Category Archives: Conservatism

Blending In With The Girls

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Conservatism, Hollywood, Intellectualism, Media, Pop-Culture

BARACK OBAMA IS. So says one of Bill O’Reilly’s resident junk-science experts. For once, Bill’s body language bimbo makes sense. In demeanor (and dentition), Obama is one of the girls. He’s blending in, said Tonya Reiman, down to the way he crosses his legs, lady like.

O’Reilly, who devotes a large part of the program to recounting his many appearances on mindless forums like The View—and is among the conservatives who considers batty Bawbawa Walters worth courting—pointed out that he seldom crosses his (very long) legs when he visits the ladies. And he always leans in aggressively.

No doubt, O’Reilly, who is über-manly, has swagger. Obama, more of a metrosexual, saunters.

Rex Murphy, easily Canada’s finest political writer, has furnished us with the best description of the Bill O’Reilly Show: “the Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.”

O’Reilly is intellectually incurious, chronically so. For scary, however, nothing beats a president who knows the ins-and-outs of the Kardashians, the most rear-ended reality stars on American TV.

BHO has more than once demonstrated—and made excuses for—how closely he watches a family that is repulsive, freaky, morally rudderless, inappropriately sexual and depraved. In the past, he had also entertained the big-boned sister (please don’t me make Google her name) and her basketball husband at the White House.

UNRELATED UPDATE: To Nick: BAB is a low- or close-to-no-budget operation, written and “programed” by me, with the help of donations from a few generous readers. Unless our fortunes change here—not least that this scribe is no longer the sole “programer”—we’ll have to make do with the BAB format as it stands, I’m afraid.

UPDATE II: National Review Eunuchs (‘Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”)

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Intellectualism, Journalism, Media, Race, Reason

The following is from “National Review Eunuchs,” my latest column:

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine. …

… National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal” proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

… Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from other similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity—ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity. …

… Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov, and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?) …

Read the complete column, “National Review Eunuchs.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: “Why Come You Don’t Have a Tattoo?”

About “those androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome,” mentioned in the column on John Derbyshire’s firing. Here is a typical example. His name is Alexander Nazaryan. he writes for the New York Daily News:

“Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke. Please, please tell me that a human being did not actually think these things and, worse yet, think to write them down.”

Reading Meghan McCain has just about inoculated me to the above form of writing (for it is not a style in any recognizable way).

It conjures the scene in Mike Judge’s genius of a satire “Idiocracy.” To be precise, the dialogue Joe Bauer, the protagonist, conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character, who discovers Bauer doesn’t have the identifying, state tattoo (listen to it HERE):

Doctor: “And if you could just go ahead and, like, put your tattoo in that shit.”
Joe: “That’s weird. This thing has the same misprint as that magazine. What are the odds of–”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo? Tattoo? Why don’t you have this?”
Joe: “Oh, god!”
Doctor: “Where’s your tattoo?”
Joe: “Oh, my god.”
Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

Doctor: “Why come you don’t have a tattoo?”

[SNIP]

You want to slap this Nazaryan man in the face. “Settle down. Stop it man. Quit the hysterical hyperbole. Stop the overwrought outrage. Calm down and write a simple sentence countering the Derb column.”

UPDATE II: To the ladies, Jeniffer and Scherie: Saddling the state solely for the dysfunction of a segment of the population is a form of determinism. According to this formula, free will and individual agency get short shrift. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians, who are also determinist, saddle the state. “The State made me do it” is how such social determinism can be summed-up.

By the way, according to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, white, middle America is in big trouble too. It isn’t as criminal as black America, but it is shot through with illegitimacy, laziness, unemployment, family and marital disintegration, etc.

Gender Junk, Again

Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, Racism, Reason

It is impossible to distinguish the conservative from the liberal perspective on the gender issue. This was the theme of “The Tarts and ‘Tards’ of Hollywood.” Duly, Fox Business hammers away today at the glass ceiling fallacy, this time “the ceiling keeping women out of the C-Suite” is said to still “hover over the sharp-elbowed world of Wall Street.”

As with alleged racism, this is the post hoc, backward reasoning error in thinking, whereby discrimination or disadvantage is inferred from the absence of women—or any other group with grievances—from a certain sector.

Recall that, “Another of Obama’s economic prescriptions for a deepening depression was to sign a pay equity act, during which he carped that women still earn just ’78 cents for every dollar men earn?women of color even less.’ Such false assertions rely on comparisons of ‘the average wage of all women working fulltime with the average wage of all men working full time.'”

From “Barack Against The Boys”: “Scholarly reams have been written disputing this phony calculus, as it omits vital variables: How long the woman has been in the work force, her age, experience and education; or whether her career has been put on hold to marry and mother. Just as women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory, so too are they more inclined to enter lower-paying professions: education instead of engineering, for example.”

“Nonetheless, allow me to dispel distaff America’s claims of disadvantage with a decisive argument:

“If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.”

The Tarts and “Tards” of Hollywood

Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture

The following is from “The Tarts and “Tards” of Hollywood,” my latest column:

“…Hollywood had its Golden Age, back when well-written scripts reflected well-developed, multifaceted characters. Today, Tinseltown is a monolithic, left-liberal automaton, marching in thematic unison, and subjecting the viewer to the same impoverished, error-riddled, preachy themes.

The evidence is in. Activism and abreaction have replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories in the repertoire of the pretty, pea-brained community.

A giant digit wagging above a captive audience: that’s Hollywood.

The conservative-minded masochist comes to the cinema fully prepared to confront and forfeit his “fascist” sympathies. For example, in the 2008 flick “Conspiracy,” the battle is between the forces of absolute evil and pure good, in the border state of another “evil” governor.

Representing the open-border sensibility is Val Kilmer, a superhuman, super-good, Iraq war veteran. Standing in for the border-control, stark-raving crazies is an all-American, Arian, gang of war-profiteering developers.

Yet, in book-after-book, the “conservative” case against Hollywood consists, mainly, in reiterating the facts of this faction’s liberalism. Unless a protagonist is against G-d or for abortion, conservatives are culturally deaf to the piffle spewed by the pea-brained community.

What do I mean?

On a meta-level, Hollywood’s “angels and demons” productions have helped create a parallel universe willingly inhabited by our countrymen, conservative and liberal alike.

Consider the gender junk percepts. Did not the commentariat, conservatives and liberals, come together over Sen. Rick Santorum’s so-called archaic ideas on women in the fighting force? …”

Read the complete column, “The Tarts and “Tards” of Hollywood.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.