Published on 30 Jul 2015
“Progressive” bigotry – the respectable kind.
August 6, 2015
Comedians and UKIP
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QotD: The chain of command
Jayne: You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with ’til ya understand who’s in ruttin’ command here. Now we’re finishing this deal,
[breathing becomes a little more labored]
Jayne: and then maybe, *maybe* we’ll come back for those morons who got themselves caught. You can’t change that by getting all… bendy.
Wash: All what?
Jayne: [starts swaying] You’ve got the — the light from the console… keep you, lift you up. They shine like…
[starts grabbing at the air like he’s trying to catch something]
Jayne: little angels…
[Jayne falls flat on his face]
Wash: Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Simon: I told him to sit down.
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August 2, 2015
Camille Paglia on atheism
From the second part of the Camille Paglia interview in Salon:
I regard [Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics] as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, Glittering Images, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents – they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general – from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.
I’m speaking here as an atheist. I don’t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.
The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.
But yes, the sneering is ridiculous! Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer art – and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. There’s a tremendous body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be called cosmic consciousness. It has to be remembered that my generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism, which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every direction – you had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So I really thought we were entering this great period of religious syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But all of a sudden, it disappeared! The Asian religions vanished – and I really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow environment where they’re peppered with images from mass media at a particularly debased stage.
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August 1, 2015
The Streisand Effect – Trying to Hide Things On The Internet I INTO CONTEXT
Published on 6 Jan 2015
One of the biggest news stories this Christmas was the (un-)cancelled release of Sony Pictures’ movie The Interview. In the movie, Seth Rogan and James Franco try to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. After terror threats against movie theatres showing the film, Sony cancelled the release of the movie. This ultimately increased the movies attention and made the later online release the most successful one this year. Actually, there is a name for this kind of phenomenon: the Streisand Effect. In this episode of INTO CONTEXT, Indy explains why it’s not always smart to try to hide things on the internet.
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QotD: How to write a headline about a “scientific” result
… let’s not forget the Heads We Win Tails You Lose rule of the in-group affirmations which we loosely call “social sciences.”
Suppose you run a test to distinguish whether women, or men, are more willing to hire family — that is, engage in nepotism — when filling a job.
If it turns out that men are more likely to engage in nepotistic practices, the study will be titled:
Women More Ethical in Business Dealings Than Men
On the other hand, if it turns out that women are more likely to approve of nepotism, whereas men are less likely, the study will have the title:
Women More Caring Towards Family Members; Men Care Only About Filthy Careerism & the Welfare of Total Strangers Who Might Be Rapists
Ace, “Shock: Social Scientists Determine Conservatives Are Stupid”, Ace of Spades HQ, 2014-09-09.
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July 31, 2015
QotD: “Having it all”
In 2012, Gloria Steinem complained that the Have It All question was a “bullshit” question because no one ever asked that question of men. It’s true. Society doesn’t often ask that question of men, but not because of sexism.
Women ask about having it all because they were told they could have it all…by women like Steinem. The old glossy women’s magazines are full of have-it-all glamour, declaring that women could easily have it all without men. Steinem did not actually coin the “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” quip, but she got the credit for it because it succinctly represented her preaching and the mood of the time. Women didn’t need anything but the old rules and the old men to get out of their way. Each woman was an island unto herself, a self-contained unit of success. Eventually, all of those things we told women back in the 60s to boost their confidence and get them out in the world became the standard by which we now demand singular performance from women.
Check the commentary in many of the lauded feminist pop culture franchises, most recently “Divergent,” “Frozen,” “Maleficent,” etc. Characters get the feminist seal of approval when they are separated from any sort of partnership with men. Having it all doesn’t count unless we are doing it without men.
Men, on the other hand, didn’t have some masculinist movement telling them that they could have it all, much less that they had to do it all on their own. Nor would they have been as receptive if they had. Unlike girls who tend to engage in pretend play in which they are the princess, then the chef, then the teacher or the pupil, all in the space of an afternoon, boys tend to also play games with rules, even if they’ve made them up by consensus. The boy who isn’t fast learns to hit the ball harder or to catch. They train each other in tradeoffs. The rules don’t bend. The boys adapt to the world the way it is. (I host large parties and play dates often. This plays out in my yard, every time.)
