Monday, September 22, 2014

DO SOMETHING DIZZY AND NEW, KEEP UP THE HULLABALOO! ALINSKY! ALINSKY! ALINSKY!

It warms my heart to see Saul Alinsky back in the rightwing papers -- and with Hillary Clinton as a bonus!  We've been around this mulberry bush before: Remember the 2012 primary campaign, when Newt Gingrich was talking about Obama's "Saul Alinsky radicalism," and supporters of his Republican opponents began calling Gingrich the real Alinsky?

Well, now they've stopped using this mudball as a medicine ball, and are pitching it at Clinton, claiming her youthful correspondence with Alinsky proves that the wife of triangulating trimmer Bill and the candidate who got outflanked from the left in 2008 is actually a dangerous radical. Chief among the complainants is National Review's Stanley Kurtz:
The difference between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren is that Warren flouts her ideology, thrilling the base by making the leftist case as few other Democrats dare. Ever the Alinskyite, Hillary prefers to achieve leftist ends incrementally, in pragmatic guise.
Ah, but that's all her craft and artfulness! It reminds me of what Kurtz said about Obama back in 2011, when our communist President signed a deep-cutting Republican budget:
Here’s my take on the puzzle of Obama’s leadership style. Obama is still every inch the Alinskyite organizer. He talks about uniting, even as he deliberately polarizes. He moves incrementally toward radical left goals, but never owns up to his ideology. Instead, he tries to work indirectly, by way of the constituencies he seeks to manipulate...

Obama is a bad negotiator because Alinskyite’s don’t negotiate, they intentionally polarize. As for their own groups, here they try to placate all factions and hide their own goals. That about describes Obama’s performance on the debt deal, which included a dollop of both of these stances...

The left yearns for Obama to take on the Tea Party in an overt ideological battle. But that is exactly the sort of thing Alinskyite organizers are forbidden to do.
Cutting taxes, deporting immigrants, bombing ISIS -- there's no end to the subterfuges Obama will employ to convince the unwary that he's not really a communist. One might grow old waiting for him to finally rip the mask off, but when you've got the Alinsky tipoff like Kurtz does, you know there has never been anything false about hope.

The brethren have a few years to try and explain to the public who Alinsky is, why he's such a menace, and how he's a hero to the liberals who don't talk about him one-hundredth as much as conservatives do. Go with God, fellas.

UPDATE. Among the many joys of comments, Spaghetti Lee seems to have gotten my titlular reference to Rodgers' and Hammerstein's Allegro, and doubled down with some musical comedy parody lyrics. Here's one to the tune of "Shipoopi" from The Music Man:
Now the girl who goes for a single-player plan is usually a hussy!
And the girl who goes for a strong public option's anything but fussy!
But a girl who goes for the corporate plan --
Won't make demands, even if she can --
She's the girl who listens to the man, the man named Alinsky!
I say we offer these to Mark Steyn.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Rice and Peterson NFL scandals, and how conservatives have turned the relevant issues from corporal punishment and domestic violence to femmie liberals versus butch real Americans.  These celebrity controversies are not very good teaching tools and, as I've said before, I'm sick of these guys attributing decisions made by risk-averse corporations to liberalism, but at least this time the psychological twists kept it amusing.

Friday, September 19, 2014

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   Kevin D. Williamson has another in his series of columns on why his current abode, New York, sucks, apparently pitched at gomers who can't understand why anyone would want to live in one of them itty-bitty apartments surrounded by blahs when they could have a nice spread in Butte. In this case Williamson focuses on that "inequality" you stupid hippies pretend to be concerned about, which he attributes not to the lack of jobs suitable to a middle class such as manufacturing once provided, nor to the rich outsiders who increasingly buy up the properties, but to "progressive policies" such as rent stabilization (which mainly helps poorer New Yorkers, which may be why people like Williamson hate it so much) and, natch, high taxes. "When it comes time to pay for college or to leave behind a bequest for children or grandchildren -- an important means of building wealth within families -- you’re almost certainly better off in San Antonio or Provo than in New York or San Francisco," hmmphs Williamson. His beef seems to be that a Bible salesman's family of eight can't afford a house on Fifth Avenue. Well, that's capitalism, comrade, take it up with the Invisible Hand. Also, I have to ask, as I do of all city-dwelling city-haters: If that's the way you feel about your progressive hellhole, why don't you move to Provo? The American Enterprise Institute says telecommuters are happier!

•   Hey look, here's the new #Benghazi -- whoops, I mean the new Journolist (tired today, can't keep my ginned-up controversies straight): This time, we are told by he-man woman-hater Milo Yiannopoulos, America is being assaulted not by Dave Weigel and his combine of communist journalists, but by "high-profile editors, reporters, and reviewers from heavyweight gaming news sites" -- i.e., nerds -- who are "engaging in activism on behalf of their reporting subjects" -- i.e., talking shop -- which is "disturbing to many in the industry, who have long suspected a persistent bias and unusual levels of co-operation and co-ordination from senior journalists" -- i.e., bros who enjoy harassing women. "It’s basically Journolist for people who didn’t go to Harvard," says Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds (Yale Law 1985), proving its pedigree as bullshit. On a similar note, PJ Media's J. Christian Adams has his own shocking expose on the campaign software Catalist, which is used by Democrats, for which reason Adams tries to make this legal product sound somehow worse than, say, the data mining tools used by every damn corporation, though his real complaint shines out halfway down the page:
Unfortunately, Republicans have no functioning counterpart data tool to Catalist. They have multiple and competing shells of Catalist, but they have nothing on the collaborative scale as Catalist, largely due to the fact that Republicans won’t collaborate and are fiercely territorial of their competing data sets.
That Adams doesn't realize how funny this is just makes it better, don't you think? You can go there and gather mangoes yourself, but let me leave you with this choice tantrum-fragment:
Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of destroying Republicans, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution.
No fair -- socialism is winning!

