Category Archives: Pop-Culture

UPDATE II: Libertarianism Lite Likely Won’t Cut It

Constitution, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Ron Paul, Sex, Terrorism, The Zeitgeist

Some libertarians dream that the establishment-endorsed libertarianism-lite, currently being touted on Fox News- and Business as the only legitimate strand of libertarianism, will catch-on in this America. Dream on.

Liberty loving adults in the US tend not to identify with fast-talking youths, wearing trendy eye-wear, who insist that the cultural foot-and-mouth that is “Glee” and Gaga is the very essence of American freedoms and liberties. (Anyone who has ever read this space knows that I don’t have any objection to risque expression; only to artistically worthless cultural products.)

Granted, life-style libertarians come in all shapes and sizes; they are often older, but are always juvenile. In the country’s founding documents, they divine all kinds of exhortations to let it all hang out. Much as the Left does.

If I’ve learned anything about what remains of Middle America, it is that ordinary, gun-toting, homeschooling, bible-thumping Americans are unmoved by people who draw their paycheques from foundations, think tanks, and academia, and wax orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman. Although it might appear sophisticated, this stuff is reductive and shallow—a kind of post-graduate cleverness that lacks any philosophical depth.

Life, liberty, property: that’s what negative liberty is all about. The rest is either fluff or ancillary.

True, libertinism can be freeing in many ways, but forgotten by left-libertarians (I prefer libertarians lite; it’s more accurate) is this: libertinism is subsumed within a larger, more-inclusive category of liberty.

Besides, joining the Idiocracy is never liberating. Things that addle the brain permanently are, ultimately, not liberating.

(And what’s up with Nick Gillespie’s less than harsh words about the War on Terror? On Fox News’ Stossel, Gillespie seemed to second the general impetus of the War on Terror. He also went soft on the TSA, protesting only that a well-intentioned effort (TSA) had gone terribly wrong. Wrong! The War on Terror is an unconstitutional crock that guarantees the growth of the state. The TSA is engaged in legalized crime and needs to be dismantled, its goons jailed for each assault perpetrated.)

As I noted, when defending Ron Paul, in 2008, from attacks by the same libertarians,

Beltway libertarians … are moved in mysterious ways by gaping borders, gay marriage, multiculturalism, cloning, and all else “cool and cosmopolitan.”
Judging by Reason’s “35 Heroes of Freedom,” “cool and cosmopolitan” encompasses William Burroughs, a drug addled, Beat-Generation wife killer, whose “work is mostly gibberish and his literary influence baleful.”
Madonna Reason has exalted for, as they put it, leading “MTV’s glorious parade of freaks, gender-benders, and weirdos who helped broaden the palette of acceptable cultural identities and destroy whatever vestiges of repressive mainstream sensibilities still remained.” That sounds like the unscrambled, strange dialect spoken by a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.

[Or is it “Womin’s Studies”?]

Naturally, I’m down with any lifestyle the individual chooses, just so long as he or she doesn’t visit violence on others (as the TSA does). But to conflate low-culture and manifest ignorance with American liberties is asinine. (And very much the essence of life-style libertarianism.) As the libertarian law goes, all human beings have the freedom to act-out in anyway they like, so long as they abide by the non-aggression axiom.

Personally, I favor discretion. For if “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, then sexual—or any other—exhibitionism is anathema.

UPDATE I (June 29): Tom DiLorenzo has blogged the this post at LewRockwell.com:

“Fast-Talking Youths Wearing Trendy Eye-Wear . . .
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo on June 29, 2011 02:42 PM

.. and “waxing orgiastic about MTV and Dennis Rodman” on the FOX networks. That’s how Ilana Mercer describes the Kochtopusian “libertarian lite” crowd of Beltway “libertarians.” They’re the same crowd that orchestrated a vicious smear campaign against Ron Paul, as Ilana discusses.
Ilana’s just-released book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, is a must-read. Among the “blurb”writers who praise the book on the first few pages are yours truly, Tom Woods, Thomas Szasz, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

UPDATE II (June 30): ANARCHISM. In reality, working as we are with so few options, there is not much that separates the classical liberal (your host, Mises, etc.) and the anarchist (Rothbard, LRC). The wise, freedom-loving thinker knows this, and works to optimize collaboration. However, as someone who was once an anrachist, and had reconsidered, after careful thought, turning to liberalism in the classical (and American) tradition, my thoughts on anarchism may be of interest.

