That was Glenn’s title for this post by Eric Raymond. I couldn’t think of a better one.
This is a real problem and one that is dramatically underreported.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
More WALL-E Thoughts
Lileks discusses the grief that he’s gotten over the fact that he enjoyed the movie:
Shannen Coffin at the Corner notes that you never know how much hate mail you’ll get until you take on a Pixar film. I’d add that the opposite is oddly true as well: I got a lot of very negative email about the review, some of which had to do with “shilling” (as one writer put it) for Disney, but most of which had to do with buying an eco-scary / anti-capitalist agenda because the characters were cute. Apparently I can write for years and demonstrate skepticism towards catastrophic doom-mongering, and it counts for nil. Ah well. Look, I think “JFK” is a pretty good piece of filmmaking. Its ideas are rubbish and its effect pernicious, but I still think it’s a compelling work. Doesn’t mean I believe a single frame.
Sometimes you separate the ideas from the movie, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you shouldn’t, and sometimes you don’t want to because you approve of the ideas. Asking me to reject Wall-E because its unrealistic premise has contemporary overtones is like asking me to swear off Star Trek because Roddenberry wanted a post-religious collectivist one-world government that eschewed money and property.
He also chides Andrew Sullivan for stereotyping:
Apparently Andrew Sullivan took note of the review, and while I appreciate the patronage, this rankles a bit:
“Well Lileks loved it. Not all conservatives are stupid ideologues.”
And not all liberals are stupid anti-consumerists who spaz out when someone praises the Works of Walt! Who’d have thunk it. Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.
Last night, I watched the end of Ratatouille, and afterward was a history of Pixar. Interesting stuff. It was a great example of the powerful synergy you can get when you successfully meld C. P. Snow’s two cultures and combine traditional animators with computer geeks.
As good as they’re getting at this stuff, though, I don’t think that it’s the death of 2-D animation. I suspect that as the 3-D stuff continues to asymptotically approach verisimilitude, there will be rebellious young turks who want to draw cartoons, and so the cycle will begin anew.
In any event, the foofaraw makes me want to see the movie in the theater, something I haven’t done with a Pixar movie since Toy Story (though I wanted to with Ratatouille).
Two Movie Reviews
Kyle Smith isn’t impressed with WALL-E. Lileks loved it (though he’s an admitted Disney/Pixarphile).
Guess I’ll have to see for myself now.
Hooking Them Early
Behold, Space Camp Barbie. Maybe math isn’t as hard as she thought.
Being All Judgmental
That’s what Rachel Lucas is doing. Well, someone has to do it, since society at large seems to have abdicated its role.
Like her, I was struck by the stupidity of this, reported apparently completely unironically, as though it made, you know, sense:
The Gloucester baby boom is forcing this city of 30,000 to grapple with the question of providing easier access to birth control…
Well, hey folks. It’s hard to see what that would do for this particular little baby boomlet.
There may be some problems that are solved by easier access to birth control, but brainless young women going out of their way to get knocked up isn’t one of them. I think, for that, there will have to be some other solution (unless by “easier access,” they mean tubal ligation).
Cyd And The Cape
Both are discussed today over at Lileks’ place. Also, judicial overreach in the Great White North.
In Defense Of A Small Town
A lovely evocative essay, from Jim Manzi. Though it’s not really the subject, it’s an appropriate one somehow, for the anniversary of D-Day. This is what blogging is all about.
Pressing (Non)Human Rights Issue Du Jour
Jonah wants to know if an atheist would think that vampires have rights.
I guess that they probably have some rights. I mean, I’m willing to grant them the right to be a vampire. That is, if they want to live forever, turn into a bat occasionally, not show up in mirrors, and avoid sunlight and garlic and crosses, and so on, it’s no skin off my nose (or blood out of my neck). But (like some conservatives’ view of homosexuals), I’m not willing to grant them a right to indulge in their (un)natural desire to drink blood. Particularly mine. I think that the Christian formulation would be hate the blood sucking, but love the vampire. But of course, this was about what atheists think.
Though if the blood sucking is consensual, it might be all right. But can it really be consensual? I mean, the consent can’t be very informed. You can describe what it’s like to be a vampire until the cows (and vampires) come home, but is that enough to allow someone to enter into such an arrangement
The blood sucking aside, though, I don’t see (given the limited thought I’ve given to the proposition) why vampires should have any fewer rights than the rest of us. It certainly seems discriminatory, and a hate crime of the first rank, to think that one has license to stick wooden stakes through their hearts, simply because they’re vampires. But if they’ve been engaged in non-consensual insanguination and vampire recruitment, then it seems as though it would be a preemptive act of self defense, albeit taking the law into one’s own hands.
Sorry, fascinating topic, but I think I’m starting to ramble. If I gave it more thought, I might come up with a more coherent treatise.
* Come to think of it, this has some parallels to some conservatives’ argument that gays have to “recruit” young boys, because they’re unable to procreate. This is a notion that I always thought nonsensical–no one can be “recruited” to be gay unless they’re already at least bisexual. I have never been unsure about my sexuality–was approached once when I was fourteen or so, and I wasn’t recruited–I was disgusted at the thought.
Irony At Epcot
A travelogue by Lileks:
The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.
BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.
At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything’s hakuna Montana.
Follow the link for the rest of the story.
The Logic Of Superstition
For what it’s worth, I set my watch to the destination time zone when they close the plane doors.