Thursday, September 18, 2014

SCOTS WOO HOO.

I know less about British politics than [George Costanza pause] anyone in the world, but ignorance has never stopped me before, so I hereby declare myself in favor of Scottish independence, mainly because the worst people on earth are against it. For example, David Frum, whose "five important ways" in which "a vote in favor of Scottish independence would hurt Americans" are so poorly cobbled together that they actually reduce my opinion of him, which I never thought possible. Get a load of this:
Second, a ‘Yes’ vote would lead to a longer-term decline in Britain’s contribution to global security. The Scottish separatists have a 30-year history of hostility toward NATO. They abruptly reversed their position on the military alliance in 2012 to reassure wavering middle-of-the-road voters. But the sincerity of this referendum-eve conversion is doubtful. Even if it was authentic, the SNP’s continuing insistence on a nuclear weapons-free policy would lock U.S. and U.K. forces out of Scotland’s naval bases.
What if ISIS attacks the Isle of Man while the UK's moving its rockets to Berwick-Upon-Tweed?
The SNP’s instincts are often anti-American and pro-anybody-on-the-other-side of any quarrel with the United States, from Vladimir Putin to Hamas.
Gasp! The Union of Scottish Socialist Republics will become the Anglosphere's Cuba, or at least its Berkeley! They may have to set up a blockade. (I think these guys are up for the job.)

But here's the convincer:


I mean, come on, wouldn't it be worth it just to see their faces the morning after? Tell me I'm wrong in comments.

UPDATE. Or tell me jokes! keta tells a good one in comments. I'm not sure this one I heard Tom Conti tell in Whose Life Is It, Anyway? is supposed to be about Scots, but what the hell: Two Scots are in Vatican City, thirsty. They go into a trattoria, order two pints of ale. They are informed there's no ale, no lager either. "Well," says one, "what's yer Pope drink?" Benedictine, he is told. "Right," says the other Scot, "two pints of Benedictine." In short order the two men are legless. "So this is what yer Pope drinks?" says one; "Christ, no wonder they're always carryin' him about in a fookin' chair then."

UPDATE 2. A commenter notes that Dave Brockington of Lawyers Guns & Money has made what he or she reads as a fair argument for Better Together. I see it as more mixed, but Brockington does make the good point if Scotland leaves it will make the rest of the UK  totally nuts politically (or as Socialist Cubone puts it, "UKIP with nukes").

We've also taken on more jokes in comments, and I appreciate Muriel Volestrangler hooking us up with Billy Connolly's version of the Vatican joke, which is terrific.

Oh by the way, no exit polls, so we'll just have to wait for a result. I expect to be disappointed, as usual.

UPDATE 3. Ah bollocks. Catalunya, you're my only hope!

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

OGLING WHILE MUSLIM.

So David Solway of PJ Media went to the swimming hole the other day and these guys tried to peep between the towels he was holding up as his wife changed out of her bathing suit, "mesmerized by the partially hidden lure of a woman in semi-undress."

This is not just gross behavior, Solway will have you know, because these people are not like, say, Florida assistant state attorney William Richard Ezzell, recently accused of trying to film a woman in her underwear at a tanning salon, or any of the other white peeping-toms and molesters you'll read about in the news; no, these were Muslims, and "dark-clad" Muslims at that. What's more, they were also seen "conspicuously observing the traditions of their native culture" -- that is, praying. And some people had to drive around them as they bowed toward Mecca.

Solway's inevitable conclusion: We Westerners are all mesmerized by the "sedatives and platitudes of multiculturalism" into ignoring our creeping dhimmitude:
Such behavior is patently different from the Muslim-inspired havoc and thuggery erupting in Canadian cities like Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, or in the municipal war zones of many European cities with sizeable Muslim populations. But it was nevertheless a visible presumption of specialness and of indifference to the conventions of ordinary civility.
And "the spirit of natural entitlement that goes hand in hand with Islam," and they're all "enjoined to conquer, enslave, tax and slay the kafir, or infidel," etc. etc. -- all the standard anti-Muslim yak, weaponized for the Age of ISIS.

I'll grant him this: Religion does make men fucked up about women -- remember when the Israeli Hasidim used to attack women who had the affrontery to pray at the wailing wall? I think the American answer is to give religious maniacs pluralism good and hard -- which is why we're making Jesus freaks bake all the gay wedding cakes. Enjoy your re-education, assholes!

UPDATE. In comments, FlipYrWhig: "If this habit of attempting to look surreptitiously at women undressing happens to take root among Westerners, it's going to make for a very naughty 30,000 years of unrecorded and recorded history."

mortimer2000 directs us to Solway's personal page, where "The Bard," as he refers to himself, discourses on several topics, including country music:
Country music loves America and cares about those Americans in ‘fly-over country’ whom sophisticated New Yorkers and CBC listeners love to hate: the farmers, ranchers, truck drivers, waitresses and cowboys who still work the land, go to church, and fight the wars that keep other Americans safe (at least for now).
As a sophisticated former New Yorker who loves his Country I take exception, particularly to being thus lectured by a guy who was first brought to the music by Brooks & Fucking Dunn.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PART NEGATIVE GAZILLION.