Asking women if they can have it all isn’t sexism. It is an aspiration that women who should know better foist upon women who don’t.
Leslie Loftis, “Irony, Thy Name Is Feminism”, The Federalist, 2014-07-28.
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July 30, 2015
It’s our Birthday! – One year on THE GREAT WAR
Published on 28 Jul 2015
We can’t believe it’s already been a year working on the great war!
Thank you so much for your great support. We hope you enjoy our little special, and if you’re up for even more History check out our sister-channel IT’S HISTORY: http://bit.ly/ITSHISTORYSHOW
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If you listen to their music, why not drink their hooch?
At Boing Boing, David Pescovitz alerts us that The Pogues have lent their name to a new irish whiskey:
Celtic punk bank The Pogues have launched a signature brand of Irish whiskey. Made by West Cork Distillers, “it’s said to be Ireland’s highest malt-containing blended Irish whiskey, with 50% grain and 50% single malt liquid.”
The Pogues’ singer Shane MacGowan is well known for his adoration of alcohol. According to his memoir, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, he started at age five with two nightly pints of Guinness given to him by his parents, and never really stopped.
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Stary Olsa covers the Red Hot Chili Peppers on medieval instruments
Published on 29 Apr 2015
Stary Olsa performing “Californication” by Red Hot Chili Peppers for Belarusian TV-show “Legends. Live” on ONT channel.
Produced by Mediacube Production. (Minsk, Belarus)
H/T to Open Culture.
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QotD: Not your mother’s feminist movement
Feminism won, they succeeded, they got what they were after. They destroyed the glass ceiling, they smashed sexism in the culture, they’ve wiped out all kinds of barriers. A strong feminist would say there’s plenty of work to do but if they are honest, they’ll admit there really isn’t much left.
Compared to 1966 when NOW was founded, today is amazingly triumphant for the cause.
And when you succeed, people strangely feel no need to keep supporting the cause. Once the airplane was designed and functional, people stopped trying to make airplanes. Once Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball[, …] there wasn’t any need to keep pushing to get blacks in baseball.
The truth is, feminists got what they were after. Even in bad economic times, women are doing well. Women lost far fewer jobs and lost less earning power during the recession than men. Women are accepted in pretty much every position and job they try for. There are women on submarines these days in the Navy.
Feminism, at least as defined by the NOW crowd, is pretty much rejected by young women today. They don’t want any part of the “never shave, men are rapists, we are oppressed” outlook of the modern feminist. They liked the “stop treating me like an idiot child and let me have that job” sort of feminist, but that’s not what NOW offers.
Like most activist groups, NOW and other feminist organizations are casualties of their own success. They did what they set out to do. They succeeded. They won. And having won, now they have no purpose and are losing influence, power, and money.
But they also suffer what most organizations — especially activist ones — face. Each successive generation of leadership tends to get more radical rather than less. Unless the organization consciously and continuously strives to remain neutral or conservative, it becomes increasingly leftist over time. This is an artifact of the very nature of activists. People who are so driven and passionate about any one cause tend to be more emotionally driven and more radical by nature. Over time that increases each step and eventually you end up with loons in charge.
The Sierra Club was founded to enjoy and protect beautiful areas, they were naturalists. These days they’re radical environmentalists. Most large religious denominations face this as well, as more conservative and doctrinally-concerned leadership gives way to more “modern” and culturally-driven leadership and they lose their way.
So the organizations of feminism are facing success not with joy and triumph, but with greater wails of despair as they see (or invent) greater areas of horror and crisis. And as they grow ever more radical, they get ever less influential and meaningful in the culture.
Most women today would call themselves feminist but they usually will qualify that with “but not like those feminists.” The only ones who cling to the “those feminist” sort are college sorts and the kind of radical men-haters that folks like Rush Limbaugh like to ridicule.
Christopher Taylor, “WOMYNISTS”, Word Around the Net, 2014-06-04.
