Let me get this straight: Republicans are allowed to swear like sailors when they feel the need, but if a Democratic President says the word “ass”, well, let us retire to the fainting couch! Well, that makes a ton of sense. I’m convinced!
Finally
An open letter
A Perfect Storm of Stupid
It’s always weird when one comes into contact with the way a rabid right-winger views the world; they just don’t see things the way the rest of the world sees them. At all. It’s often breathtaking and creates cognitive dissonance as on the one hand, one tries to formulate arguments against their clearly ludicrous positions, but on the other, one realizes that none of it will work in the slightest.
Case in point: Ben Shapiro’s list of the ten most overrated directors in history. Ben Shapiro is one of those people who thinks that every single thing under the sun needs to be examined for its conservativeness (or lack thereof), often with laughable results. Like this article. Here are some of his more laughable assertions (and most of them are terribly laughable):
On Ridley Scott:
Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments. He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces. Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess. Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff…Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through. Alien is slow. GI Jane is hysterically terrible. Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.
Nice editing there; Orlando Bloom isn’t in GI Jane but Kingdom of Heaven, which Ben disses two films previously on grounds that make clear, if you’ve actually seen KoH, that the only way Ben would approve would be if it depicted Muslims as murderous without exception and Christians as holy without exception. And thank God we have the Al Gore reference! Hoo-boy!!
On Michael Mann:
All style, no substance.
That’s always a pretty useless complaint, but it certainly indicates something about Ben that he couldn’t find any substance in Heat.
On David Lean
Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour. I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.
It’s not a mortal sin. It’s just stupid. Kind of like saying Hamlet is “less than a masterpiece”.
On Quentin Tarantino:
I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill. But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema. Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.
Given Ben’s all-too-obvious inability to read or watch a story, it certainly seems odd that he would quibble with Tarantino’s ability to tell one. But Pulp Fiction is pure story, brilliantly told. Ben’s babblings about plot make clear what’s happened: he’s failed to understand the movies he’s watching.
On Martin Scorsese:
Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching. Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me. The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.
Umm…no, it’s really not baffling at all. Unless you’re stupid, that is. As for Ben’s take on Goodfellas, well, I suspect there aren’t enough trees in the world to yield sufficient paper to contain a list of items that make Ben want to take a shower afterwards.
But his Number One choice for Overrated Directors is an utter hoot:
On…
…wait for it…
…oh my…
ALFRED HITCHCOCK!!!
He never made a great film. He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there…North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again. It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” Not so much for Hitchcock…Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.
So many assertions! Stephen King never knows where to go with his stories! North by Northwest relies too much on coincidence for an established fan of 24 like Ben Shapiro to follow! Rear Window taxes his ability to pay attention! Although, I suspect that last isn’t out of boredom; rather, I suspect that looking upon Grace Kelly gives Ben the urge to take one of those showers of his.
Share This Post
Pass it. Now.
I see, in various places, that deals are now in place to secure the 60 votes needed to end debate on the Health Care bill in the Senate. Setting aside the staggering insanity that we’ve now reached a place where the Senate requires a supermajority to do anything more than go to the bathroom, it’s time to lock down and get this thing done.
My take on the bill? It’s nowhere near perfect. I’d frankly like to see the French system adopted in the United States, but…well, I’m not in the mood to write a long post about what I want. The current bill doesn’t go far enough, and the process has been very ugly (Joe Lieberman is, in my mind, one of the vilest people in American public life), but it seems on the brink of having produced a bill that does get some good things done. I also note that the bill is, and should, in no way be the final word on health care in this country, just as the first Civil Rights bill in the 1950s was in no way the final word on that topic. If you can’t get everything you want, then it seems to me that at least getting some of what you want, or moving in the general direction of something that you want, is the clear course of action.
Some folks say “Oh, just kill the bill and start over”. That sounds great — well, no, it doesn’t, especially considering the stark reality that if this bill fails, there will be no “starting over”. There will be no rolling-up-of-the-sleeves, “Let’s get a better bill”. There will be blame, recriminations, head-shakings galore, triumphant nonsense by the Teabaggers…and then health care will again be seen as this toxic thing that no one dare touch for another sixteen years.
