Wednesday, August 06, 2014

WINGNUT ARTS & CRAFTS NIGHT.

Speaking of kulturkampfers gone wild, Rod Dreher has a post called "A Case For Why Conservatives Make Better Art":
["a blogger called Staffan"] goes on to claim that the fact that Hollywood keeps making movies that rely on archetypes that go against contemporary liberal dogma means that despite the individualism and anti-traditionalism of our culture relative to the rest of the world, it is very difficult to tell stories that speak to people as they actually are without relying on archetypes — which is to say, without using the full spectrum of moral intuitions, including so-called retrograde ones that people like Richard Cooper call “fascist.” Staffan says that these filmmakers have to lie to themselves about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, for the same reason that certain liberals will, for example, profess to favor diverse public schools, but pay a lot of money to send their children to all-white private schools.
Sure all those Hollyweird homos are liberal, but their art is conservative and they're all hypocrites, Oh, did I mention that the "art" Dreher is talking about in this post is superhero movies?

The "blogger called Staffan" guy he quotes, though, is slightly more expansive: though understandably fixated on comic books, he also mentions The Kids Are Alright, "written and directed by archliberal Lisa Cholodenko," and how that lesbo Julianne Moore played really did need a man, "and as soon as Paul is out of the picture Cholodenko hastily wraps things up since the archetypal energy is gone... No wonder these guys need therapy. Or superman."

I imagine these dummies playing Ultimate Artistic Symposium with He-Man and Skeletor dolls.

98 comments:

  1. Izzy Wasserstein10:28 PM

    Nothing says "conservative" like an Illegal Alien fighting a rich guy to protect the powerless.

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  2. calling all toasters10:47 PM

    "a blogger called Staffan offers a Haidtan theory of why conservative artists have a bigger toolbox available to them than liberals do."



    I have a theory, as well: it's because y'all have to live inside yours.

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  3. John E Williams10:54 PM

    Cooper's article is just about as stupid. I think I am more sick of serious analysis and absorption of superhero movies than I am of the movies themselves. What is it with the Conservative mindset that says on one hand, all that matters is corporate profit, but on the other hand my idiotic worldview must be catered to by fucking stupid comic book movies? On all sides, it's like Rain Man obsessively reciting "Who's On First?" over and over in a vain attempt to answer its non-riddle. At least Raymond's tastes are more highbrow than Cooper's or Dreher's.

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  4. Cato the Censor11:00 PM

    That first portion of a sentence that you quoted is a masterpiece of not quite coherent, reactionary semi-gibberish. As his reward, Dreher should be stripped, scourged, and nailed to a cross. He'll probably get a boner while it's being done, but just ignore that thing and go on with it.

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  5. Leonard Pierce11:04 PM

    They're not DOLLS! They're (political) ACTION FIGURES!

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  6. I wonder how they manage to thump their Bibles so vigorously while worshiping Ayn Rand.
    ~

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  7. Well, it is Salon. If they didn't publish the occasional bit of overanalytic, pseudointellectual bullshit, they'd have a few gaps in their schedule.

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  8. Derelict11:36 PM

    Ignore it? First you'd have to be able to see it.

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  9. ...the fact that Hollywood keeps making movies that rely on archetypes that go against contemporary liberal dogma means...

    ...that there's nothing "liberal" about Hollywood? Goddamn it Dreher, this isn't hard.

    Speaking of archetypes, I've finally figured out why these guys raise my ire so much. These guys are the political equivalent of those people who decide to write a novel or a screenplay, never do it, but talk about their unwritten thing at parties. You know what, Rod? You don't become a great artist by writing about how great your art would be if you ever bothered to make any. Seriously, quit telling me about how Hollywood is afraid to produce your movie and just write the damn thing already (both of you, I mean).

    I'm sorry, you were saying?

    If Staffan (who identifies himself as a “socially conservative lefty”) is right, then reality has a culturally conservative bias, and successful art and storytelling must as well.

    *sigh* So, when you two geniuses were pretending to pay attention in your humanities classes, presumably you heard of the monomyth, right? You know, the hero's journey? The type of legend that was already generations upon generations old by the time the Greeks got ahold of it? For all this yammering on about Jung, I feel it's amazing that neither of these guys thought to mention the truest ancestor of the superhero tale. It seems relevant, is all I'm saying. It also seems disingenuous to describe as "conservative" a concept that originated about ten thousand years before the concept of "conservatism." But that's just me.

