topic, wasn't it?)
That's what I was wondering - how those two things were incompatible. I suspect that Jonah's working off the same script as a lot of social commentators, one in which young people are hopelessly histrionic and obsessed with fame. I've just never seen anyone blame the fucking Enlightenment. Geez, Jonah, how retrograde are you going to get?
ReplyDeleteActually, he might have complained about the Enlightenment in Tyranny of Cliches, as well. You'd think that a guy so obsessed with the Internet would have at least some appreciation for the avant garde or the world outside the mainstream, but I guess that's a fart too far.
I eagerly await Jonah's next magnum opus, Enlightenment Fascism, featuring a caricature of Thomas Jefferson with a Hitler moustache on the cover, and Alexander Pope dressed as Mussolini on the frontispiece.
ReplyDeleteCome on now! I mean, he actually said that we live in a world where social media make it much easier for people to find out about what we do and say! Nobody's ever come up with that insight before!
ReplyDeleteI wish it was by the numbers. The topic sentence ("college administrators have taken to perusing the social-media habits of applicants" -- as far as I can tell) doesn't happen till the midpoint. It's followed instantly by the expert quote -- and then he wanders off again, this time into "but there's a larger point" territory. Nowhere is there a study or a summary. Not to mention the larger point isn't even stated as clearly as Roy puts it. "Maybe this is Fascism, but it doesn't affect me, and it'll build character in you."
ReplyDeleteRELATED: How beautiful it was to be frustrated by the undisciplined babble of that column only to see it conclude with: "[Such stories] reflect a... trend that celebrates self-expression over self-discipline. That tension has been baked into the cake since the Enlightenment, and it’s not going away. But it’s nice to see society self-correct every now and then. It’s a sign of good character." So: you plod to the finale of this shitty column and are rewarded with a signed confession of bad character. Sweet.
Oh more like Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers
ReplyDeleteThe fact is, we barely survived the Ruppertian Jihad.
ReplyDeleteI've seen Night Ranger live, which is weird, because I wouldn't even voluntarily listen to them not-live. They were opening for Journey.
ReplyDeleteJohn Locke threw the *best* raves.
ReplyDeleteWell he scent me a letter said he couldn't write without help anymo'
ReplyDeleteI said "Get yo' ass back and clean up the mess you left on the flo'"
Anyway, yeah
I have trouble joking about creeping intrusion of employers into their employees' private lives because I'm pretty angry about it. It's something unions and labor movements in the early-to-mid 20th century managed to largely suppress, but now it's coming back with a vengeance, fueled by social media, and people like Goldberg are, predictably, cheering it on.
ReplyDeleteYes. This is what right-wing nepotism sounds and smells like.
ReplyDeletean essay about what should and shouldn't be evaluated by prospective employers makes sense coming from someone who didn't actually have to apply for his job.
ReplyDeletewe need reddit or 4chan to invent a phrase stronger than "fuck you asshole" for jonah goldberg.
I've just never seen anyone blame the fucking Enlightenment
ReplyDeleteIt's always Kant's fault.
If you are "baking tension into the cake", you have probably picked the wrong recipe book from the shelf, and you are actually using "Principles of Pre-Stressed Concrete Engineering".
ReplyDeleteImage Search is your friend!
ReplyDeletehttp://media1.break.com/dnet/media/2012/10/10/9b0be97d-8e97-4c13-8cfc-dadbfc2c4f9a.jpg
Meanwhile Todd Kincannon remains gainfully employed.
ReplyDeleteOr another website of "inspiring" stories and videos: Upwindy
ReplyDeleteThanks to BBBB for reminding us that Johan was not calling for Jihad against the existence of an authoritarian, intrusive security-theatre agency, but in favour of of an authoritarian security-theatre agency that intruded selectively upon non-white people.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is, Johan managed to take a non-canon bit of backstory invented by Willis McNelly (in the Dune Encyclopedia) and attribute it to Frank Herbert, all in the course of displaying his command of popular culture.
