Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Unimpressed

5 Comments

Thoughts from Lileks on Letterman:

What’s amusing is how unamusing he is in the clip. How sour he seems. Compare him to his predecessors: Carson was all midwestern charm, with unreadable yet mannerly reserve; Steve Allen was almost as smart as he was certain you thought he must be, but he was cheerful; Parr was a nattering nutball covered with a rich creamy nougat of ego, but he was engaging. Letterman is empty; he’s inert; he stands for nothing except disdain for people foolish enough to stand for anything – aside from rote obesciance to all the things Decent People stand for, of course, all those shopworn assumptions passed around in the bubble.

This posture was fresh in ’80; it even had energy. But it paralyzes the heart after a while. You end up an SOB who shows up at the end of the night to reassure that nothing matters. I think he may have invented the posture of Nerd Cool, an aspect so familiar to anyone who reads message boards – the skill at deflating enthusiasm, puncturing passion with a hatpin lobbed from a safe distance. The instinctive unease with the wet messy energy of actual people.

Yes, reading too much into it. Really, it’s just a rote slam: If your mother is a loathed politician, and your older sister gets pregnant, famous old men can make jokes about you being knocked up by rich baseball players, and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the culture: a flat, dead-eyed, square-headed old man who’ll go back to the writers and ask for more Palin-daughter knocked-up jokes, because that one went over well. Other children he won’t touch, but not because he’s decent. It’s because he’s a coward.

I’ve never had any use for him, myself. But I’ve never been much into late-night “comedy,” period.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why aren’t feminists upset with Dave?

Because they’re leftists first, true feminists a distant second. And besides, Sarah Palin isn’t a real woman and of course, by extension, neither is her fourteen-year-old daughter. So they’re fair game.

[Mid-morning update]

Little Miss Atilla pulls no punches:

This is American Sharia, a**holes. The practitioners of Sharia in Muslim countries are at least consistent in their contempt for women and in their practice of gender apartheid: you, on the other hand, want sexual slavery for some women in this country; others, whose opinions you prefer, can live in relative peace and freedom. You will allow it.

If you are giving women and girls the “gift” of not being badgered for being female, and threatened with misogyny and sexual assault, they are not truly free—only living in a state of grace, contingent upon performing the right tricks, spouting leftist verbiage like seals at Sea World, balancing balls on their noses in the hopes of getting fish thrown into their mouths.

And any woman who doesn’t understand this fundamental truth about the misogynists living among them could be in for a rude awakening at any point, because that attitude will infect those who harbor it.

The leftist men in the sixties were notorious for their sexism and misogyny, considering women only useful for cooking and sex, while they wrote their manifestos. In fact, the feminist backlash in the seventies against “male chauvinist pigs” was a direct result of the experience of many of the women in the sixties with their “progressive” male cohorts. Some of them never grew up. Letterman is of that generation.

History, Social Commentary

Sixty-Five Years

11 Comments

Next year, it will be roughly two-thirds of a century since the Normandy landing. The ceremonies on the beach had been held every ten years up until 2004. I remember the 1974 anniversary, and my mother, who had been a WAC in Egypt, commenting that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. It’s sobering to realize now, as my age is close to hers then, that the landing was as close to her in time as the Iranian revolution and the worst of the Carter era is to me now.

Anyway, today’s ceremony has been only five years since the last one, because it won’t be long before there are no survivors left. The youngest of the men who stormed Juno, Gold, Sword, Omaha are eighty-three years old, and many of them are older, and they are dying by the hundreds each year as their ages advance. There will be many fewer on the seventieth anniversary, and just a handful, if any on the eightieth.

When they’re all gone, will European and North American leaders still gather on the once blood-soaked sand to commemorate their sacrifice and bravery? If so, for how many more years, before it becomes an event in long-forgotten history, irrelevant to those generations? We no longer have such ceremonies at Gettysburg, a similar watermark in political and military history, because no one alive remembers it first hand. Has any president given a speech there on the anniversary (the nation’s birthday)? Has any made a speech there on any day since Lincoln made his famous address only a few months after the event? I suspect that as time goes on, no one will show up at Normandy on June 6 except history buffs. The “greatest generation” is passing, and with them, an era.

[Update in the afternoon]

It occurs to me that this is probably the first such event at which none of the leaders speaking at it were alive when the landing occurred. G. W. Bush was born just after the war, but in 2004, Chirac gave a speech, and he was twelve years old when France was liberated. I’m pretty sure that Sarkozy, Harper, Brown and Obama are all baby boomers.

[Update a while later]

Lots of D-Day posts and links over at Aaarrrggghhh (not a permalink, just scroll).

History, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Well, He Meant “…A Man…”

1 Comment

…but he didn’t quite say it:

Riley and Olsson…concluded that Commander Armstrong and his family members do pronounce the word “a” in a discernible way.

And based on broadcasts from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the surface of the Moon, it is clear that the word “a” was easily transmitted to Earth without being obliterated.

But their analysis of the intonation of the phrase strongly suggests Commander Armstrong had intended to say “a man”. There is a rising pitch in the word “man” and a falling pitch when he says “mankind”.

According to Mr Olsson: “This indicates that he’s doing what we all do in our speech, he was contrasting using speech – indicating that he knows the difference between man and mankind and that he meant man as in ‘a man’ not ‘humanity’.”

I think it’s safe to say that this has been analyzed to death at this point. It’s only been forty years.

Business, Economics, Social Commentary

The Cruelty Of The Marketplace

22 Comments

This is one tough recession. Hookers’ rates are down in Amsterdam:

‘Some of the girls are now doing it for 30 euros (S$60). My price is still 50 euros, but the men are playing us off against each other. Some want to pay only 20 euros,’ she told AFP.

Guess they need a bail out. Of course, it’s particularly tough in Europe, where there’s so much competition from women who are giving it away…

Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Where’s My Flying Car?

12 Comments

And what happened to my space colonies?

Yes, it was never a mass movement, and even with the merger of NSI and L-5, I don’t think that NSS has ever had more than a hundred thousand members. I do think, though, that it is sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of people that when we break out of the NASA paradigm, and the supply actually responds to demand, some people will live in space in the future.

[Evening update]

Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s dyspeptic space colony post:

In the 1970s space had become a niche topic little noticed by the general public. Within that niche area one could search around and find a tiny sub-niche dealing with in-space orbital space colonies. Sure, there were the occasional articles and a handful of books about O’Neill space colonies and a small group of people had a high interest in them. However, you could say the same thing about a million other topics as well. Orbital space colonies never came close to being a topic that most people were aware of, much less considered in any thoughtful way.

If in 1980 you asked a randomly selected group of a thousand people what they thought about space, a thousand would say, probably in the first sentence, that space was wildly expensive. If you asked them if they had read an article about space colonies in the past decade, I doubt even fifty would say yes. And most of those fifty would say such colonies might be a great idea but are impractical while space travel is so wildly expensive.

Yes, as is the case of much of space policy, it’s all about information and perspective. (I’ve added “Media Criticism” to the categories for this post, and bumped it…)

Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Parasites

18 Comments

Here’s another guest post, from “Douglas,” on the subject of carlessness.

Most of my oh-so-enlightened (all of them college drop outs like me) liberal-minded freaks of friends (no, they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.

Most of them live in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, and don’t own cars any more; they only update their driver’s licences so that they can defer portions of their taxes to Indiana rules rather than Illinois.

One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost ten years. Since then, he’s gotten married, had two kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an Indiana resident.

Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.

There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technically poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brother’s wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.

I drove from Chicago to Vegas for a one-night trip three times, so that I could be a part of my friends’ getting married. I got in my car and drove to Florida for the same reason, I made it to Kentucky twice for a cousin’s christening, and again for another cousin’s divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)

I drove from Chicago to Hammond, Louisiana four times, because I was the only one who could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was so possessive of certain possessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.

It took four trips.

If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) events. If I hadn’t had a car.

If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independent movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for inefficient buses and trains to get you where you need to go.

This “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasitically demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pay for it.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Shocking News

34 Comments

It’s cheaper to own a car than to use mass transit. When you take all the costs into account (and even ignoring the convenience factor) it’s not really surprising at all:

Anti-car people will argue that the high cost of living in New York City or San Francisco is some kind of anomaly, and that proper government action could magically create low cost of living dense urban areas. I am doubtful. Government regulations usually drive up costs rather than reduce costs (with the exception of regulations carefully thought out to prevent value transference). In fact, the rent control laws in New York City, which liberals think are making housing more affordable, are actually contributing to the high cost of living here. I’ve previously suggested two reasons why dense cities are so expensive: (1) dense cities create transportational and space inefficiencies; and (2) dense cities attract liberal voters who elect liberal politicians who enact dumb laws which increase the cost of living. Maybe there is some third or fourth reason as well. Until someone can demonstrate a place where it’s reasonable to be carless and it doesn’t cost a fortune to live there, one has to assume that such places are inherently economically inefficient.

The arguments against cars and sprawl are aesthetic (and elitist), not economic.

[Saturday update]

Randall Parker has further observations.

[Bumped]