We got nowhere with this when I was 22. I’m 38 now, and I’d like to get somewhere, because if we go nowhere again, the fact is that it’s almost certain the topic won’t come up again until I’m well into my 50s. “This bill or a better bill” is not an option. The only option is “This bill, or no bill.”
So pass the damned bill.
Now.
(And for the love of God, start rewriting the Senate rules to get rid of the filibuster. It’s just nonsensical.)
Share This Post
Fly it.
Surely if the Supreme Court has affirmed the right to burn the flag — and rightly so, in my view — than one also has a right to fly the flag. When I first heard about this, I figured it was one of those hyper-anal Home Owner Assocations or whatever they’re called, the ones who get angry with you if you have a pink flamingo in your yard or if your grass is one half-inch too long or something. But no, this was an apartment manager specifically telling residents that they could not fly the American flag — in any form. Including car decals and the like.
I’m also unsurprised that the management person who made that decision wouldn’t speak to the press. Own your decisions, people.
(via)
Share This Post
Huh….
I’m as big a supporter of President Obama as anyone, but even so, it doesn’t seem to me that he has a record of accomplishment yet to warrant something like the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ll grant that he gives people “hope for a better future”, but I’d like to see how he does at actually giving people a better future, as opposed to hope for one. Still, congratulations to the President.
(Comments deactivated)
Share This Post
The wanking of the wankitrons
Color me kinda-sorta amused by the outbreak of right-wing joy at Chicago’s defeat (along with Tokyo and Madrid) for the hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games. First, there’s the odd spectacle that these people are actively rooting against the United States; further, there’s the perception on their part that this is all about Barack Obama when the Bush Administration was also supportive of the Chicago Olympic effort, because, you know, American Presidential administrations tend to be supportive of holding Olympics in America.
This whole thing is staggeringly silly, of course, but it’s precisely that silliness that is so revelatory of the rhetoric and the very thought behind it that now dominates the political right in this country. Their logic, on anything, boils down to exactly this:
PROPOSITION: Obama’s position on Issue X is ______.
THEREFORE: Our position on Issue X is the exact opposite of ______.
COROLLARY: No factual information about the world will dissuade us from believing the opposite of Obama’s position on Issue X.
SECOND COROLLARY: Any denial of what Obama wants, pertaining to Issue X, is a political win for us.
THIRD COROLLARY: Any denial of what Obama wants, pertaining to Issue X, is a colossal defeat for Obama and will be analyzed as a sign of how he will fare on all other Issues, no matter what those may be.
There is zero actual thought coming from the right these days. It’s all just a bunch of knee-jerk reaction to them: Find out what Obama wants, and then oppose it. No matter what it is. I swear, these people would cheer if Obama ordered a pepperoni pizza and the pizzeria sent him a mushroom pizza by mistake. There’s no sense of “Yes, this is an actual issue, but here’s how we think it should be solved.” There are no actual ideas on the right, aside from their continued religious belief that cutting taxes on rich people or bombing brown people will solve all problems. Nothing at all.
Especially interest to me is that third corollary up there. The theme of the day over at The Corner (where a number of the Right’s greatest idiots, including Jonah Goldberg, reside) was that somehow Obama’s failure to convince the Olympic Committee to award the games to Chicago somehow indicates something about the success of Obama’s future foreign policy. Matthew Yglesias has some examples, and then points out the sheer stupidity on display there:
These are lame jokes, yes, but I also think they reveal the profound misunderstanding of how international relations works that exists on the right. The competition to host the 2016 Olympics is just that, a competition. It’s a friendly competition, yes, but it’s still a competition. It’s zero sum. If Rio wins, then Chicago and Sao Paulo and Tokyo lose. But the overall relationship between the United States and Iran is not a zero-sum competition. A world in which Iran accepts verifiable safeguards on its nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees and a relaxation of American sanctions is a world in which both the United States and Iran wind up better off. A world in which the US and Iran cooperate in Afghanistan is a world is which both the United States and Iran wind up better off. If we fight in Iran, we both wind up worse off.