In his Morning Jolt email, Jim Geraghty engages A.O. Scott's thumbsucker on the lack of adulthood in sitcoms, and for a couple of seconds sounds non-crazy ("Not all popular culture needs to hold a mirror up to us" -- boy, where's that synapse been all these years?); but then, alas --
It's not that America doesn't have any grown-ups or non-loser dads left. We dads didn't go anywhere; it's just that television networks don't make as many shows about us, and when they do, the kind of people who review film and television for the New York Times aren't as interested...

Remember a moment ago when I described "communities dominated by underemployed urban quasi-professionals, unmarried, without kids, without mortgages, without a career path or plan"? How large a portion of the communities of our creative classes fits that description? Or perhaps more specifically, how many people in our creative classes percolated for years in that sort of extended-adolescence Bohemian urban environment? There's nothing inherently wrong with that environment -- for a while, at least — but it's light years away from being universal. Our national storytellers may be quite convinced that they're holding a mirror up to society — but they're only reflecting their own limited personal experience.
They're elitists, is what they are, these arty-farties who live in (spit) cities and don't know how to change a diaper. Not like the shirtsleeves, shot-and-a-beer kind of pundit-dads you see hand-lathing shelves at the National Review woodshop in Skunk Hollow, Ala.!
This sort of "You Hollywood types are too insular" complaint usually gets dismissed as whining when it comes from a conservative...
Come on little synapse!
...but maybe it sounds more valid coming from a Latino or Asian-American, when they note how few movies at the Cineplex or shows on the dial reflect the stories and experiences of their communities.
Is Linda Chavez still alive? Our nagging needs minority cover. Get her busy on a piece demanding the return of The George Lopez Show.

Believe it or don't, there's even worse at NR today: Kevin D. Williamson considers Hamlet and Sons of Anarchy together because, he says, they both address "maternal guilt" -- wait, don't run screaming yet, because here comes the sheet-enseaming shot:
“Hamlet and His Problems” was published in 1921. Seven years shy of a century later, Sons of Anarchy presents the question: Is the theme of maternal guilt still “an almost intolerable motive for drama” [as J.M. Robertson said]? 
The model of motherhood that prevails in 2014 is fundamentally different from the model of 1921, so different in fact as to be an almost entirely distinct moral and social phenomenon. This begins with the world-changing fact that the progress from conception to birth is today optional. The millions of acts of violence that have been committed in utero since January 1973 inevitably have shaped our views of motherhood...
I ain't even kidding. There follows a catalogue of post-Roe horrors -- "feminist doublespeak, which regards the developing person as morally indistinguishable from a tumor," "the 117-minute meditation on sundry pregnancy horrors that is Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien," etc. -- meant to convey that as compared to the delicate, Jainistic Elizabethan era, we moderns wade through cord-blood in a global charnel-house where
meditations upon maternal guilt are hardly intolerable; they are, rather, inevitable... we have a different sort of problem than Hamlet had: His drama had to do with the degradation of his mother; ours has to do with the degradation of motherhood categorically. Dragging that into the sunlight is an unpleasant business, and a necessary one.
I wonder what his readers think this means; probably "See, Sons of Anarchy is conservative, just like choc-o-mut ice creams and everything else I like."  Me, I want to be generous to Williamson, in return for all the laughs he's given me: Maybe his is a stealth mission to discredit modern liberal arts education by his example.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Obama's ISIS speech and the brethren's reaction, which was outraged that it didn't contain enough hatred, especially of Muslims, because come on, they can't talk smack about blacks, they can't talk smack about gays or Hispanics, you gotta give them something or it's, like, persecution.

UPDATE. Adding to the anti-Muslim ooga-booga at National Review is Theodore Dalrymple, who asks, "why there should be proportionally more jihadis from Britain than, say, from France" in ISIS, and "why they should be more brutal." Considering that ISIS is overwhelming native-based, this is a ridiculous line of inquiry (not made less so by Dalrymple's admission that "the premises of the questions themselves are somewhat speculative") unless your goal is to try and tar a whole people with the actions of some weirdos, and this is what Dalrymple is up to: The Muslims in Britain, apparently, aren't performing as well economically as the Sikhs or the Hindus, and so the Brit Muslim  male is a "failure," and his "resentment is all the stronger because of the additional element of personal responsibility for that failure, actual or anticipated," leading to his savagery.

Dalrymple does offer an alternative environmental cause for those who prefer their Muslim-bashing with a chaser of kids-today yak: "contemporary British culture... is the crudest, most aggressive, and most lacking in refinement of any of the Western cultures," says Dalrymple, and the Brit jihadis are basically lager louts gone tea-total for Allah, which goes to show how "partially British" they are. Wouldn't it be easier to just blame the malign influence of Henrik Ibsen?

Friday, September 12, 2014

THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN UNTIL JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE, PART INFINITY.