Sounds more like a Serge Gainsborough song, with "French red hand" meaning something... very different IYKWIMAITYD.
ReplyDeleteHe toadying, shillin' for the right, a journalistic blight!
ReplyDeleteI have to give him credit, a lesser winger would have just assumed the Butlerian Jihad had something to do with Islam and stopped reading.
ReplyDeleteAnd exploding firecrackers. An insane scene, and brilliant.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile... McMegan has sided with John Cochrane against Krugman. She really isn't very bright.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing you can say in favor of the Pantload, as I'm sure many others already have, is that at least he's not being a hypocrite here. I mean, every day he puts more stuff online that does nothing except further cement our perception of his ... character.
ReplyDeleteFor want of a better term.
The only two filters will be Blood-Stained and Dusky Hued.
ReplyDeleteI believe a famous quote of his was "Mankind, being free and equal, has an inalienable right to get totally fucking WASTED, dude! WOOOOO!" Obviously, it's been toned down a bit by those fascists in the history textbook industry.
ReplyDeleteEither that, or he's dipping into the Megan McArdle cookbook.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to guess, I feel pretty confident that it includes the following:
ReplyDeleteEye of the Tiger
Heart of Rock N Roll
Hey Ricky
Laura Branigan's Greatest Hits
and Vanilla Ice. You know, for the street cred.
It's like you're channeling me.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the WWJD (What Would Journey Do) site is a thing of the past, or I would have linked it here.
Huey Lewis I'd give you, but I dunno...Jonah seems like the sort of discerning music fan who thinks anything that isn't guitar-centric is for girls or Europeans. I'd swap in Bon Jovi and Def Leppard from his high school years, and for his "I'm hip and happenin' so here's some pop culture references from the 90's" persona, Smash Mouth, Bryan Adams, and The Black Album.
ReplyDeleteUnder that formula, then, you've gotta give me Eye of the Tiger as well.
ReplyDeleteOh, good point.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have to use it on me as well because I sincerely do like Journey, and I can't blame my parents for it either.
ReplyDeleteLike the accidental-mutant villain in a Spider-Man comic, I've stopped trying to get empathy for my taste in music, and I'm just weaponizing it instead. For instance, this has been on regular rotation on my ipod, on purpose, for over a year now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExqE4SPrK0Y
MUAHAHAHAHA!
The dick self-silhouettes are next cave in.
ReplyDelete"And how does that square with his fancying himself a libertarian/Tea Party/cheetoh-eating libertine?"
ReplyDeleteEasy answer: None of that enforced discipline would apply to him, Mommy's special snowflake. It would just apply to everybody else.
Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I'm okay with living in a social media panopticon
ReplyDeleteI believe this to be a distortion of his real point, which is "I'm okay with those people living in a social media panopticon."
BBBB has reminded us of Johan's TSA fatwa, in which he fully approves of the TSA having unbounded panopticon privacy-violating powers -- as long as they are only exerted upon the swarthy classes and not on people like him. Much as the business lobbies and Chambers of Commerce are always keen to extend drug testing and lifestyle policing to larger and larger swathes of their employees, without ever volunteering for the same scrutiny themselves.
Sounds right for the most part, but the Black Album? There's no way Jonah listens to hip-hop, even in some demented attempt at getting cred. I'd say some third-wave ska for the 90's hipness, and I'd bet that he has a bunch of Springsteen, if only because all pundits are obsessed with Springsteen.
ReplyDeleteI seriously doubt that your average NRO commenter is a legacy. This sounds more like a right-wing variant of those 60's/70's radicals talking about how their FBI files must be six inches thick after all the shit I've done. Of course in this case, "the shit" is hitting the share button on a pro-life Facebook post.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough. I was thinking of the writers more than the commenters.
ReplyDeleteBreak out the B-roll of a neck-down shot of a teenager rolling a joint!
ReplyDeleteKudos. This is cherce. Well observed.