    The main problem these guys have is not even that they keep reading politics into everything, as preposterous as it is when they do it. We're a storytelling species, and storytellers have used fiction to impart moral lessons since the dawn of time. Frankly, it may be a mistake to completely avoid analyzing the politics in fiction, since the two will never be wholly separate. But storyteller have always understood that the moral serves the narrative. What the kulturkampfers do - whether making fiction or just expounding on it endlessly - is try to make the moral the master. Unfortunately, the moral is always too busy talking about its awesome and unwritten novel to be a proper leader.

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  10. Derelict11:38 PM

    Figures Rod would glom onto something like this. It's like focusing on one little slice of culture that, if you squint hard (and drink a lot) might be construed as conservative--and thus it wipes out all the other culture that tramples conservativism and wins massively in the marketplace.

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  11. Derelict11:41 PM

    It also seems disingenuous to describe as "conservative" a concept that originated about ten thousand years before the concept of "conservatism."
    If there were any justice in the world, Dreher would spent eternity having his liver pecked out--by ducks.

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  12. mortimer200011:58 PM

    The Wolf of Wall Street is an example of storytelling which relies on a false negative archetype: the unrestrained capitalist whose morality is totally corrupted by greed and overindulgence. This absurdist anti-hero is a fixture of liberal mythology, and it's no wonder that stories featuring such an obvious fabrication don't speak to people untainted by leftist dogma. The moral values of this unbelievable Jordan Belfort character are less a set of moral intuitions than a collection of moral lacunae, and the beast is entirely the creation of an author desperately trying to....

    I'm sorry, based on what did you say?

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  13. BigHank5312:18 AM

    To be fair, it's not they've ever understood either of the books, even if they finished reading them.

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  14. AGoodQuestion12:21 AM

    So the people of the developing world are wise and well-balanced and - natch! - ultimately conservative? It must be exhausting keeping track of what's conservative and permissible this week.

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  15. Tyrone Slothrop12:27 AM

    I get that you don't care for Dreher, but I've passed a considerable amount of time at his place—and say what you will, he garners, and allows, a large number of liberal/progressive commenters who routinely take him to task, while also appreciating the areas where they can find room for agreement. Indeed, the disparate views one can find going back and forth - and with reasonable civility - over the various topics of the day makes for an intriguing atmosphere; particularly the religious/secular abutments that abound. Out of all the conservative blogs I've sampled over the long, lonely years of internet lurkerdom, IMO Dreher's is one of the better ones.


    Not exactly sure why I felt compelled to say that, but there it is...

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  16. I HAVE THE BLATHER!

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  17. Here's a still from a stop-action flick filmed with action figures that uses squirrels as a metaphor for the well-known squirrelyness of liberals:

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  18. i look at the site once or twice a day, just to keep my hate pure.

    seriously, though - what happened to pareene?

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  19. "one of the better ones"

    Compelled to damn w/ faint praise?

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  20. montag212:48 AM

    Well, it is a bit like saying, "out of all the shit sandwiches out there, Dreher's is one of the least objectionable."

    Unfortunately, it's impossible not to conclude that one had to go through a bunch of shit sandwiches before coming to that estimate. It's a task most of us would find pointless and wholly unrewarding.

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  21. AGoodQuestion12:54 AM

    In his insistence on putting all superheroes and implicitly most pop culture on an arbitrary left-right axis, Cooper is sitting by the bandstand, hoping someone like Dreher will ask him to dance. Not surprisingly he gets his wish.

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  22. montag212:55 AM

    Ooh, look! Teeny tiny little conservatives with teeny tiny little guns!

    And they're posed just like big game hunters!

    it's all archetypy an' stuff.

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  23. AGoodQuestion12:58 AM

    They've hired Digby, so they can't be all bad. I can understand your hate, though.

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  24. Megalon1:02 AM

    "Cooper's article is just about as stupid. I think I am more sick of
    serious analysis and absorption of superhero movies than I am of the
    movies themselves."

    I hear that! Maybe they're just embarrassed at liking something dumb so they have to pretend it's actually really deep and smart and meaningful in ways that only they are brilliant enough to discern. Or maybe it's an attempt to get people to pay attention to their pointless self indulgent navel gazing by tying it into whatever's popular. It just to stop already.