And now, even as I’m writing this, I see that Newt Gingrich is saying the same thing, via his Twitter account. Remember when Gingrich was “the guy on the right with the ideas”? Well, OK, I don’t either, but that’s how the media saw him, and that’s how they still see him, which is why the Twitter ramblings of a guy who was forced out of office by his own party more than ten years ago are still treated as newsworthy.
The Right’s desperate need to see everything as a defeat for Barack Obama is embarrassing enough, but their general levels of cognitive dissonance are downright troubling. During the campaign, there was lots of comment about Obama’s patriotism, or lack thereof, owing to the absence of a flag pin on the lapel of his jacket — but somehow, cheering for Chicago to lose the Olympic bid is also patriotic. I well remember the tantrums the right used to have, during the Bush years, whenever any Democrat traveled overseas and said virtually anything that they could construe as being critical of the Bush foreign policy — “Everybody should follow the President on foreign policy! Politics should stop at the water’s edge! They’re traitors!” I remember how un-American the Dixie Chicks were when one of them made an anti-Bush statement on the stage in Paris, but they sure lap it up when Sarah Palin criticizes Obama in Hong Kong. I will not be holding my breath, waiting for Republicans to denounce their own Senators who are traveling around the world to disrupt Administration policies.
Anyway, as for the Olympics themselves, congrats to Rio. I kind of hope they put the Olympic flame on top of Sugarloaf Mountain. But I also wonder if, given the apparently irritating political crap that’s going to come up every time a host city is chosen and given the fact that Olympics represent enormous expense to their host cities, maybe it’s time to simply put the Games someplace permanent — say, Athens. That would solve some problems, wouldn’t it? At least it would spare future US Presidents the unimaginable embarrassment of seeing their foreign policy credentials demolished by failing to secure a two-week quadrennial sporting event.
(Comments are shut off for this post.)
Share This Post
Seeking the Middle?
UPDATE: A correction is posted below.
An interesting discussion is going on at Tor.com over an old issue: should one make decisions on novels to read on the basis of the authors’ political views? Specific examples cited over there are Paul di Filippo, who recently edited an anthology book of “Mindblowing Science Fiction” stories whose main qualification for story selection was that the tales be “Mindblowing” — and yet the book included not a single story by a female SF author, and author John C. Wright, whose views on homosexuality are just slightly more tolerant than saying they should be stoned at dawn in the town square.
[Wright has since deleted a LiveJournal post of his that started some kind of free-for-all, but just that one; for a good notion of what kinds of things Wright believes, check out an older post of his in which he offers predictions for the next fifty years. Specifically, prediction #2 is entertaining: “The sexual revolution will be recognized as a complete failure. Monogamy and chastity will return as norms of behavior. Homosexuality will be reclassified as a mental disease.” (Emphasis mine.) And in comments, when someone notes that Wright’s predictions all seem pretty downbeat, he objects that Prediction #2 is a positive one. So he looks forward to the day when gays are once again seen as lunatics.]
The conversation ensuing in comments is interesting to follow. For one thing, it’s pretty civil. This is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years. After all, I love Richard Wagner’s music a great deal, and there’s no getting around the fact that Wagner was a shit. And while it’s tempting to say that the politics and the art don’t have to exist at the same time, many times they do; in Wagner, for instance, one can’t escape the man’s deification of All Things Teutonic. (Now, whether or not his personal antiSemitism is on display in his music has been debated for years, and I’m not equipped to weigh in on one side or the other in that debate.) But there’s something about Wagner that makes it a bit easier to get past all that, and that something is simply that Wagner lived in the 19th century, when views such as his, as odious as we see them now, were much more mainstream. It always seems a bit unwise to hold people of the past to higher moral standards on all issues. No one condemns the Founding Fathers for not realizing, right at the outset in 1787, that slavery should have been ended and blacks made citizens with all the rights and privileges thereof.