"(For example, if we ever get some sort of functional immortality serum,
ReplyDeleteyou can bet your ass that Monsanto or GE will copyright it and David
Koch-level assholes will be the ones who get to use it.)"
First, someone assure me that this has already been used as a premise for an s.f. novel and second, if it hasn't, permish to steal? I'm serious.
I believe that legally speaking, it's impossible to copyright a concept. (Otherwise Christopher Tolkien would have sued the pants off of every elf-dwarf-and-orc fantasy writer that came after his dad) So go right ahead! I would be very surprised if someone hasn't done it before in some way, though. Sounds like it would be right at home in some Dangerous Visions-era lament.
ReplyDeleteI actually remember the seed being planted in some futurist (or strictly speaking, anti-futurist) article about how immortality would be bad for society, because more often than not, the only way we advance and change things for the better is by the old guard dying. Imagine a US Senate years from now with a 150-year-old Strom Thurmond and a 130-year old Jesse Helms filibustering every political attempt to improve the human condition out of existence. Or Al Davis owning the Raiders for another two centuries. Makes you think, don't it?
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly what you'd expect from a guy who got into opinion "journalism" through association with his mother, a noted ratfucker. Hell, for all I know even NRO only keeps him on because Lucianne's got incriminating pictures of someone.
ReplyDeleteThat's a sight I'd like to see. Although "What would Styx do" also has potential.
ReplyDeleteRichie Incognito got in trouble because his victim finally snapped. Technology might have helped, but I'm guessing the dumbass would have left a racist and threatening message on Jonathan Martin's cassette answering machine anyway.
ReplyDeleteJihad's jihad got lax in LAX.
ReplyDeleteJohn Locke threw the *best* raves.
ReplyDeleteUntil the Smoke Monster got past his bouncers. *sniff*
OT: Just watched Pacific Rim. That's 2 hours I'll never get back...
ReplyDeleteBut I wonder. Ron Perlman's shoes. What do we call those things, "blingtips"?
Being Jonah's intern? Now there's something that could hurt you in a job interview.
ReplyDeleteVonnegut.
ReplyDeleteThat's 2 hours I'll never get back...
ReplyDelete:(
At this point I'm just happy when Hollywood comes up with new names and faces for their army of stock characters instead of just parasitizing some comic book or 80's cartoon in an effort to sucker in fans of the original. Low standards, I know, and it's amazing how often they can't even clear those.
Also Charlie Stross (Saturn's Children) and Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder)
ReplyDeleteHoly Fire by Bruce Sterling.
ReplyDeleteJob interview, hell. Inhalation of toxic gases can hurt you in the here and now.
ReplyDeleteJonah's Ex-Lax got had.
ReplyDelete"These are all mistakes, Jonah. I looked them up."
ReplyDeleteOK, yes, I meant the seed being planted for me personally. I'm not as well-read as most of youse.
ReplyDeleteIf it were me I'd just replace it with something less embarrassing, like, oh say, collecting semen from thoroughbred stallions.
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising that Jonah is anti-Enlightenment (it's a significant strain in conservatism), but it's amusing to see him invent fictional reasons why. Hey, the same fantasy approach got him his Liberal Fascismbook deal – that smell isn't just flatulence – it's a bestselling conservative sequel.
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to believe that *somebody* wasn't mooning Rick Perry.
ReplyDeleteNot quite that, but definitely related, is "Trouble with Lichen' by John Wyndham.
ReplyDeleteMax Planck: "Science advances one funeral at a time."
ReplyDeleteWasn't it Jonah who picked Englishman in New York as an exemplary conservative song? (Thus making Quentin Crisp laugh so loudly on the other side that minor temblors were set off.)
ReplyDeleteI love your comment on her piece.
ReplyDeleteI would go further and state that collecting semen from random people at run down truck stops is a less embarrassing job that interning for Jonah.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what you intended to get out of it. We were promised giant robots wailing the crap out of giant monsters, and by god, that's what we got.