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  25. AGoodQuestion1:03 AM

    ... unless Zagat's was paying really good rates for it.

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  26. Megalon1:04 AM

    It just NEEDS to stop, rather. Rereading before posting, on the other hand needs to start.

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  27. Megalon1:08 AM

    "the fact that Hollywood keeps making movies that
    rely on archetypes that go against contemporary liberal dogma means that
    despite the individualism and anti-traditionalism of our culture
    relative to the rest of the world, it is very difficult to tell stories
    that speak to people as they actually are without relying on archetypes”


    Or maybe they're just lazy and unimaginative, Rod. Did you ever think of that?

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  28. DocAmazing1:16 AM

    These guys think Joseph Campbell had something to do with soup.

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  29. FMguru2:08 AM

    Oooh, good analogy (to those people who are always talking about the screenplay or novel they are planning to write). I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Mel Gibson because instead of whining about how no one wanted to make his Jesus torture porn film, he went out and secured the financing and produced the movie and oversaw the marketing and had a massive hit on his hands (and made a giant pile of money in the process). Hollywood is one of the most ruthlessly capitalist places in existence, everything's for hire, and there's nothing stopping any of these guys from putting their money where their mouths are and making That Film That Hollywood Doesn't Want You To See. The reason they don't, of course, is that they (or, more accurately the money people) actually know how much actual audience demand there is for explicitly conservative films (see the box office for things like An American Carol and America: Heart And Soul and Atlas Shrugged) and they don't want to throw their money away and have their ideas shown up as truly and massively unpopular - its so much easier to just sit back and play the put-upon martyr.

    It's the same reason that those people never get serious about writing their novel or finished their screenplay - because then they'd have to put themselves at risk of undeniable popular rejection or (more likely) total apathy towards their work. Much easier to just all that hard work and risk to your emotional well-being and just play-act as a struggling bohemian.

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  30. JMPesq2:08 AM

    Yeah, superhero comics are all conservative. Really, a genre created most by artistic Jewish New Yorkers in the 1940s and then revived and reinvented in the 1960s is totally right wing, which is why for examples the X-Men were created as a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement, and have later been used as analogues for the gay rights movement and other minority struggles, or why Captain America quit for a time in 1970s after discovering that the President was at the center of the Secret Empire conspiracy, and why his movie counterpart most recently fought against overreaching government surveillance and preemptive attack on perceived potential enemies. Really, they're all conservative.

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  31. "Oh, did I mention that the "art" Dreher is talking about in this post is superhero movies?"



    What other art is there to talk about these days?

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  32. "it is very difficult to tell stories that speak to people as they actually are without relying on archetypes"

    I'm guessing Dreher doesn't know that he sounds here like any number of late 80s "How to Write a Successful Screenplay by Following the Hero's Path" type books and weekend classes spawned by Joseph Campbell's Jung for the Masses (as it were) TV series of the same era. Campbell (and Campbell's Jung) became, of course, one of the cornerstones of the "New Age" - that set of quasi-religious beliefs so beloved of the despised Liberals - as it displaces proper Christianity.

    Such individuals don't need Christ, of course, because they understand that the Archetype of the "god who is sacrificed to bring renewal" is the only thing that matters; the only thing that's TRUE. It's all storytelling, ain't it?

    Dreher has entered into the stomach of the Hollywood Whale - archetype of being swallowed by the monster! - and when he heroically finds a way to cut/burn/trick his way out, he will realize at the end of his hero's journey, he has become the Beast himself.

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  33. Archetypes function as a shorthand so the cubicle drone or retail serf can sit down for a couple of hours of escapist fun without having to expend too much effort. It's a welcome break from humdrum existence, a tiny taste of wish-fulfillment by proxy before returning to the grind.

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  34. Conservatives don't bother to keep track of it, only liberal suckers bother to remember shit. We've always been at war with Eurasia!

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  35. Who is this "Staffan" character? Whoa, "Rod" is citing "Staffan"... Staffan/Rod- it's not only a pun, but an allusion to a psalm. I think we've found Rod's alter ego, it's like "Fight Club" but for the Bible-y set.