Obama says ISIS is neither Islamic nor a state; about the second bit, Jonah Goldberg says [squish of foot landing in bucket, crash of head striking cabinet and dishes falling out]:
...reasonable people can quibble. The terrorist army that calls itself the Islamic State is certainly trying to build a state — and not just a state but a super state, or caliphate. They’re not there yet; their delivery of social services seems spotty at best, though they do collect taxes and uphold the law (in a fashion). 
More relevant, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a state. Morally, this weed stinks just as much whether you call it a state or a soccer league that rapes, tortures, and murders people on the side. And legally, statehood would matter — and not very much — only if the U.N. and other bodies agreed to recognize the fledgling caliphate’s legitimacy. That’s not going to happen even if the Islamic State opens up post offices and DMVs on every corner.
So, ISIS is not a state. Moving along: about the Islamic part, Jonah Goldberg says [clunk of bucket-footed running, kee-rash of body tumbling down cellar steps]:
As for its not being Islamic, that’s at best unclear, if not just clearly wrong. And the fact that the majority of its victims are Muslim is irrelevant. Lenin and Stalin killed thousands of Communists and socialists...
Yeah, and what about those altar boys those priests raped? I suppose those priests suddenly turned Protestant! Not that I blame the church, it's rilly holy.
The president faces the same dilemma that bedeviled George W. Bush, and I sympathize with him. It is not in our interest for the Muslim world to think we are at war with Islam, not just because it is untrue...
Remember that thing I said about "clearly wrong"? You don't? Good.
....but more specifically because we desperately need the cooperation of Muslim nations. That’s why Bush constantly proclaimed “Islam means peace.”
But...
(You might want to soak your head in ice awhile before reading the rest of this.)
...it also seems flatly wrong for an American president to be declaring what is or is not Islamic — or Christian or Jewish.
Yeah, if we can't say America is a Christian nation (butitisdon'tworryFundieswejusthavetosaythat) I guess we can't say it isn't a Christian nation either. Fair's fair.
Given the First Amendment alone, there’s something un-American in any government official simply declaring what is or is not a religion.
Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America.
Bush’s formulation in his September 20, 2001, address to Congress was better: “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.”
And it's better because (TK) (Sorry KLO lunch went a little long and the intern went back to prison).
Regardless, I’m not the kind of purist who would object to Obama’s version — if it worked. Aeschylus first noted more than 2,400 years ago that the first casualty of war is the truth.
Remember that "not just because it is untrue" thing I said before? Oh shit, you do remember? Farrrrrt.
And if saying that the Islamic State is guilty of religious false advertising makes it easier to win a war, that’s fine by me. 
But does it work?
QUESTIONS REMAIN
...In fact, maybe it’s a mistake to concede the point up front? Instead of Americans trying to persuade Muslims of the world that terrorism is un-Islamic, why shouldn’t Muslims be working harder to convince us?
I don't see Mo-hammed or whatever his name is over there doing anything to convince Jonah Goldberg he's not a terrorist. I just see him making Jonah Goldberg's sandwich. Extra bacon, please. [(whispers) You can tell how big a jihadi they are by their reaction.]
Think about it. Whenever a tiny minority of bad actors hurts the reputation of its ethnicity, faith, or cause by doing terrible things in the name of its ethnicity, faith, or cause, the responsible thing is for the moderate, decent majority to cry “Not in our name!” or “They don’t speak for us!”
How about a #NotAllMuslims hashtag? Thank you, good night, more September-October 2011 retro bullshit to come.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

YOU SUPPLY THE WAR, THEY'LL SUPPLY THE PROSE POEMS.

Well, more bombs in the Mideast. I didn't like the Libya intervention and I don't like this. But I generally disapprove these half-assed sand-diving expeditions; what's the conservatives' problem? From my first quick scan of the commentariat, they appear to think Obama shouldn't be trusted because his bloodthirst is insufficiently ostentatious, and because like that other pussy George Bush he refuses to denounce Islam the way that, after Pearl Harbor, FDR denounced Shinto and Confucianism. We're gonna have a loooong Rightbloggers column on Sunday.

My favorite so far is -- surprise! -- Jonah Goldberg. I reproduce his post in its entirety:
Good luck, Mr. President
I thought that this was a fine speech, grading against the curve of my expectations. But my expectations were low. The problem for me, and I suspect for others, is that it’s very difficult to see him as anything other than a political creature. It’s obviously the case that he is doing this not because the facts on the ground convinced him he had to do what was necessary to protect America but because the polls and the political climate convinced him he had to plug a hole in the hull of his presidency. I really have no problem with politicians being led by the people, when the people are right. And I think they are here. But I have serious doubts that Obama has any desire to stick it out beyond the moment the American people stop paying attention. I hope I’m wrong.
It's perfect in its way, from the title and lede that are shown almost immediately to be disingenuous, to the piss-trickle ending. I'm beginning to think these single-long-paragraph posts of his are dictated to an intern while Goldberg tries to time the microwave so his Cheetos get hot without melting the bag.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

HAYEK GET YOUR GUN.

The Libertarian Moment, ladies and gentlemen:
Sen. Rand Paul’s position atop the isolationist wing of the Republican Party has fueled his political rise, but his supporters are far more enthusiastic than the general public about any American military action against the Islamic State. 
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 44% of the people who hold a favorable view of the Kentucky Republican want the U.S. to become more involved in world affairs. About a third of Mr. Paul’s supporters said the country should become less involved and 17% said the current level of engagement is appropriate.
Senator Paul himself has found the moment opportune for a fit of war fever, leaving Rep. Justin Amash as the new front-man for libertarian foreign policy (look, big pixels at Reason.com!): after the lumbering hulk of Dick Cheney read the riot act to Congressional Republicans, Breitbart.com recorded this:
Amash disagreed with reporters that Republican hawks were coming back into the party. 
“Did you see my election?” he replied.
As goes Michigan's Third Congressional District, so goes the GOP! Hold on, the follow-up is even better:
Another anti-interventionist Congressman, Rep. Thomas Massie R-KY, was a little softer towards Cheney, politely telling reporters that he wouldn’t criticize the former Vice President after he took the time to visit with the Republican conference. 
“His advice was mainly to spend more money on the military,” he said, adding that he believed that Congress should “spend less money on everything.”
They're playing good crap, bad crap.

Always remember: it's a scam. Libertarians don't really care much about the social issues that many people associate with them. And in foreign policy they are clearly in accord with traditional U.S. political realities, i.e. full of shit. The limited-gummint they're serious about is very specific: They want to transfer as much of the economic power that currently resides in our government (the "takers") to a few rich fucks (the "makers"). And to get this economic power, they have to first get political power. That's why Paul's doing a war dance with the statists. What the hell, it's just going to cost some human lives, and since when have libertarians cared about those?

