Category Archives: Intelligence

A Bum’s Rush To Pope Francis

Capitalism, Christianity, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Private Property, The State, Uncategorized

In his 1998 encyclical, “Faith and Reason,” Pope John Paul spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought. While Karol Wojtyla’s role in the fall of communism is likely exaggerated, he was no communist. Pope Benedict XVI was—still is— a great intellect, who took a risk in attempting to explain why “Islam may be a closed and irrational system, impermeable to reform.”

Pope Francis, the new Holy See, is no match to his predecessors. In fact, Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be more of a bumpkin than expected.

Courtesy of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh comes Pope Francis’ “latest papal offering”:

Pope Francis attacked unfettered capitalism as ‘a new tyranny’ and beseeched global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality, in a document on Tuesday setting out a platform for his papacy and calling for a renewal of the Catholic Church. … In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the ‘idolatry of money.'” … “Pope Francis said that trickle-down policy…” We hear about trickle-down policies? “Pope Francis said that trickle-down policies have not proven to work.”

Preached Pope Francis: “I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: `Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs,’ said Francis, quoting the fifth-century St. John Chrysostom.”

In other words, the livelihood for which a successful man labors belongs not to him, but to the poor and their benevolent proxy: the government. Some doctrine that is.

Rightly, Rush rails against the Pope. Read on.

UPDATE II: ‘The New Hunger Games: Empty Calories’

Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Pop-Culture

I was unable to endure more than 15 minutes of the first, much-ballyhooed Hunger Games. Much to the consternation of the company present, I muttered about obedient America in-thrall to DC warfare propaganda. Writes Steve Sailer about the next installment: “Like the Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games young-adult novels are aimed at 12-year-old female readers. This puts the movies squarely in the intellectual wheelhouse of average Americans, a sizable fraction of whom don’t read much at all”:

… Perhaps we might eventually see a smile from Jennifer Lawrence (no relation to Francis), the Oscar-winning (Silver Linings Playbook) actress who plays the PTSD-addled heroine Katniss Everdeen.

Much of Lawrence’s star appeal to teenagers comes from being a normal-looking pretty American girl, a Homecoming-Queen-second-runner-up type. Her apple-cheeked face is distinctive mostly for her wide, well-padded cheekbones.

Since she’s only 23, everybody predicts a great career for her. But she strikes me as a girl built more for comfort than for speed, one whom Hollywood will hound to keep her weight down, with unpredictable consequences. Already, they seem to be doing something strange with her face. Lighting? Makeup? Digital manipulation in postproduction? Collagen injections? Beats me, but ever since X-Men: First Class she hasn’t looked the same as she did in her early low-budget films Winter’s Bone and The Beaver.

… Perhaps The Hunger Games works best as an allegorical critique of poor dumb Red State Americans volunteering to serve in the Capitol’s wars without even getting a cut of the Beltway’s black-budget contracts.

Thus the heroine is never tempted to side with the rich and powerful, although you can’t really credit her for that considering their taste in couture. The Capitol denizens are addicted to godawful conspicuous consumption rather than to the current status system in which you show off what esoterica you notice (how much carbon was emitted bringing your carrots to market, for instance) and all the massive facts you ostentatiously fail to notice.

Conversely, the movie’s portrayal of West Virginians is straight out of a Works Progress Administration writers’ project. The mountaineers are all hardworking coal miners. Nobody is on disability due to morbid obesity. The working class isn’t trapped in a web of invisible debt, they aren’t having their heavy industry jobs outsourced, nor are they having new populations insourced. In other words, there’s little to unsettle contemporary viewers in The Hunger Games. …

MORE.

UPDATE I (11/29): Facebook thread. I hate allegories; libertarian, left or right. They’re cumbersome, inorganic, artificial—all the more so when done by dumb Hollywood types. A movie has to present a good script and story and be well acted and well-put together. I don’t want symbolism. Stay away from politics, Hollywood. Above all, to please my tastes, it has to resemble reality. That’s the general rule, although I have been known to lose myself in “Avatar” lately. Never watched it when it came out. I think it’s b/c the actual scenario is a possibility; man destroying other civilizations and animals has happened—still does. Kerry: You are right. I deserve a medal for watching the bit of Hunger foolishness I watched.

UPDATE II: Kerry Crowel, I was a kid when Ingmar Bergman was popular in Israel. I recall trying to read subtitles and figure out the agonized themes and plots. (And fiddle the bunny rabbit TV antenna to get a picture.) A lot like a Nordic Chekhov he was. Actually, whatever he did, Bergman was way too sophisticated to compare to “Hunger Games.” More in the league of Fellini, who also delivered plots that made you forget the symbolism behind it. It wasn’t labored. You could still get absorbed in the plot. The reason I like a straightforward plot these days (then I was able to watch Bergman starring Liv Ullmann) was b/c simple is all the current crop can manage. I do like thrillers. I confess.

Idiots Amplify Each Other

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Gender, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Reason, Republicans

Do you find yourself listening to TV talkers and trying to decipher word-salads that result from linguistic imprecision and irrational thought processes?

DANA DITZ PERINO stood in for Gretta Van Susteren (whose viewers detected ditz material). She chatted to an affiliate about the Knock-Out Game, or polar-bear hunting. This last term, devised by perps way cleverer than Perino, is wonderfully precise.

The ensuing conversation was one that could only have taken place between two ditzes. The idiot effect was exponential. Each woman, Dana and Fox affiliate fool, bounced stupid stuff off the other.

Soon the women were nodding over the apparent need to look into the Knock Out game, It warranted an investigation, repeated Dana’s buxom interlocutor, again and again. In order to help her think remotely logically, Danna needs smarter people around. In the absence of such a quantity, she just nodded and paraphrased her friend. The two rehashed the wisdom of investigation the attacks.

None mentioned that “polar-bear hunting” was played by black youth at the expense of Other, Paler People. I could be wrong (no video clip or transcript is available), but I believe the words, “boys behaving badly” were mouthed a few times too. (Only 5 or so deaths so far, so yeah, like, yeah, bad behavior, for sure.)

‘Blackout’: Are Reality Defying Libertarians Doomed To Extinction?

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Objectivism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race

Some simple-minded, lite libertarians feel (for they do not think) that describing race reality is a feature of a collectivist habit of mind. Crimes described by their perpetrators as “polarbearing” or Jew hunting, these libertarians refuse to frame in anything but race-neutral terms.

Oh Buddha!

Imagine. You walk past a feral gang of black youths, like the ones depicted in all these terrifying YouTube clips. You smile bravely, place hands on honky ears and hum loudly as you walk by, until… you are coshed on the head by a black youth. Then another. And another.

As you fall to your knees near death, you congratulate yourself on cleaving not to reality, but to a dumb “theory” instead. You die a happy person, redeemed by piety.

These self-styled individualists—it must be clear that such left-libertarians are genuine idiots, not real individualists—may be doomed to extinction. Those derided as “collectivists”—as in a person who cleaves to reality—will likely outlive the self-sacrificing individualists among us. Sacrificed to an idea that has no basis in reality.