Category Archives: Pseudo-intellectualism

Updated: Sean's Porn Pinup

Aesthetics, Hollywood, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, Sex

Kim Karsashian appeared on Sean Hannity’s ostensible news hour, and was praised by the anchor as a role model for “young girls” (read: budding sluts). With reference to this not unfamiliar sight on FoxNews, Richard Spencer, editor of Taki’s Magazine, Writes: “After this, Sean might wanna make some personnel changes in his Research department.” I think not. Has any one seen “the succession of vacuous, narcissistic, pig-ignorant panelists paraded on Sean Hannity’s ‘Great American Panel‘”? The cheap and nasty looking Kim Karsashian belongs on FoxNews, alongside that cable channel’s anchor ladies, and its chosen bimbo commentators who dress and behave a little like Karsashian.

For example, Geraldo is especially attached to a psychologist—a buxom, surgically altered, grotesque blond, who was once a playmate pinup. O’Reilly makes a mockery of the already ridiculous culture-warrior concept by dragging onto the set a very eager, slutty, East-European Internet exhibitionist to impart her “knowledge” of the English language, no less.

In “CREEPING PORN AND THE CABLE NEWS NETWORKS” I wrote:

The girl on the screen could have been a Fox News anchorwoman, although she was by far prettier and less vulgar looking than the coarse loudmouths, whose lipstick-dripping mouths deliver, in fog-horn decibels, slogans like: “We Report, You Decide” and “Fair and Balanced.”

Appearing on “Your World” with Neil Cavuto, porn star Sunrise Adams attempted, rather touchingly, to play down her cheap hooker looks and sorry syntax with a pair of nerdy spectacles. But while she used the standard, dizzy, woman’s magazine self-realization routine to describe her occupation—“this is a pastime for me. This is just something for me to do and enjoy and to grow with”—it was her host, Cavuto, who was responsible for rolling out the welcoming waterbed for the porn star and her pimp, Steve Hirsch, co-founder of Vivid Entertainment.

But Fox is “sexing up” more than just news. It’s customary to see the skanky Jamison as a commentator on the E! Networks programs, but the news cable networks, with Fox in the lead, are not far behind. These faux-conservatives are certainly helping to mainstream society’s more dubious members. The class act that is Martha Stewart, for instance, is routinely derided on Fox. Their choice of ‘Lifestyle Guru’? The rotting flesh that is Gene Simmons of the band ‘Kiss.'”

FoxNews is full of big, mediocre egos who feel good around pea-brained, Jenna-Jamison lookalikes.

Update (August 24): Conservatives never tire of touting Miley Cyrus as another example of wholesomeness. They were furious with me for suggesting, in “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” that Miley Cyrus be exported to China:

What an excellent preemptive strike that would be. You just know that before long we’re going to be forced to partake in the awakening of yet another vacuous narcissist who flaunts her character flaws, and other folds, before millions of video voyeurs. A Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan in the making.

Admittedly, I know very little about “Hannah Montana” and her handlers. What I’ve seen of the overbearing, extremely precocious, brassy, and not very bright Miley Cyrus doesn’t conjure the “wholesome” descriptive. When I think of “wholesome,” I think of, say, Martina McBride. Miley in various states of undress, nestled in the arms of father Billy Ray Cyrus, gazing at him seductively—this may be cringe-making, but not surprising.

As for the whole blame Dad and Disney thing: Adopted by left and right alike, the paternalistic depiction of women as passive agents, demeaned by male-driven appetites, is feminist fiction. Miley Cyrus may be 15, but she’s a single-minded exhibitionist, propelled by the fame thing. She’s been raised like that. In all likelihood, Miley originated the idea of posing for Vanity Fair and would not stop pestering pappy until he relented. The typical American parent treats his teenager like a Delphic oracle. Any parent who has such a demigod under construction knows I’m right.