UPDATE. Speaking of Cheney, Dan Froomkin spots a lovely correction in the Times:
An earlier version of a summary with this article misstated the former title of Dick Cheney. He was vice president, not president.
"Easy mistake to make," says Froomkin.

UPDATE 2. In comments, LookWhosInTheFreezer:
Somebody must have told Paul that ISIS is pro-union and supports minimum wage.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

THAT'S WHAT THE NEW BREED SAY.

No less than in publishing, The State of the Youts is a staple of the propaganda industry. The idea isn’t so much to sell to the kids themselves, though, as to vampirize their vitality. Just as the glossies’ perennial kids-today spreads aren’t pitched at the youngs but at the post-youngs who enjoy a little taste of something fresh and supple, so political mags use the kids to give their movement a youthful patina.

One popular gambit is to assure oldsters that the kids are alright, i.e. just like them only with firmer butts. The latest such offering from Libertarian flagship Reason, which has of late gone all-in on millennials (check out “A Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton Prez Race Would be a DISASTER for Millennials” by Nick Gillespie), is Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s “Rise of the Hipster Capitalist.”
From riot grrrl 'zine publishers to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, anxiety over selling out to the mainstream dominated the cultural discourse of people who came of age in the '80s and '90s. Baked into the concern was an intrinsic sense that art and social change could only be corrupted by capitalism. 
Millennials, generally considered to be those in the late teens to early 30s right now, simply do not wrestle with this issue.
They’re good capitalist kids, not like those rotten Gen Xers, and will make their bobo parents proud! Also, like all model Youts, they’re plucky in the face of adversity:
For those millennials who do have jobs, wages have stagnated or dropped… Millennials have adjusted their expectations accordingly. Job security and retirement benefits seem as quaint and anachronistic as floppy disks and fax machines. And only 6 percent of millennials think full Social Security benefits will be available to them, according to a Pew Research poll from March 2014, compared to 51 percent who think they'll get nothing.
Libertarians seem to have a love-hate relationship with this economy. On the one hand it’s bad, and they can blame it (like all bad things) on Statism; on the other, it depresses wages and wage expectations, so they can spin our current neo-feudalism as a rich environment for opportunity capitalism. And that’s how it works here:
Yet members of Generation Y, as millennials were once known, are still remarkably optimistic about controlling their own destinies, despite the mess of 21st century America. 
Why so optimistic? In part, because they’re young and fashionable, which tends to buoy one’s spirits. Brown tells us about a bunch of young small-business starter-uppers, and makes sure we know they are not uptight business drags but awesome dudes and dudesses from the hippest Brooklyn precincts: For example, Greenpoint  -- where Brown once “lived across the street" from a bright young thing with “boundless enthusiasm for taking on new, unpaid creative work” -- and Bushwick  -- where Brown “lived in a warehouse that had been converted into a semi-legal residential space”; her roommates were showing their no doubt magnificent artwork, but not in some half-assed hippie way: Their “planning from the get-go involved not merely showcasing their art for the local creative community but luring in wealthy buyers.”

So how’d that go? Who knows? Whether successful or not-telling, Brown’s hipsterpreneurs seem uniformly the sort of young-people-with-money who can afford to dick around with socially-conscious dream businesses: Before co-founding the wonderfully-titled BeGood, Brown tells us, “Mark Spera was burned out on his corporate job at the Gap. ‘I couldn't imagine the idea of sitting at a desk all day.. I was considering getting into a nonprofit and he was considering traveling abroad.’” The new breed, says Brown, “chose to take huge pay cuts to pursue their dreams and make a business out of their passions.” Sounds like they didn’t have to worry too much about money, or about getting funding even in these tight-lending times.

For those who do have to worry about it, there are other hipsterpreneurial opportunities:
In the Buzz Marketing Group/Young Entrepreneurs Council survey, 33 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old respondents had a side business. (This included activities like tutoring and selling stuff on eBay.)
Selling stuff on eBay! No word on how many of these second-tier-and-lower millenials have a side business in begging for change or going through their girlfriend’s purse.

After a bellyful of that, it’s almost refreshing to look at an example of the more traditional conservative kids-today yak, like John Hawkins’ “Millennials, Hollywood Is Lying To You About Work And Success.” Don’t worry, despite the addressing, Hawkins isn’t really talking to millenials at all, but about them to other wingnuts – partly because that’s how greybeards talk in the presence of punk kids (Look at him, I got him a nice razor but he won’t shave!) but also because it makes a nice hook for discussing the outrages that really exercise Hawkins, and which these punk kids are too dumb to understand:
However, we've done something even worse to these kids. We've left far too much of their education in life to Hollywood, musicians, and college professors who've passed on a skewed view of the world. 
Unfortunately for them, reality doesn't care about boring, mean or "uncool." It just keeps rolling on like a threshing machine, cutting anyone who ignores it to pieces. 
Many's the time, in this the autumn of my life, I’ve sat on a riverbank and thought of life in just that way.
With that in mind, do you REALLY want to know why America has been so prosperous? Want to know why we're a superpower?
Whoops, pops is talking to you again, kids.
It's because of Judeo-Christian values, Western culture, a Puritan work ethic, patriotism, capitalism, small government, adherence to the Constitution, and a capability and willingness to use our military to decimate enemies of our country. 
None of those things are being celebrated in songs by Lady Gaga, movies by James Cameron, or in women's studies courses at American colleges. 
The whole thing pretty much goes on like that. Between the two of them, I have to give the edge to Hawkins, who at least doesn't embarrass himself by pretending to like his ostensible subjects, or by telling us about his groovy years in Crown Heights.

