Category Archives: The Zeitgeist

UPDATE II: Pleasure Me, Now!

Debt, Education, Ethics, Federal Reserve Bank, Morality, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The following is from my new, WND column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”:

“Our society revolves around the pleasure principle. Unless something is pleasurable, it excites suspicion and is deemed unworthy of pursuit. This is one reason so many American youngsters entering the job market are dumb, difficult and will be, ultimately, dispensable. They’ve been taught, by parents and pedagogues — falsely — that learning and work must be jolly fun all the time. If your field of endeavor is no fun, quit it.

Anyone who has studied seriously, or worked to master a craft, knows that nothing worth learning or mastering is easy or enjoyable, at first — unless you’re a genius, a natural, or both. Most of us are not. For proof of the fact of mediocrity, look no further than the normal distribution, the Bell Curve.

With mastery, however, comes enjoyment. And mastery generally means hard work.

‘The value of hard work is overrated. Laziness is the mother of invention’: these were riffs offered up against my case by one of the bloggers at BarelyABlog.com. The writer, a physicist, makes my point for me: He happens to be a relative of Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics!

No, not everyone can ‘work smart.’ Whereas graft is within each person’s reach; genius is not.

The pleasure principle is at play in the realm of both personal and public finances. Saving for the future is not fun. It means postponing pleasure for the sake of solvency or other more ambitious future gains.

Tellingly, a survey by the ‘National Foundation for Credit Counseling’ has revealed that … ’26 percent of adults in the U.S. admit that they’re spending more than they did a year ago. And 40 percent of consumers are still battling unpaid credit card debt month to month.'” …

Read the complete column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”, on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (April 22): In the Comments section, Annette makes important points. Running my own tiny enterprise, as I do, I agree with her. When us oldies die-out, the American workforce is close to toast! However, home-schooled kids give me hope. I’m working with one such gentleman (a kid, really) whose work ethic, method of problem solving, and cognitive skills match mine. As my husband would put it, “A normal person.” But the “mature” “professionals” who came before him, all with fancy offices downtown, gave new meaning to the concept of outsourcing.

Let me parrot, once again, “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”:

“The hybrid, hi-tech workforce ? comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent ? is manned, generally, by terribly smart older people with advanced engineering degrees. Yes, the people designing gadgets for our grandiose gimps are often Asians, many of whom are older. They beaver away under fewer, also terribly smart, older Americans. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.
My source in the industry tells me that the millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity. I am told too that for every useless, self-important millennial, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings.
Let the lazy American youngster look down at his superiors, and live-off his delusions and his parents. His young Asian counterpart harbors a different sensibility and skill; he is hungrily learning from his higher-ups with a view to displacing artificially fattened geese like Meghan McCain.”

UPDATE II (April 23): Myron, Right you are. My source behind enemy lines—one of the biggest, most prestigious American corporations—is reduced to working in his garage, where he has better lab equipment, solving the company’s technical problems.

UPDATED: The Babes Leading The Blind

English, Free Markets, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Literature, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, The Zeitgeist

With apologies in advance to all non-human primates. In the quest for the lowest common denominator, mainstream American publishers will publish the musings of a monkey, or worse: a small boy. Colton Burpo, barely out of short pants, is the “author” of a best seller, “Heaven is for Real.” ALLEGEDLY, this “four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor, during emergency surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.'” Yeah, I kid you not.

The only scientific variable worth noting in this equation is the fact of a father with a vested interest in the belief system. (Hypothesis: Boys whose fathers believe are more likely to develop after-life ideation than boys whose parents don’t believe. Examine whether the difference between the groups is statistically significant.)

The same awe accorded to the Nobel Savage and to the natural world is accorded in American culture to The Child, who is seen as possessing uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom.

Heaven help us! Errant adults elevate infants as philosopher kings.

I love the free market, as was said here, but faith in the free market need not require a nearly equal faith in popular culture. Why does it follow that a product produced and exchanged in the process of making a living must inspire faith? More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art, pop culture, or literature. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers.

Aguilera (Christina) sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney and Burpo outdo Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

Seriously, that America’s adults are reading this tripe (and bopping in front of a TV screen using Microsoft Kinect) goes a long way to explain a hell of a lot.

UPDATED: Guys, you’re missing the point: the problem here is not the issue of faith in the afterlife; it’s the publishing of this tyke. A nation that looks to kids for spiritual, intellectual, and moral guidance is a nation without any idea of ordered liberty, which demands a certain hierarchy in terms of age, intelligence, experience, knowledge, etc. It’s something the Japanese know about. Adults should not be reading books written by kids.

UPDATED: The Tyrant’s Intellectual (& Non-Egghead) Enablers

Celebrity, Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Much has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)

“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”

READ ON.

[SNIP]

Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

There are other culprits, of course.

UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.

UPDATE II: Oscar Offal (Salutations From the Stutterers)

Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Previously, I watched the Grammys for you guys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.)

The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of “The King’s Speech”). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in-sync with the times, I know.

The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture.

The last simply superb picture I watched was “The Secret In Their Eyes,” a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Naturally I will be on the lookout for more such gems in this category.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): TRUE PUKE.
Mike D.: For me film is not really about striking the right ideological tone; it’s about weaving a yarn and avoiding that wagging ideological finger. I will not be lectured by pin-heads. I’d like them to weave a story that I have not figured out in the first 5 minutes.

I would never watch—much less wax fat about (as some libertarians have been doing)–“Atlas Shrugged” when placed in the hands of Hollywood. (I believe Dagny takes to green energy, or something along those lines.) And the snippet I saw of the “You Go Girl,” aka “True Grit,” was the standard emotional rubbish from Hollywood. Mike, you seem no longer able to even detect the abiding themes that ought to repulse you: young courageous girl sets lax, libertine, drunk adult on the right track and awes all with her moral certitude. They should provide vomitoria in the cinema for this kind of fare.

Such hackneyed, corrupting pabulum ought to repel the intelligent viewer. It’s Hollywood’s revival of the Noble Savage, only applied to kids; they are always the prescient sages; adults are the dolts needing the guidance and direction of babes barely out of diapers. Puke.

And if saintly, snotty-nosed kids are not enough, then you have “The Social Network”: fast talking, hubristic Millennials, making, if to go by Mike’s advisory, “profound” statements about the Culture of the Commons. Yeah, that’s just what I crave. Wisdom from Meghan McCain’s peers. Remember the dot.com kids to whom errant adults were praying, not so long ago?! Get a grip!

UPDATE II: Salutations From the Stutterers. A disease has been born. A new adversity to diagnose, medicate, write soppy stories and scripts about overcoming, launch campaigns for, and discuss, if you are lucky, while plonked on Oprah’s load-bearing couch.