Those who persist in the he-done-me-wrong routine don’t have teenagers. Or are oblivious to the reversal in parent-child roles that has come to typify the dynamics in the American family.

In any event, as Lou Dobbs often exhorts, it’s time to get tough on China. I say let’s get dirty. Export Miley to China. What better way to addle the young minds of the competition?”

CHECK OUT this soft porn, suggestive, father-daughter tease. Tender, isn’t it? (NOT: this is twisted):

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

Update III: Ass-troturfers

Conspiracy, Democrats, Economy, Healthcare, Media, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason, Socialism

I’m talking about the media. The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that end up becoming part of the narrative and serving to fuse fact with fancy. I refer to the way town hall attendees against Obama Care are being discounted as stooges for “corporate interests.”

It was wicked when the neocons presented antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan as something other than what she was. And it is execrable now that MSNBC is tarring impassioned Americans on the Right as something other than what they are. It doesn’t matter with which small or large groups these protesters, left and right, seek solidarity and solace. What matters is the case they present against socializing medicine. The rest is just ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US is at.
I don’t care if George Soros, as alleged by this neocon outfit , came to back Sheehan. Her cause was just. She spoke extremely well against the ongoing travesty in Iraq.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow intoned like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their little foot soldiers conspiring against state health care. The forces of darkness against the forces of light. She arrived at her scoop by following a few links on the internet and ominously reading out some posts, which she framed as secret memos. Unlike comrade Keith, at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of those evil corporatists. And how delightful he turned out to be. “Do the oil companies fund us? No, but I’d love them to. I urge them to support us.” And so he went.

She looked confused. (Rachel’s inner voice: “When will all this free exchange of funds be outlawed? Oh pretty please, Obamby.”) But at least she was a good sport, which is more than one can say about Chris Trickle-Down-The-Leg-For-Obama Matthews and other Obamaheads.

I must say, Maddow is so smarmy and self-satisfied. I can’t bear to watch her coiling and uncoiling as she expounds ominously on conspiracies that are really unremarkable events and associations.

Update I (August 10): The woman of the frozen face and equally unsupple mind—Nancy Pelosi—has teamed up with the Ring Leader, Steny Hoyer (House majority leader), to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American.” As if the number of podiums the parasitical class monopolizes were not enough, the parrot press has given another sizable platform to this excuse of a team: “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Pay attention to how the dastardly duo:

• Conflates the political will with the will of the people. (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care.”)
• Dishonestly fails to acknowledge that the protests mirror the polls:

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that more Americans disapprove (50%) than approve (44%) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy. There is a tremendous partisan gap in these views, with 74% of Democrats but only 11% of Republicans approving. Independents are more likely to disapprove than to approve of Obama’s work on healthcare.

• Contends that health care drives our economy. In truth, production should drive a healthy economy, not consumption of services. The former enables the latter.
• Sell yet another government program as salvation for the nation’s ills. If you believe them, you deserve what they dish. The problem is, you intend to force your choice on me and mine; sell me into serfdom, using the power of the state to get your way.

Update II (August 11): SVENGALI SHIFTS INTO CAMPAIGN MODE. Obama showed his hand by emphasizing during his Town Hall that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group of people.

Naturally, MSNBC took him at his word, reporting enthusiastically on how little resistance BO met. Outside the Obama town hall the country was roiling—still is. Inside the Barack Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brain waves.

Tucker Carlson, who works for MSNBC and has certainly worked the political system, was unable to back-up the line the Obama organ—also his employers—was peddling. Most presidential town halls are screened and packed with supported, said Carlson. BO has just joined the rest in lying about the practice.

As BO’s charmed political life continues—suspended as he is in a third dimension—one of the few honest Republicans, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, confronted a more realistic setting. I say honest, because all Republicans bar a handful fit in the camp to which Specter defected.

In any event, Specter provided some much-needed comic relief. When asked by a patriot what he was going to do “to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution,” Specter replied: “When you ask me to defend the Constitution, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

That’s rich.