ReplyDeleteJonah's idea of hip-hop starts and ends at "Bust a Move".
ReplyDeleteThe Just World Fallacy strikes again. In a "just world", if something bad happens to you, it's because on some level you deserved it. It's a distortion and misunderstanding of the karmic wheel. In the just world fallacy you MUST have done something to cause your firing or rape or imprisonment or whatever it was. Bad things do not happen to good people, if it appears to be so, it's because that person was not good. And the flipside of this worldview is that if good things (ie money) happen to someone, it's because they worked hard and deserve it, and NO other reason. Government benefits to individuals undercut the just world which means people are Getting Away With Something, which is infuriating and wrong on an atomic level. So, means-testing, drug-testing, everything else to delay and minimize and make sure at whatever expense, that the Just World is allowed to operate.
ReplyDeleteThe just-world fallacy is the underpinning of conservatism, even more than authoritarianism or selfishness or religion or what not. All the 'legitimate rape' stuff beloved of republicans, every time they open their mouth about welfare or food stamps, environmental policy, and even this latest pantload from Doughy, it all boils down to the just world fallacy.
I don't see a way to crack this memetic fortress. :(
I believe SC was referencing her cookbook.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would be very frightened if the butlers declared jihad. What would they do, serve my food cold?
ReplyDeleteThis proves my long held theory that the internet creates what you need through the search engine. I.e. You search therefore it is.
ReplyDeleteI'm also deliriously happy when a movie is shot in color and there's, y'know, actual color as part the visuals. Awash in a grainy blue-gray Man of Steel, I'm lookin' at you...
ReplyDeleteThe word "enlightenment" is horribly liberal-sounding.
ReplyDeleteThere was a TV show in the 60s, "The Immortal." The premise was this:
ReplyDeleteTest driver Ben Richards discovers his blood contains every immunity known to man--in effect making him immortal. When an elderly billionaire named Maitland learns of Richards' condition, he hires mercenary Fletcher to track Richards all over the country, capture him, and bring him back to Maitland's estate for periodic transfusions. The series details Richards' adventures with people he meets along the way, all the while fleeing from Fletcher and his goons.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065303/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
"Someone left the cake out in the rain..."
ReplyDeleteWith Elba, Hunnam, Perlman, Gorman, and del Toro writing/directing, I was expecting maybe a little higher grade of complete bullshit entertainment. (As a Dr Who fan for decades, I'm obviously not against the stuff). Hellboy? Pure bullshit, but it was well done. I'm not a film critic, and I can't really pin down intelligibly the difference between Pac Rim and, say, The Avengers, but Avengers was a ton of fun, and this thing was, for me, anyway, a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteYeah. Were there enough cliches in this thing, you think?
ReplyDeleteThe just-world fallacy is the underpinning of conservatism, even more than authoritarianism or selfishness or religion or what not
ReplyDeleteTragically, it leads them to perpetuate an unjust world.
So, basically, it was a big-budget remake of Godzilla versus Megalon.
ReplyDeleteColor, yeah. Why is there so much blue in CGI FX, anyway? And in P Rim, um, glowing blue "sweat, piss, jizz & blood" plus glowing blue innards just looks cartoonish. I noticed, though, that when the glowing blue whatever-the-fuck slammed into something with a bunch of unnecessary orangey explosions, that was real purty. I'm guessing that was the reason...
ReplyDeleteIt's also remarkably chaste for genre geek-bait.
ReplyDeleteWhoa, whoa, WHOA!!! You mean to tell me that a movie titled Pacific Rim doesn't even have a hint of Mecha/Kaiju ass-play?
Check out this cool new t-shirt I just got:
ReplyDeleteYou're thinking of Pacific Rimming.
ReplyDeleteYou will be.
ReplyDeleteThe link doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteEh? I posted a pic - I'm seeing it on this end, anyway.
ReplyDeleteWell, he's asking for it, what with his Kantian nihilism and all. I mean, say what you will about the tenets of logical positivism, but at least it's an ethos.