Sunday, September 07, 2014

Thursday, September 04, 2014

A SHORT TOUR OF THE CULTURE WAR BATTLEFIELD.

Well, boys, how's the culture war going?
How Big Government Ruined Parks and Recreation
Clickbait for sure, among a certain population! Spencer Klavan (Jesus, Andrew has a brother? I weep for the Republic) complains at PJ Media that the show "has devolved from incisive comedy into aggressively unfunny propaganda." See, once it was about "the morass of self-importance and illogic that results when people get together to plan other people’s lives for them" -- that's conservative for "small-town government," folks -- but then "the writers replaced it with a dogmatic fantasy world based on the unexamined conviction that everyone needs a hyper-attentive government mommy. That’s when Leslie Knope became a hero, and Parks and Rec became about as entertaining as a health code referendum."

Wow, so they beefed up the role of the star? And a cynical supporting character became more cuddly? Just like in nearly every sitcom that lasts more than three seasons? What a bunch of statists!

But courage, kulturkampfers -- it's not all liberal fascism on the TV; here's a show that Matthew Rousu of The Federalist says teaches a conservatarian message:
What TV’s ‘Suits’ Tells Us About The Job Market 
...Ross and Spector form a great team. They trade witty rejoinders and provide incredible service for their clients. But in the United States, for the most part, it is illegal to practice law without passing the bar exam. That Ross is practicing law illegally — and what he must do to avoid being discovered – provides part of the show’s drama. While I find the show entertaining, it troubles me because these types of situations happen in real life. There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work...
Yes, it's the old licensing-restriction rap, with which max-freedom fans sometimes get liberals to agree five minutes before they call them hypocrites for thinking polluters can't regulate themselves. Mentioned in essay: Uber. Not mentioned: State medical boards.

Meanwhile at Acculturated, Erin Vargo:
Drugs are ruining EDM...
Which is like saying sugar is ruining cake, but go on:
...and not only as a matter of individual health and safety (a sobering topic in and of itself). Drugs at EDM festivals ensure that Calvin Harris is virtually indistinguishable from a remix DJ at a wedding party.
[pause, suppressing laughter]
Sure, he showed everyone a good time, but the event wasn’t really about him or his skills and talents and creative capacity.
[pause, stabbing myself in the thigh with a pen] For our reductio ad wingnut let's go to The Federalist's Rachel Lu:
Is it possible that Clueless Dad (that tired old television trope) is going into decline? He’s long since outworn his welcome. And General Mills seems to have gotten the message. 
Their new commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios...
For some reason I'm reminded of the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, though it's not so much the "closing of a gigantic circle" as a disappearance up one's own asshole.

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

THE NINE-ELEVENING PART X: REV UP THE FIST-SHAKING PANTS-WETTER OF DOOM!


(photo via Don Van Natta Jr.)

We're finally getting to see what Iraq-War-style hysteria would look like without Bush and Cheney standing ready to make the fantasy real, and, surprise, just as in olden times, the usual press dopes have got their terror drums tuned and in sync, paradiddling as one: be afraid be afraid be verrrrry afraid...

In other words, it's not just buffoons like the Fake Woodsman above; we also have Dana Milbank telling us that Obama is scaring America by not vomiting over the podium in fear.
President Obama is not worried. And that is unnerving.
Yes, the UK's David Cameron is harrumphing to beat the band, but Dana Milbank didn't get a harrumph outta that guy Obama!
A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 54 percent of the public thinks Obama is “not tough enough” in foreign policy. Americans are not necessarily asking for more military action — Pew’s polls also have found a record number of Americans saying the United States should mind its own business — but they seem to be craving clarity. As National Journal’s Ron Fournier put it: “While people don’t want their president to be hawkish, they hate to see him weakish.”
In other words: when you can't dazzle them with drone strikes, baffle them with bullshit. (Or: That's Bullshit -- Boy, Do We Need It Now!) Milbank and Fournier know from years of flogging crap stories that the American People won't pay attention to a summer shower but will tune in twice nightly for a Killer Storm. And so they're out there pitching doom, each hoping the panic surges of traffic run in his direction.

This material is much tamer, at present, than what's coming out of the meth labs of the Right: at National Review, Deroy Murdock ululates, "Pulverize the Islamic State" -- and he doesn't seem too worried about who else gets blown up along with them ("drone-based projectiles, air-to-ground missiles, 500-pound bombs... As Eric Clapton once sang: 'Let it rain'"). This article has it all: Judicial Watch's claim that "high-level federal" sources reveal ISIS is comin' up from Mexico; James O'Keefe dressed as Bin Laden crossing the Rio Grande; Obama golf argh blargh ("If Obama would give his putter and tin cup a rest, he just might find time to craft a strategy for the U.S."), and a bunch of messages from terrorists meant to terrify Americans, all relayed with relish by Murdock because that's what he wants, too.

And once again we undergo a national attention-span test. Here's hoping this time we pass.

UPDATE. In comments, whetstone says David "Bobo" Brooks "shows us how a real pro does it. Since 'ISIS is a material threat to America' isn't going to fly, especially in the context of the last war in Iraq, Our Mr. Brooks wants us to consider ISIS as an existential threat. In the philosophical sense: 'We are not living in a moment of immediate concrete threat, but we are in a crisis of context... Putin and ISIS are not threats to American national security, narrowly defined. They are threats to our civilizational order'... It's the domino theory applied to any fucked-up government or insurgent wanna-be government (provided they make the front page). 'Oh shit, it's a CRISIS OF CONTEXT. CODE RED CODE RED.'"

