In response to my previous post on the subject, from Eric Scheie:
If we see the two anti-freedom strains as “your money or your sex,” it becomes quite obvious that it’s easier — a hell of a lot easier — for the government to grab your money than your genitalia.
Yet even though the anti-sex people are by no means a majority in the GOP and cannot possibly implement their schemes, more people fear the Republicans.
A great con job, if you ask me.
Yup. And it continues on.
Kay Hymowitz writes about the chaos of Darwinist dating.
Never before have so many been so proud of so little:
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.
“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
“High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,” Twenge said.
Don’t they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an “A” in math, even though they didn’t understand it.
One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.
More evidence that the fashion world is not mine.
Katherine Manju Ward says that Naomi Wolf has been driven completely around the bend.
She could have walked. Based on her previous writings, it was always bound to be a short trip.
As Glenn says, we’re going to see more people living to be this old. And as a commenter notes, there aren’t very many people left who were born in the nineteenth century. My maternal grandmother would have been two years older, had she lived, but she died at the ripe young age of ninety eight, fourteen years ago (whereupon I became a full orphan, and next in line, having no longer any living ancestors).
Of course, I take these folks’ recommendations for a long life with a healthy bag of salt. Particularly when they recommend a life of celibacy. I think that it’s good genes, and good luck, more than anything else.
Should American writers secede from the Nobel Prize for literature?
There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.
But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater–as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel–it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.
Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.
Other than that I think Hemingway is vastly overrated, and ample fodder for parody, I agree. The Peace prizes have been a joke since Arafat and Rigoberto Menchu (not to mention Jimmy Carter), and I think that the literature prizes have gone the same way, decades ago.
O.J. Simpson is finally going to do some hard time.
[Mid-afternoon update]
No smirking at this verdict. He’s been getting away with bad behavior all of his life. He must be wondering what finally went wrong.
Nothing to see at all. Move along, move along.
As Jonah says:
All I need to know about your politics is whether you find this creepy or not.
Get out the crayolas and color me creeped out.
[Update mid afternoon]
Roger Simon (who knows his fascists) has more thoughts.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some great comments at the Hit’n’Run link.:
[Olympics flashback]
The worst part is that the original singers were all replaced by much cuter kids.
[/Olympics flashback]
[Update about 3:15 PM EDT]
Exurban League has more, as does Confederate Yankee. It turns out to be astroturf:
Here’s a partial list of those who helped produce this “grassroots” effort:
- Jeff Zucker — American television executive, and President & CEO of NBC Universal.
- Post-producer (former choreographer?) Holly Shiffer.
- Motion picture camera operator/steadicam specialist Peter Rosenfeld (appropriately enough, worked in “Yes Man,” a movie about ” a guy challenges himself to say ‘yes’ to everything for an entire year.”
- Darin Moran, another motion picture industry professional, who just finished filming — how appropriate — Land of the Lost.
- Andy Blumenthal, Hollywood film editor.
Jeff Zucker. This generation’s Leni Riefenstahl. Except without the talent.
RIP, Paul Newman.
You can’t live a life much more full than he seemed to. And unlike many of his Hollywood colleagues, the one way that he didn’t seem to fill it up was with promiscuity and infidelity. It’s all too rare that an actor is faithful for decades. Of course, as he noted himself, it probably helps to be married to Joanne Woodward.
I hadn’t realized that he was a flier in the Navy in the Pacific. It’s always tempting to say that they don’t make them like that any more, but I suspect that they still do. A lot of them probably served in Iraq in the last few years, and we’ll be hearing from them in the future.