Here they are in “AGAINST ANARCHISM.”

“Do Immigration Laws Violate Libertarian Axiom” is another relevant read. Ditto my immigration archive, the articles in which advance (unanswered) arguments as to why humanity does not have the right to venture wherever, whenever.

UPDATED: Engorged Organisms & The Porn Aestehtic

Aesthetics, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The genus Rep. Anthony Weiner, an “engorged organism” indigenous to DC, has an exotic-looking, ravishing mate. (Full image posted below.) But men—at least American men—prefer what I’ve termed (in “Sluts Galore”) the porn aestehtic:

Ideas about feminine beauty are bust. The sublime 1350 B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti showcases her fine cheekbones and graceful neck. Her Western contemporary look-a-like, down to the perfectly shaped dainty face, was Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve embodied the French ideal of female beauty, immortalized in the bust of Marianne.
But forget these regal beauties; they, apparently, have nothing on the double-chinned, large, flat expanses that make up Britney Spears’ crude mug. Nefertiti, Hepburn, Deneuve—your patrician pulchritude no longer excites the “porn generation”; the sly, weasel-like looks of a Paris Hilton do.
The culture’s aesthetic preferences are now shaped by the basest of instincts. I call it the porn aesthetic, another example of which is Hue Hefner’s harem of hos. The three kept creatures are currently starring in a reality show called “The Girls Next Door” …

MORE…

UPDATE: The addiction excuse is just that: an excuse and an error. (Read “Evil, Not Ill.”) The liberal establishment—it includes Republicans and Democrats—has accepted that all bad behavior is a disease. From lying to murder: every bit of human nastiness is said to be a biological-based disorder. The premise for this conceit is the Rousseauist notion that humans are all equally good and would remain pristine if not for external agents, namely biological or societal forces. The problem is, as I have shown in my writing, and Dr. Thomas Szasz has done over the course of half a century: there is no basis for this claim—not in biology, much less in morality.

I quote from “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.

Conservative Hollywood Hooey?

Conservatism, Gender, Hollywood, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist

The “case that Hollywood is liberal” is hardly novel or new, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg observes about Ben Shapiro’s book “Primetime Propaganda.” I’m not even sure that getting “a whole bunch of liberal Hollywood muckety mucks to confess their very liberal agenda” serves to out these shameless idiots.

Does Shapiro get at the core of the problem?

One aspect is that, as I wrote, “Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.”

However, there’s more to it. Does Shapiro enunciate the fact that on a meta-level, Hollywood’s increasingly impoverished scripts, with few exceptions, have indeed created a parallel reality, one that is increasingly reflected in real life (say, in the workplace)?

*Gender junk: Woman is brawny, brainy, and beautiful; man is a buffoon. An 80-pound waif manages to wallop a 200-pound gangster with no punctures to the silicone sacks. Her hulking cop partner trots after Great Woman obediently, and is forced to endanger his life to compensate for her lack of physical prowess in police work, firefighting, etc. As in “The Killing,” normalized is the dysfunctional life of the anemic, morose midget of a female detective, while her decent male partner, who ought to be her boss, is cast as the out-of-place brute.

*Junk Science: Take your pick. The choice is endless, from the multiple personality disorder falsehood, to the global-warming canard and the root-causes-of-terrorism rot, to the “diseasing” of all aspects of evil.

Who can forget James Cameron, who having “worked extensively with robot submarines,” imagined he could help the film directors of BP to plug the oil plume? Cameron’s plan included that liquid metal robot from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

*Good Government must always temper bad business.

*The canonization of kids and critters. In Hollywood’s case, America’s kids, who’ve never been dumber, are deified. The depiction of the natural world is a cartoon, festooned with errors and ignorance and plain delusions.

This Idiocracy was at work, I believe, in the film “Rio,” in which parrots, who resemble only humans and primates in their unique, brainy ability to manipulate objects with their adorable, human like digits—are depicted as having the claw-configuration of a common bird. Here my T. Cup is manipulating a toy block and reading Reisman’s Capitalism. (T. Cup has since grown his flight feathers and acquired 30 words, including sentences used in context, a feat Hollywood types would find hard to accomplish.)

Such was the ignorance of those who put this film together (and they call conservatives stupid?). Hollywood may mirror the cretinism of America at large, only many times amplified.

*General affirmation of slut and celebrity.