"Existential threat" reminded me of something from Twitter:


Recognize the existential threat! Take no options off the table! Sounds like Fournier has been to too many management retreats. Or maybe he's reading this off an old Dr. Bronner's bottle.

UPDATE 2. In comments TGuerrant asks a relevant question: "How is it these squealing bundles of suet haven't noticed that the Kenyan Pretender has just droned Hellfires on al-Shabab in Somalia?" More to the point is, what happened to "Obama the bloodthirsty drone maniac" as portrayed by conservatives only last year?

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT.

You probably saw that survey last week that showed women don't think Republicans are on their side. Maybe that's what motivated Christine Sisto to write "No, Catcalling Is Definitely Not Flattery: Why conservative skeptics are wrong about street harassment" for National Review, gently explaining to her colleagues that, bullshit New York Post stories to the contrary, women really don't like guys on the street screaming about their tits, particularly when it leads to less-verbal aggressions. (The comments to that article are everything you'd expect.)

Well, guess what: National Review apparently decided assholes should get equal time. Nicholas Frankovich.
At some level, a man who catcalls wants the woman to reciprocate. “Guys, I see attractive men all the time,” Christine Sisto remarks, “but I don’t feel an urge to loudly request to see their genitalia.” But they might be psyched if she did.
Also, if a beautiful woman followed me down a dark alley and started ripping off my clothes, I'd be totally psyched, so what's your problem, bitch? Then Frankovich gets into some PUA yap about "social rank and mating-market" for however many of his readers hadn't already started beating off at the thought of women giving them the Rita Moreno speech from Carnal Knowledge at high decibels on a streetcorner.

Also, Molly Powell tells Sisto "if we [women] are treated as mere pieces of meat, we bear at least some of the responsibility," which you have to admit sounds slightly less repulsive coming from a fellow female than from Whiteman P. Republican, which is why Molly Powell will never miss a meal. Also: "When you are fat and gray-haired and have three chins and cankles, I wager that no one you will catcall you." (Hot Air's Jazz Shaw said "an opinion like this coming from a woman – particularly the insinuation that women might bear some 'responsibility' for the responses of men – produced the predictable head spinning on the Left," which I guess is wingnut for "Mrrow! Catfight!")

Meanwhile, if you've been horrified by how that female gaming critic was chased out of her home by misogynist creeps, Breitbart.com's Milo Yiannopoulos is here to tell you that you have it backwards, because it's actually "FEMINIST BULLIES" who are "TEARING THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY APART" by spoiling fanboy boners with their femmy complaints. As the thing is full of lines like "let's be honest. We're all used to feeling a niggling suspicion that 'death threats' sent to female agitators aren't all they're cracked up to be," clearly the point is not to sway fence-sitters so much as to assure MRA douchebags, "yep, Breitbart.com's the place for you!" (Tears are also spilled over "threat hysteria... designed to stifle debate and silence critics," because Yiannopoulos needed one more space to win Wingnut Bingo and "Powerless People's Opinions Are Oppressing Me" was sitting right there.)

I guess they think they don't need the votes so badly that they'll give up being jerks to get them.

UPDATE. In comments, @goofoffartiste: "From the Yiannopoulos article: 'There's even a theory floating around that she is planning to have herself beaten up at an upcoming conference.It's an unconfirmed internet rumour, but it illustrates Quinn's credibility.' This must be some of that journalistic integrity they keep claiming this is all about."


Monday, September 01, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the ISIS yap last week. Those of us who remember the run-up to the Iraq War will know the drill.

The brethren's current fist-shaking reminds me that, had Al Gore been elected President -- excuse me, had he been inaugurated President -- we might not have had the clusterfuck we wound up with in Iraq; and if Romney had been elected in 2012, we might already be running back there full-strength. I know what George Wallace said, but to paraphrase Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, hurrah for that dime's worth of difference.

Friday, August 29, 2014

FRIDAY AROUND THE HORN.




Happy Labor Day folks. Take it easy, but take it.

•   Rod Dreher's going on again about how the atheists are persecuting the Christians. (The casus bellow this time is, two years ago Vanderbilt University kicked a Christian student org off-campus because they wouldn't sign a non-discrimination agreement.) This is from Dreher's gloss on some other Jesus freak:
He goes on to say that Christians — the untame ones – need to learn how to deal with the coming scorn with “a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art.” Why were the martyrs joyful? Because they were confident that from their suffering, new life would emerge. So too should we be...

“Blessed are you when they persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” What if we lived as if that were true?
Dreher, as you may know, lives off writing and royalties and is always fucking off to Paris. Some martyr! When they send the lions after Dreher I can see him trying to throw them off the scent with a coq au vin. "But it's free range" will be his last words.

Believe it or not, though, there's someone worse on this subject. Well, we can't be too surprised, it's Erick Erickson in the tertiary stage of whatever's wrong with him:
A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
Do conservatives never drink cocktails? Or are my cheap beers now rendered "cocktails" just because I, a filthy liberal, am drinking them? Well, I always suspected P.J. O'Rourke was full of shit.
...You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God...
Yeesh. Here's a serious question: Does this sound like a spiel you'd expect from a movement that was gaining adherents? (Also: Did someone actually show Erickson this shirt? Well, at least his friends have a sense of humor.)

UPDATE. In comments, right out of the gate, (the good) Roger Ailes: "I think Eerick Eerikson could pull off a trendy naked Leena [sic] Dunham tee-shirt. And by pull off, I mean masturbate into."