ReplyDeleteI relished his complaint about "fortune cookie" style homilies when he himself has had a rotating set of moronic fake aphorisms on Starbucks cups when Starbucks was attempting to appeal evenhandedly to two traditions: Bartlett's Quotations and the Clown Bible.
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely no idea what any of these comments mean.
ReplyDeleteWhy is there so much blue in CGI FX, anyway? ... I noticed, though, that when the glowing blue whatever-the-fuck slammed
ReplyDeleteinto something with a bunch of unnecessary orangey explosions, that was
real purty.
I apologize in advance, but TV Tropes is on the case. (One can also go directly to one of their sources to avoid Timesink(TM).)
Yes, is it really worse that your employer could look up your FB page and see that you've been doing bong hits with a picture of Geoffrey Dahmer and thus decides not to employ you as the public face of his company than that people doing three shifts a day are rotated through every possible permutation of their circadian rhythm, told to pee in a cup periodically, and denied bathroom breaks or water for lengthy stretches of time? The panopticon and control of the worker as prisoner has a long history--as I think we were discussing over at LGM in the context of new work on slavery but also old work on the introduction of factory style discipline. The Jonah's of the world don't dislike or distrust corporations ability to gather data about workers and control or exclude troublesome workers from their work place at all. In addition one could argue that the "GATTACA" style distopia that Rand paul was worried about has always already existed where race or ethnic based slavery was the norm, and in jobs that have been set aside for some races or sexes. It only gets scary to upper class white guys when they start to realize that the tenets of this anti-labor regime are going to be applied to them.
ReplyDelete"Such stories are extreme examples of the Internet culture’s tendency to reward oversharing."
ReplyDelete-- Doesn't he mean the opposite: Internet culture's tendency to *punish* oversharing? Also, run and hide your brain whenever anyone at NR mentions the Enlightenment.
He uses it like "The Talk" as advice to boys when they reach puberty.
ReplyDeleteThe concept is pretty common in SF, but on the upside, nobody has a copyright on it, so steal away.
ReplyDeleteI know that is the plot of one of James Gunn's fix-up novels; I had no idea that it had been adapted for the Teev.
ReplyDeleteI don't see the Just World worldview as a fallacy so much as a perfectly cromulent strategy for cognitive-dissonance reduction.
ReplyDelete"I like to regard myself as altruistic and empathetic... which imposes the obligation to take steps towards helping this person who is starving / ill / falsely imprisoned / abused by employers... but I happen to be lazy, and like my money. Dissonance!
Therefore that other person must have done something to deserve starvation / illness / imprisonment / abuse, and does not deserve help. Dissonance goes away!"
How much rebar do you put in your Baked Alaska?
ReplyDeleteYou are taking the wrong approach entirely! Jonah has heard, and perhaps even read, from his conservative betters (and almost all of them are his betters, at least in the sense that they are smarter and more educated than he is), that the Enlightenment was bad. Enlightenment = bad. And, in this particular column, Jonah is talking about self expression (or thinks he is, anyway), which he has also heard/read his conservative betters denigrate. Self expression = bad. Using the transitive principle: Enlightenment = bad; self expression = bad --> Enlightenment = self expression. QED.
ReplyDeleteSimple logic and second hand condemnations save Jonah from the hard work of actually having to, ya' know, know about stuff!
Considering that I know exactly how they do that job, I'm gonna say for sure that being Jonah's intern is way more embarrassing, unless you think watching a stallion mount a padded frame and spooge into a giant plastic baggie is somehow embarrassing. (No, the handlers actually don't manually jack the horses off; that's a good way of getting kicked or bitten.)
ReplyDeleteTrust me, as a horsey person, there are tons of things associated with horses that are way more embarrassing than that.
"employers will penetrate as far into their employees' private lives as society will let them"
ReplyDeleteI don't wanna know how far Goldberg is OK with being... penetrated, thanks. ;)