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  36. Wrangler6:37 AM

    Dreher: ....So you see child, all the things you enjoy in your leisure time are actually conservative. You were a conservative the whole time and you didn't even know it!


    Millenial: Wow.... So....


    Dreher: ...Yes....


    Millenial: Soooo I guess I should start demanding we cut the minimum wage and roll back abortion rights?


    Dreher: Exactly!

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  37. Derelict6:39 AM

    Starring Ann Coulter as Skeletor.

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  38. smut clyde6:46 AM

    A Case For Why Conservatives Make Better Art"
    The case is certainly easier to argue when you start with the axiom that when anyone makes art -- even non-conservatives -- they do so by being conservatives.

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  39. smut clyde6:57 AM

    any number of
    late 80s "How to Write a Successful Screenplay by Following the Hero's
    Path" type books and weekend classes spawned by Joseph Campbell's Jung
    for the Masses (as it were) TV series of the same era.You can blame 'Star Wars' for that. The first time a lot of people heard of Campbell was when Lucas copped to stealing his plot ideas.
    Me, I came across Campbell in 1977, from a second-hand copy of the Quartet edition of John Barth's "Chimaera".

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  40. smut clyde6:58 AM

    Staffan (who identifies himself as a “socially conservative lefty”)A balanced authoritarian, then. That's nice.

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  41. Well, this whole "argument" of theirs is based on a faulty premise that "conservative" values are those that conservatoids lay claim to but don't actually practice.


    Conservatoids pretend that universal human values such as loyalty, courage, hard work and accomplishment, family bonding, spirituality, community wellness, and so on, are "conservative" values. When the brighter ones in the pack observe that these traits seem to be valued throughout the world's cultures, or just in a sub-sub-pop-culture like superhero movies, they insist that must mean that everyone is secretly conservative, just like them.


    But normal people understand that these values are human, not political, and the only traits that really differentiate conservatoids from everyone else are fear and hatred. They are rigidly tribal and authoritarian xenophobes. Anything else they pretend to be is borrowed from humanity at large.

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  42. Derelict7:12 AM

    What, exactly, is a "socially conservative lefty"? Is that someone who thinks abortion should be outlawed and that the only way to do so is to radically expand the size of government while taxing the rich into pauperdom? (Or is it someone who's willing to give Dreher his government dream job: Inspector of Sex Practices so Dreher can go door-to-door and personally observe people having sex in only officially sanctioned ways?)

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  43. smut clyde7:17 AM

    Think "Anti-Sex League".

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  44. TGuerrant7:57 AM

    Huckabee's going to have to get out his really BIG popcorn popper.

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  45. GreenEagle8:42 AM

    May I just say that I have been employed in film production for going on thirty years now, and I have never ever known anyone who thinks like this. Films, particularly expensive ones like superhero films, require tons of money, and are a commercial product. Producers make movies that they think lots of people will pay to see. That's the whole story, and anyone who thinks they are sitting around trying to promote a political agenda is a fool.

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  46. NonyNony8:45 AM

    What, exactly, is a "socially conservative lefty"?

    MRA with socialist leanings. Thinks liberal economic ideas are great, thinks feminism is awful.

    Not saying that's what this Staffan guy is - haven't read his work - but I've encountered more than one socialist MRA and that's how they describe themselves - socially conservative, economic liberal.

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  47. Chairman Pao8:46 AM

    To: Conservative kulturkampfers
    Re: Art


    If you're still expounding on why you're better at it, you're not.


    xoxo


    Captain Obvious

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  48. redoubtagain8:48 AM

    Thy rod and thy staffian, they comfort me

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  49. redoubtagain8:52 AM

    Who is Job Galt?

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  50. redoubtagain8:57 AM

    'Cause what it comes down to, really, is that they want Rupert Murdoch to give them 20th Century Fox to play around with. (As if Rupert Murdoch hates other people's money as much as they do.)

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  51. BigHank539:18 AM

    All the parts they LIKE are conservative. Did you expect them to watch the superhero movies with a more critical eye than they apply to the Old Testament, which they hop around in like a choose-your-own-adventure book?

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  52. BigHank539:25 AM

    Christ, what are those poor ducks guilty of?

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  53. Derelict9:27 AM

    That's the whole story, and anyone who thinks they are sitting around trying to promote a political agenda is a fool.