But it’s harder with those of our own time, isn’t it? Now, I’ve only tried to read one of John C. Wright’s books, and I bounced off it, five or six years ago. Many times when I bounce off a book I’ll make a note to return to it sometime later. Maybe I do get back to it, maybe I don’t — but in all honesty, my acquaintance with Wright’s views as I’ve seen his LiveJournal here and there over the last couple of years makes it highly unlikely that I’ll ever bother. But it’s simply not the case that Wright’s a conservative and I only read liberal authors; I love the work of Michael Flynn, who is certainly conservative. I felt no problem buying books published by Baen Books despite Jim Baen’s politics. Mark Helprin writes wonderful novels, and he’s a guy with whom I agree on approximately nothing. However, again likewise, I have no problem deciding that I loathe a writer’s views to the point where I simply won’t read them. That’s why I have not read a single word of Orson Scott Card since his How to Write Science Fiction, which I read fifteen years or so ago. I used to own a copy of Ender’s Game that I intended to read sometime, but I started bumping that down the priority list as I heard more and more about his loathing of gays as well. (It’s not all about writers who are homophobic, though. What finally made me put Ender’s Game on eBay without reading it was a global warming denialist screed Card wrote in which he referred to former Vice President Gore as “pond scum”.)
So what’s the difference here? Why will I read Flynn and Helprin but not Wright or Card? For one thing, there are degrees of belief. I doubt Flynn or Helprin are anywhere near as far to the right as Wright or Card are. More than that, there’s the way writers go about things. I once in a while find myself looking at a Card essay online, and I see the rantings of an arrogant prick. Same thing with Wright: his LiveJournal posts fill me with the sense of being in the presence of someone who is so self-impressed as to leave me looking for the nearest available exit. In a lot of ways, it goes to behavior more than the actual views, and this can actually happen on both sides of the specturm. It can, and it does. There is a film music record producer whose CDs I steadfastedly refuse to buy, because even though I agree with him across the board politically, I find his persona as I’ve encountered it online to be insufferably boorish.
Some people will point out that I may be missing out on some great books by so banishing authors from my bookshelves, and they’re right. The thing is, though, that I’m a human being, which means that I am mortal and thus will, by definition, miss out on the vast majority of great books that exist. I see no reason to not apply some standards once in a while as to the great books I intend to allow to pass by. Ditto the afore-mentioned music producer. Sure, his CDs are highly regarded. I’ll survive without them. I’ve more than enough music to keep me occupied. On a similar vein, in that comment thread author Nick Mamatas makes the point that not buying an author’s books on the basis of their views will in no way hurt their royalty statement. Sure, that’s true, but so what? Whether I’m in agreement with them or not, I am under no obligation one way or the other to give them my money. It’s not unlike my general refusal to shop at Wal-Mart. I’ve no illusion whatsoever that Wal-Mart is hurting one bit because I am not contributing to their revenue.
However, sometimes I might find myself feeling a tad hypocritical about these kinds of issues. I find Mel Gibson’s views on just about everything to be nauseating, perhaps even as nauseating as I find John C. Wright’s, but I still watch his movies. (At least, in theory I do. I haven’t seen Apocalypto because it just doesn’t look like something that interests me, but I did watch The Passion of the Christ, with which I was less than impressed.) What’s the difference here? Maybe it’s that movies constitute a smaller investment of time than a book does. And there’s probably also the fact that I was a fan of Gibson’s twenty years before I learned just how far to the right he actually is. That can be a factor: familiarity with a person before learning what their warts are tends to make the warts less troublesome. One of the most memorable family friends from my years as a youth was a man who was warm, loving of his friends, wickedly funny…and a bigot who could get really bad sometimes if he drank too much. It happens.
Avoiding movies or teevee shows that feature actors with whom I disagree has always struck me as being a faulty premise. There are just too many people to keep track of, then; that way really does strike me as being limiting in my choices. I don’t stop watching Tom Cruise movies because he’s a Scientologist any more than I avoid Gary Sinise because he’s conservative. There are just too many actors to keep track of, and ultimately, who cares?
UPDATE and CORRECTION: Serves me right for not totally fact-checking myself. A reader points out, in comments, that Paul Di Filippo did not edit the “Mindblowing SF Tales” book; rather, he appears in it as a writer and posted a defense of it online which then triggered lots of spirited discussion. Thanks to “Phy” for setting me straight, and I of course regret my error. Oops and apologias!