•    But I thought conservatives loved it when businesses got tax breaks to promote job growth... oh, it's communist TV shows, nevermind. Key phrases from Dennis Saffran's City Journal article: "contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites," "crony capitalism," "corporate welfare," etc. Key missing phrase from his article: "trickle-down."

Thursday, August 28, 2014

CULTURE WAR IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO THE CULTURE WARRIORS.

I've mentioned before that Armond White had a good record as a legit if insane film critic before he joined  National Review. I suspect they hired him because he occasionally says mean things about liberals (either that or there's a reeeaally big Spielberg fan over there that I don't know about), but the readership seems not to be responding well to him. I think that's because White is not sort of doctrinaire doofus they usually go for  -- not like Jay Nordlinger, for example, and his "this is really a lovely scherzo in Beethoven's Ninth, it reminds me of how liberals love Castro" horseshit. White is on a mission, and unlike his colleagues he doesn't appear to have read it from a telegram from the High Command.

For example, while NR's Jesus freaks were all in spasms about The Giver, because it's supposed to be anti-abortion or something, White gave them "The Giver: Pseudo-Rebellion for Conservative Sheep." The comments to that one are lovely (sample: "I'm going to see it tonight. Cal Thomas recommended it and I value his opinion on any subject. This movie reviewer? Never heard of him").

Who knows what they'll make of White's last few efforts: First, he describes 2004 as "the year film culture broke" because it saw "the media’s lynch-mob excommunication of Mel Gibson and his film The Passion of the Christ, soon followed by the Cannes Film Festival’s ordination of Michael Moore’s anti–G. W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11." So far so compatible, but White works up a rich froth that might have even the regular punters backing away from the podium:
It was moral vandalism, sullying ideas and totems sacred to many. Such a fundamental offense devastated civilized behavior in ways many still have not realized. It drove a wedge between the public and the elites who make movies; the very ground we walked upon as enlightened, cultured people was scorched like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center... 
From 2004 on, even “entertainment” movies were made and received with deleterious political and moral bias.
This is loony and conspiratorial even by culture-warrior standards, but wait, there's more: Later White listed "20 signs of a broken film culture," a list of entartete kunst including some films I'll bet National Review readers like, including The Dark Knight ("used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy"), Knocked Up ("Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety"), and Lincoln ("Spielberg succumbs to Tony Kushner’s limousine-liberal cynicism to valorize Obama-era political chicanery"). Comments to that one so far are also delightful ("How many times are they going to see the comments and realize we don't like him?").

There are all kinds of ways to look at this, but the big point for me is that people who are serious about the arts -- not serious about using the arts as a way to spread the usual dreary propaganda, but about the arts themselves -- are not just capable of surprising readers, but extremely likely to do so. And that's terrific. I hope National Review surprises me and hangs onto White so he can rave away like this on their dime. Who knows, maybe one or two of them will be improved by his example.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

DEATH CULT.

Some of you may remember my column last Spring about what I characterized as the new conservative position on climate change: roughly, "Hey, everybody dies (literally)". In other words, even if you stupid libtards are right, environmentalism is futile and we should just all prepare for an earlier-than-expected deliverance unto the loving arms of Jesus.

Mind you, my analysis was largely based on extrapolation of the texts. But it turns out RedState kingpin Erick Erickson is willing to say so out loud:
I Simply Do Not Care About Global Warming
We’re all going to die or something according to the latest hysteria from the United Nations now that government bureaucrats have sufficiently added hype and hyperbole to the IPCC report on global warming a/k/a climate change.
Folks, I do not care. Let me assure you that the world is not going to end and we are not going to cause ourselves to go extinct. This report is written by a bunch of people who believe in the evolution of humanity, but somehow think mankind is unable to adapt to changing circumstances. 
The simple fact is that, if they are right and the world is warming, there is nothing we can do short of economic Armageddon to stop it. We’ve already told most of the third world they have to hide under nets or die of malaria because we do not want them using DDT. We should not now tell them they have to turn off their electricity and never improve their existence because of global warming.
The DDT thing is total bullshit, by the way --  scientific management of a dangerous chemical is not politically-correct reckless endangerment, it's the opposite of it. But does Erick Erickson care about your so-called "science"? Erickson then gets to his secondary argument, which is eat it you stupid libtards:
This is all orchestrated left-wing crap that a bunch of private jet setters and twitter liberals can worry themselves over. I have never once met a person who treats global warming as the most significant issue of our time and is a well adjusted, happy person. From Al Gore to the nuts on Twitter who’ll fill up my timeline in outrage over this, they are maladjusted, angry people in need of prayer to a realer God than Gaia. 
Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it. Expect a series of these "who gives a shit" items, and not only from Erickson, on banking regulations, race relations, foreign policy, etc. As my archive shows, all these guys have left now is resentment, racism, and rifle worship; it's about time they abandoned argument altogether. At least it'll be an improvement over that "conservative reform" bullshit, in that they'll no longer be pretending.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

SILENT UPON A PEAK IN DERP-IEN.

A. J. Delgado's scolding of Nicki Minaj is so duh-what that I'm not even going to add my own jokes. I mean, everywhere you drop the hook you catch a beauty. Here's my favorite:
This openly sexual, anything-goes mentality may have taken off several years ago, with Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” in which the non-bisexual Perry nonetheless suggested to girls that experimenting with bisexuality is sexy and playful. (The truth is, bisexual acts when one isn’t naturally disposed are a dangerous opponent to morality and female empowerment, as it is often done purely to please a male onlooker or due to the influence of drugs and alcohol.)
Feel free to offer your own exegeses in comments. Yeesh. She makes Martha Bayles look like Anton LeVey.