Note how Specter, like a true pol, “vowed he would never support any bill that increased the federal deficit or took away a person’s right to choose their health care coverage.”

And indeed, once the lumbering juggernaut of government-run health care becomes a fait accompli, Specter and his ilk will be perfectly correct to say that when they signed off on this violation of rights and usurpation of authority, he was promised the “reform” would not become a public plan.

This is just how the Hildebeest and her Democratic warmongers excused their vote to give George authority to go to war in Iraq: “We were betrayed; we had been told the power would not be abused.”

These people are beyond contempt.

Update III (August 12): TAMRON TITS-HALL is an MSNBC host. Tits-Hall’s beauty is inversely related to her brain power. (The combination of beauty and brains is as rare as it is lethal, I paraphrase Peter Brimelow.) But in the Age of the Idiot she fits right in. (Whereas some MSNBC babes are lovely, Foxette News anchors, I would argue, sport the porn look. They are molded in the Hugh Hefner mold: vulgar but fit for You Know What. This Fox News aesthetic is one of the few issues of disagreement with my good friend, Prof. Paul Gottfried. I think the pea brain Kirsten Powers is a dreadfully plain girl. Alex Witt, on the other hand, has going for her that Lara loveliness from “Dr. Zhivago.”)
But I digress. Here is Tamron; a beauty. Here are her fans; brainless..

I arrive, after that bit of titillation, at Tamron’s portion of the week (that’s what we Jews call a weekly segment read from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue). First she and David Shyster peddled the propaganda that healthcare protesters had been bussed in by political operatives. Now they concede that these angry “un-American” Americans are simply stupid. Tits-Hall, who could never be called simple (read what her fans say about her clever cleavage), believes “these people,” clearly alien to a member of the “multicultural noise machine,” don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are run by government; and they don’t get that INsurance (why do Americans place the emphasis incorrectly on the first syllable of this word?) is a third-party entity.

And this is reportage in the age of the idiot.

Your retort to Tits-Hall:

• From the fact that VA hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that incorporating more of the industry into the state gulag is insignificant, negligible, or that protest is rendered meaningless. Tits-Hall is one big non sequitur, which should be your most used word in the Age of the Idiot.
• The fact that there is already one mediating entity between doctor and patient does not mean that another, subject to all the wrong incentives, ought to be introduced.

Don’t count on Tits-Hall or Shyster to comprehend a reasoned argument.

Libertarian 'Idiocracy' Rising

Intelligence, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The West, The Zeitgeist

Over the pixelated pages of Barely A Blog and IlanaMercer.com, I’ve devoted time and effort to elucidating where libertarianism has gone wrong. The sexy, rah-rah, fist-in-the air aura of anarchism has attracted the worst to the movement. My own readers are constantly seduced and pulled back, on BAB, from the brink of errant thinking—as when they fall into pacifism or social determinism.

Then there are the dumbing-down forces that have taken their toll on the Zeitgeist in general. In America, and elsewhere, we are in the throes of an era that elevates and celebrates the worst of humanity, man and woman; intellect and ethics. To get an exaggerated sense of what the consequences of such a persistent upheaval in the natural order, I recommend my all-time favorite social commentary, “Idiocracy.” Comedic reductio ad absurdum is better than the kind of social science-cum-social engineering produced these days by the likes of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam.

After that prelude, please take a look at what goes for gritty libertarian thought on the website of The Examiner: “Is cannibalism really wrong or just taboo?”

An intellectual pygmy and shock jock gets a forum. An even stupider editor believes musing about cannibalism is edgy and exciting. Your main deduction here as far as libertarianism goes must not involve libertarian legal theory. For the act of cannibalism should go unpunished only in extremis—where the individual would not survive unless he indulges.

Otherwise, a society that is reduced to the skeletal essence of the non-aggression axiom is not a civil society, but an “Idiocracy.” (Bless Mike Judge for that stroke of genius.)