    You've already met Rod Dreher. Allow me to introduce you to Jonah Goldberg, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh . . .

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  54. Derelict9:29 AM

    To be fair, many of them are self-aware enough to understand that they really don't have the chops to create anything that publishers or the public would buy.

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  55. Derelict9:33 AM

    The ducks would be professionals--they'd bill for it.

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  56. BigHank539:38 AM

    Archetypes function as shorthand so that everyone can understand a story without having to live through every boring minute of a character's backstory. Example: watch the first thirty seconds of the Fifty Shades of Grey trailer. Do you think the mousy little slump-shouldered journalist is going to look like that by the end of the movie? And they communicated that in seconds of screen time. We don't need to know why or how she wound up with crappy self-esteem, just that she did.

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  57. satch9:51 AM

    "If Staffan (who identifies himself as a “socially conservative lefty”)
    is right, then reality has a culturally conservative bias, and
    successful art and storytelling must as well."


    And if Staffan is wrong... well, never mind. Oh and Rod, I'm sorry, but who the fuck IS this Staffan guy again?

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  58. Fights and car chases are conservative? Wow... who knew?

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  59. "...and why his movie counterpart most recently fought against overreaching
    government surveillance and preemptive attack on perceived potential
    enemies."


    Yeah... just like the Caped Libertarian Rand Paul.

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  60. "...any number of late 80s "How to Write a Successful Screenplay by Following the Hero's Path"


    Hell... I'm old enough to remember seeing this sort of stuff on matchbook covers in the '50s.

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  61. Halloween_Jack10:17 AM

    So, basically we've got a crap blogger citing a crap blogger as proof, with that crap blogger citing another crap blogger. (Even though Cooper is fulfilling his clickbaity duties with Salon, he's only got one credit with them, and what does that tell you, given that they're willing to cut Camille Paglia a paycheck?) If someone wants to posit that all power fantasies are inherently fascist, well, good luck with that, as the Captain America sequel had its hero prevail over a physically superior foe through personal sacrifice. The Winter Soldier is hardly an edge case, as the theme of victory through sacrifice echoes through many myths and stories, from Jesus to Obi-Wan Kenobi to Guardians of the Galaxy (in more than one place). In the classic monomyth, the hero has to travel outside his comfort zone, make himself vulnerable, and quite often sacrifice something dear to him to receive his boon, rather than simply being able to smash through all his obstacles because he's from Krypton. Giving up power to win runs counter to any impulse that can be sanely labeled as "fascist"; some superheroes are indeed essentially fascist fantasies, but not all, and the more popular franchises (Spider-Man, X-Men) will even take some pains to explore the differences.


    But Staffan doesn't go that deep; he barely touches on the hero myth before wending his way to kicking around some half-baked evo-psych, stats from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and claiming that The Kids Are All Right was a failure, literally all evidence to the contrary. And this is the crumbling sandstone pebble upon which Crunchy bases his modest edifice. Par for the course, really.

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  62. BigHank5311:02 AM

    I should expect nothing less than someone feathering their own nest in a privatized prison system.

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  63. AngryWarthogBreath11:11 AM

    Soundtracks to superhero movies.

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  64. AngryWarthogBreath11:14 AM

    The pull from this is plainly that the phrase "reality has a liberal bias" has REALLY gotten under their skin. Eight years on, they've managed to bring up a counterargument. It's a stupid counterargument, but let's not let that get in the way of their high fiving victory lap.

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  65. AngryWarthogBreath11:15 AM

    Example: watch the first thirty seconds of the Fifty Shades of Grey trailer.


    ...Thirty seconds might be survivable. You're still not paying me enough.

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  66. mgmonklewis11:22 AM

    They have a few people who I like, but the site has become so disappointing. First, the layout is atrocious, the red-and-black theme is like a hammer on my retinas, and the amount of junk running scripts in the background sometimes locks up my browser. Sadly, TPM is starting to do the latter as well.

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  67. swkellogg11:24 AM

    Rimshot. Cymbal crash.

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  68. GreenEagle11:36 AM

    Those people don't believe that. They are paid to try to make other people believe things like that. And the people that fall for it are indeed fools.

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  69. Ellis_Weiner11:37 AM

    Most of them are. Some of them are, uh, quacks.