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July 29, 2015
Camille Paglia on the parallels between Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby
In Slate, David Daley talks to Camille Paglia about the similarities between the former President and the former entertainer:
Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.
But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women – he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas. And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky – I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her – somebody who was looking for a father figure.
I was enraged! My publicly stated opinion at the time was that I don’t care what public figures do in their private life. It’s a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is, they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians have, while the Clinton episode was a disgrace.
[…]
So have the times and standards changed enough that Clinton would be seen as Cosby, if he was president today?
Oh, yes! There’s absolutely no doubt, especially in this age of instant social media. In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized – “Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written – in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.
So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton–aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile – they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power – and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.
Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, Sexual Personae – which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac – a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.
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July 27, 2015
GMO food is safe, says … Slate
In Slate, William Saletan on the FUD campaign that has been waged against genetically modified foods:
Is genetically engineered food dangerous? Many people seem to think it is. In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to the Non-GMO Project, which certifies goods that are free of genetically modified organisms. Last year, sales of such products nearly tripled. Whole Foods will soon require labels on all GMOs in its stores. Abbott, the company that makes Similac baby formula, has created a non-GMO version to give parents “peace of mind.” Trader Joe’s has sworn off GMOs. So has Chipotle.
Some environmentalists and public interest groups want to go further. Hundreds of organizations, including Consumers Union, Friends of the Earth, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Center for Food Safety, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, are demanding “mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.” Since 2013, Vermont, Maine, and Connecticut have passed laws to require GMO labels. Massachusetts could be next.
The central premise of these laws — and the main source of consumer anxiety, which has sparked corporate interest in GMO-free food — is concern about health. Last year, in a survey by the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans said it’s generally “unsafe to eat genetically modified foods.” Vermont says the primary purpose of its labeling law is to help people “avoid potential health risks of food produced from genetic engineering.” Chipotle notes that 300 scientists have “signed a statement rejecting the claim that there is a scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs for human consumption.” Until more studies are conducted, Chipotle says, “We believe it is prudent to take a cautious approach toward GMOs.”
The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all declared that there’s no good evidence GMOs are unsafe. Hundreds of studies back up that conclusion. But many of us don’t trust these assurances. We’re drawn to skeptics who say that there’s more to the story, that some studies have found risks associated with GMOs, and that Monsanto is covering it up.
I’ve spent much of the past year digging into the evidence. Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.
H/T to Coyote Blog for the link.
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QotD: The herbivorization of the urbanites
OMG! You guys! That whole “Eloi and Morlocks” thing? It’s coming true! If you know how to work a screwdriver, your descendents really are doomed to an underground life, eating the descendents of telephone sanitizers and TV news anchors.
As evidence, I present the following snippet of dialogue from a TODAY® show segment where investigative reporter Jeff Rossen learns how to deal with a kitchen fire. (I seem to recall this being covered in second grade by a cartoon dalmatian, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I am including in the dialogue the parts where I was yelling at the television.
Savannah Guthrie: “A lot of us are intimidated though, like, by the idea of turning it on…” *makes gestures and facial expressions as though she’s holding a well-greased and annoyed cobra at arms length*
Me: “Wut?” *tilts head on side like RCA Victor mascot*
Jeff Rossen: “I… I will tell you, I actually never used a fire extinguisher before and I thought there would be a kickback and I was afraid to use it…”
Me: (yelling) “OH. MY. GOD! It’s a fire extinguisher, you sackless herbivore! What are you afraid of, you big girl’s blouse?”
It had honestly never crossed my mind that a grown human being could feel an ounce of trepidation about a fire extinguisher. That’s like… I don’t know, being scared of pillows, or footstools, or filing cabinets. And whatever you call this bizarre phobia, two out of five Manhattanites on my TV screen just admitted to suffering from it!
Tam, “Still more proof that speciation is well underway”, View From The Porch, 2015-07-16.
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July 26, 2015
Mark Knopfler – Tracker – A Film By Henrik Hansen
Published on 20 Feb 2015
‘Tracker’ by Mark Knopfler available now.
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