Alas, judging from their Bio information, too many Facebook friends who call themselves conservatives or libertarians profess to favoring movie and TV programing that does all of the above. Other than their penchant for FoxNews, the programing these Facebook friends favor and support is the most perverse of Hollywood programing (in terms of some of the parameters above).

My impression is that unless a protagonist is against G-d or for abortion, conservatives are culturally deaf to the piffle spewed by Hollywood pea brains. What’s more, conservatives are obsessed with Hollywood. If they were serious, they’d write Hollywood off—stop writing about these phony fools, begging them to grace their shows and panels, and simply withhold buying power by not purchasing/patronizing Hollywood’s crappy cultural products.

More later.

UPDATE III: Naipaul Right About Women Writers

English, Gender, Literature, Music, Pop-Culture, Reason

It is getting harder to tell men from women writers, as males have been so thoroughly feminized over the last couple of decades. Still, Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul is correct when he states the following: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” In general, you can indeed tell right away if what you’re reading was penned by a man or a woman. On the whole, the best writers have always been men, still are. I excerpt here from “The Silly Sex?,” in which I was way to kind:

Since 1950, women have won only five Nobels in literature. And some of those are questionable. How can one put Toni Morrison into the literary company of Patrick White, Albert Camus, and Isaac Bashevis Singer? In past years, the literature prize went to authors of the caliber of J. M. Coetzee, Günter Grass, and V.S. Naipaul. But last year, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the literature prize. I’m not suggesting the grumpy Jelinek is a fraud like Guatemalan leftist and Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Some of Jelinek’s dusty works, translated crudely into English, showcase some skill (if one can stomach the contrived subject matter). However, unlike her male predecessors, she is better known for politically correct posturing than for penning memorable works of literature.

Naipaul fingers women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world … that comes over in her writing too.” True. Sentimentality, moreover, accounts for why women (including those with the Y chromosome) are wont to misplace compassion. If you can’t think clearly, your feelings tend to be muddled and flimsy; your sense of justice is skewed too.

Mundane, mainstream media are furious with Naipaul. This Via NPR:

Alex Clark, a literary journalist, said: “It’s absurd. I suspect VS Naipaul thinks that there isn’t anyone who is his equal. Is he really saying that writers such as Hilary Mantel, A S Byatt, Iris Murdoch are sentimental or write feminine tosh?”

YES! When Vladimir Nabokov, Patrick White and Isaac Bashevis Singer died, I stopped reading novels.

As for non-fiction, Ann Coulter (and this writer) excepted, where is the woman who writes a strong, witty, wickedly funny column? Nowhere. Sure, I like Diana West a lot, but even she suffers from that singularly female proclivity to fixate obsessively on one issue only: Islam this; Islam that. On and on. All terribly important, but it can get repetitive. And that’s another thing: Non-fiction female writers cleave to a couple of easy, oft-charged subjects. Most steer clear of economics. (How many Amity Shlaes are there?) They simply don’t seem to have a wide array of interests. (I’ve covered Ann Coulter’s awful acolytes in many a blog post, “The Republican Tart Trust” is one.)

I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered, though: men generally prefer women who’re sentimental and unhinged, so long as they don’t have a better head than they do.

UPDATE I (June 3): Cross-posted on Facebook:

Has any of my Hebrew-speaking readers read Shmuel Yosef Agnon? Pure genius. Better than Naipaul. He was, of course, widely translated, as is all Hebrew literature. A translation would not do justice to Agnon’s use of the Hebrew language. But this was required reading when I was growing up. The current crop of Hebrew writers is as bad as their English, stream-of-consciousness counterparts.

Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, well before honoring females, however forgettable, became the rule.

UPDATE II: Myron, Ayn rand was one of the greatest essayists, showcasing a brilliant, unparalleled capacity to development a logical argument. But one would be less than honest as a writer—and fall into sycophancy—if one failed to mention that her style was a little dour, lacking in any humor. The classical liberal philosopher DAVID CONWAY alludes to this fact here.

UPDATE III: Rob, I do think Brookner is a genius. I devour her books. I discussed her with Derb, who, in my opinion, has mistaken her subject matter—the utter aloneness of a certain kind of character—for some sort of feminine preoccupation. However, Brookner has written equally of males in this predicament. I ventured that because our Derb is such a suave, confident gentleman, he does not empathize with the kind of person who is as alone as Brookner’s protagonists are. Needles to say, I do.