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  70. swkellogg11:46 AM

    Everyone has fantasies of power.


    Who doesn't want to escape the degradations of being powerless?


    The idea that such fantasies are inherently conservative is patently stupid.


    A more thoughtful analysis might have looked at how most superheroes use power in a manner that might best be described as...


    SOCIALISTIC!!!


    There. I said it.

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  71. Jon Galt with a stuffed nose?

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  72. Bloody hell I was three hours late with this joke.

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  73. Socially conservative, economically liberal? Isn't that an angry libertarian dude who can't get laid without a government affirmative action sex program?

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  74. But farther down he outsources his critique to another guy and ends up approvingly publishing this piece of dreck:

    We must never hesitate to defend our culture, our future, and our lives against those who seek to destroy us. The liberal cosmopolitan elite appeal to tolerance and understanding in the face of such an enemy is suicidal. However, the right-wing populist position, which is willing to face up to and address the evil of terrorism, fails to understand the ramifications of becoming like the enemy by dehumanizing them.

    The truly Christian position is to never forget that evil comes not just from the actions of “terrorists” or “enemies” but from the heart of a fallen, sacred yet degraded, human beings. If we are to preserve our own humanity we must not forget that our enemy differs from us in degree, not in kind. Like us, our enemies need to accept Jesus and to be baptized by water and the Spirit. That is the Christian way, not as Palin would have it, to have our enemies fear a pagan god and have their spirit broken by water.

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  75. There are only two stories:


    A man comes to town.


    or
    I leave and have an adventure.

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  76. Derelict12:39 PM

    Amen to the browser-locking scripts. I understand the need to make money, but can't they do it without auto-play ads and kiddie-scripts?

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  77. Derelict12:40 PM

    That thumping you hear has nothing to do with Bibles.

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  78. Chairman Pao12:41 PM

    I'll just leave this here (though I know I should be leaving it for Rod).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-v-f2mT94Y

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  79. Wait, we're talking about Jesus again aren't we?

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  80. Gilgamesh was totally a conservative!

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  81. When they do actually write a book, it is about bears getting erections...

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  82. More like a "choose your own commandments" book- I don't like that shellfish bit, so I'll turn to page 235 where it says to stone sluts.

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  83. gocart mozart1:17 PM

    Free Obama phones for abortion protesters?
    Mandatory gay prayers in school?

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  84. He made Enkidu enter the palace through the side door.

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  85. gocart mozart1:19 PM

    "What, exactly, is a "socially conservative lefty"?"


    In all seriousness, Pope Francis might qualify.

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  86. SatanicPanic2:04 PM

    Superhero movies are not dumb.

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  87. NonyNony2:12 PM

    I'll just leave the comparison of the current Pope to a woman-hating socialist there, I think, because I could rant for a while about it and get into a lot of nuance about whether Francis hates women or is just the front man for an organization that has as a foundational principle the idea that women are at best second class members. I'll just say yeah, that sounds about right.

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  88. billcinsd2:16 PM

    I thought it was bad (ie liberal) criticism of Guardians of the Galaxy

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  89. KatWillow2:42 PM

    Lady Catherine De Burgh is a good example of conservative thinking.

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  90. Stupid destruction of property as a result of massive masculine ego displacement gone wrong? No care for passersby, children, or the costs to society? Yup: conservative.

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  91. KatWillow2:49 PM

    That's their cunning trick: hire ONE good writer to make the magazine look all intellectual-like and even "lefty", while the rest of their "writers" are too stupid to breathe in after breathing out.

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  92. You just wait until Squirrel Girl hears of that.

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  93. smut clyde3:42 PM

    In the classic monomyth, the hero has to travel outside his comfort
    zone, make himself vulnerable, and quite often sacrifice something dear
    to him
    If your mythic reenactment requires a Night Sea-Journey, allow me to recommend the overnight ferry from Copenhagen to Oslo.

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  94. These guys are the political equivalent of those people who decide to write a novel or a screenplay, never do it, but talk about their unwritten thing at parties.

    So which conservative is finally going to finish Business Secrets of the Pharoahs?

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  95. montag25:53 PM

    Well, it's a reasonable question to ask who the fuck is this guy, so, it must be okay to ask it more than once.

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  96. mgmonklewis11:09 PM

    Not the back door?

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