Category Archives: Intelligence

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.

Correction, Gov. Christie: It’s Obama The Liar Talking

Barack Obama, Education, Healthcare, Intelligence, Media, Morality, Propaganda, Republicans

“That’s Barack Obama the lawyer talking” was the crappy Chris Christie’s explanation to the attempts of the president to finesse the lies he told at least 24 times about his subjects’ ability to hang on to their health-care.

Correction Gov. Christie: It’s Obama the liar talking.

CNN knows who to go to in order to bolster the narrative that the nitwork has been promoting: The Anointed One merely misspoke when he roared repeatedly, from 2009 through to 2012:

“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it. Or, “If you got health insurance and you like your plan and like your doctor, you will keep your plan, you will keep your doctor.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper is obviously—and energetically—collecting affidavits for his nitwork’s favorite man. Who else to galvanize but a character like New Jersey Gov. Christie, who is an expert at lying about lying? Here’s what that mountain of opportunistic flesh told Tapper:

“Don’t be so cute,” Christie said. “And when you make a mistake, admit it. Listen, if he was mistaken in 2009, 2010 on his understanding of how the law would operate, then just admit it to people. Say, ‘You know what? I said it, I was wrong. I’m sorry and we’re going to try to fix this and make it better.’ I think people would give any leader in that circumstance a lot of credit for just, you know, owning up to it.”

Tapper referenced Obama’s revision last night of his “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge.

“Don’t lawyer it,” Christie continued. “People don’t like lawyers. I’m a lawyer. They don’t like ‘em. You know? Don’t lawyer it. When I saw that this morning—I saw that this morning for the first time, and I thought, he’s lawyering it. That’s Barack Obama the lawyer.”

I love the way everyone reverentially alludes to the president’s former profession, as though he was anything but a lawyer with no private-practice or scholarly achievements, and a subpar university teacher with bad ratings from students:

During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, [Obama’s] student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest ranked professors in his last 5 years at the university. As we already know … [Barack Obama] left no record of legal scholarly writings.