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comments by emporium

Published comments
Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 7:40 PM
Bozobub I appreciate this list as well. "Rats and Gargoyles" is
vivid in my mind -- so too Jonathan Carroll, who is accessible to
anyone who likes Gaiman. And of course know that Wolfe will
eventually be feted in a way that finally draws all to him, a societal
phenomenon perhaps akin to "True Detective".

But Wolfe has praised Pat Buchanan, whereas longtime democrat
and vegetarian Piers Anthony, only seems to bring up Paul
Krugman ... which one of these well-resourced individuals do you
think Salon readers really ought to (re)discover?

And just one last bit about promoting the fantasy genre ... it's
becoming so that if you don't have at least one fave you're not
substantially literary. How loudly, for example, have Chabon and
Lethem been promoting fantasy and sci fi? Very loudly -- these
Philip Roth-pronounced best writers of our generation -- indeed.
And just go to the "New Yorker" to see how many are already loud
in their enjoyment of GOT, and elsewhere amongst the literary, to
see how many have to some extent rescinded their previous harsh
judgments -- Sady Doyle (at least with the show), for instance.

But why is it that I actually now think that works most likely to be
charged as being written by fairies, about fairies, and for fairies,
may actually be where you'll find the least coddling? To be doing
that, you'd have to willing to be a clown and unrecognized even as
the rest of the genre finally has its full day -- that's "Gladiator"
bravery, and maybe that's why.


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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 6:59 PM
Christopher1988

It sounds like someone who likes elves and fairies but not dragons
and heavy bloodshed. More of a Narnia person than a Tolkien
person, more fairy tale than Arthurian legend.

I like, and don't like, this response. Laura IS NOT trying to
establish herself as someone who goes for elves and fairies but not
dragons and heavy bloodshed. I WISH this was the case, because I
think there's truth in it -- which you sensed. She's trying to
establish herself as someone mostly outside the fantasy genre --
"Narnia" being mostly C.S Lewis, not talking animals -- who's still
open to being nudged into reading about dragons and heavy
bloodshed, OR about elves and fairies, if it's really, really, good.

This helps. I would hope she's using her credentials to legitimate
intelligent people discovering works that'll enrich them and
which'll be enriched, by their commentary upon them -- Richard
Brody says he's going to start trying to watch television again, and
god almighty if he'd bring himself to review GOT how much our
awareness of the show would be informed, and how grateful we'd
all be that fellow "Newyorker" Nussbaum sort of shamed him into
doing so.

But Laura'd of been a more evolved person if she'd of said -- just
what you said. That is, "I'm FOR elves and talking animals -- I've
written a book about them, in fact -- but normally avoid dragons
and bloodshed, but thank god I was still open to giving GOT a
chance."

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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 4:47 AM
Bozobub He said he kinda wants to give Robert Jordan a crack.
Selling "Anubis Gates" by assuring him there are no orcs, elves, or
other Tolkienesque frippery should probably dissuade him, no?

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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 4:41 AM
Bozobub Emporium Hamlet_d I love him but I'm also
mentioning Xanth because there's something just so small about
how some people hoping to schlep fantasy more into the literary
mainstream, first make clear they don't really go for dragons or
whatnot. My apologies, but they kind of do it the way you just
presented Tim Powers, whom I mostly remember for
swashbuckling.

So Victorian steampunk, or based on Tudor history, or sparse
magic, or even Pratchett -- where it's all overtly just a joke, and to
whom A.S.Byatt turns when in need of a break.

And not Xanth where it's so much whimsy, excited creation,
and an author not sufficiently winking at us.

The current turn, may be against magic period -- including
Updike's. Maybe not; I'll think on that.
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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 4:06 AM
Christopher1988 Emporium smartacus

How exactly does she sound here?

Ive learned to listen when friends insist that this or that specimen
of a genre stands out from the crowd, which is how, even though I
really couldnt care less about dragons, I ended up reading A
Game of Thrones several years ago.

Like someone who wrote a book about "Narnia," or someone
outside the genre who gave it a chance owing to her wisdom and
her friends' insistence?
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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 1:17 AM
Hamlet_d I agree. I put the magical world of Xanth up there with
Hemingway and Proust as well. Not to say Octavia Butler or
Vonnegut haven't done a noteworthy thing or two, but I'm sure not
quite up to the level to the endlessly inventive, pun-filled world of
Xanth!
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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 1:14 AM
buddy66 Don't read Updike then, 'cause he makes magic of the
everyday -- which, I assure you, feels vastly more saturated than
almost any fantasy I've ever read though maybe not the magical
world of Xanth.
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Original Article: Game of Thrones is not genre for
guys!
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 1:09 AM
smartacus It'd be nice if she explained how someone who wrote a
whole book on "Narnia" could write that she was willing to read
the best the fantasy genre had to offer -- despite the dragons.

It would seem to make more sense if she wrote she was willing to
give books mostly bare any magic at all a shot, so long as there
were at least some talking animals, or fire-breathing dragons.

The other thing that perplexes me is how she trusted that
"Thrones" was the best of the fantasy genre. You'd only know this
via someone who spent a lot of time reading all kinds of writings
from that genre -- sure, maybe owing to being an editor or
something, but still unaccountably for being someone who gets
jizzed over constant repetition of magic-sprinkled medieval. How
does a person who is comfortable with so much genre trash gain
the trust of someone who's level of taste is so parfait, so perfect,
she knows she's losing out if she doesn't read top genre, but would
never even on a million dollar bet spend a year immersed in the
garbage?

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Original Article: It isnt easy being twee: Why the
Wes Anderson aesthetic is good for everyone
THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2014 12:53 AM
@BigJimSlade @Emporium We're living in era where there's a
consolidating elite. If you listen to Thomas Frank, the whole liberal
professional class is to be included as part of it. What unifies
them? Who gives a bleep about Kansas? -- distinction from the the
rabble, that is.

And here's a writer entrenching himself within and trying to spread
the word about twee. What is it to be twee? It's to be still curious to
life despite a profound awareness of the darkness. And it has some
similarities to the aristocratic "polite vision" that appeared at the
mid-point of the 18th-century, that stopped the advance of the
burgeoning middle class in its track. A burgeoning middle class,
that had gained ground on the aristocracy through the sensitivity
movement, which was easily aped; open to any merchant who was
anti-slavery (and the like) and who could master a few basic
mannerisms.

The polite vision was something everyone might hopefully
emulate, but few really had the resources to possess. It was much
more than just saying you were anti-slavery more to do with
showing in ways only the most refined could fully appreciate, that
you had a soul as deep and broad as Mr. Darcy. It was successful.
The aristocracy consolidated and allowed few new members in.
The middle class was once again ignorable.

Think about this piece. If it was just about a willingness to still be
innocent and open, despite a brutal society, despite the internet,
then Deschanel's "I love cats" could have replaced by "I love"
anything resonant of the childish. But if she's said "Forrest Gump,"
do you really think that this author wouldn't have shied away?

This reference is about 10 years too old, but still, if she's of said "I
love the magical world of pun-filled Xanth," wouldn't this author
have openly scoffed at her? There was an article here at Salon
where someone was open about having "lived years in Xanth," but
though written maybe 10 years ago the author was still half-
admonishing her former self through the piece, as if knowing that
if she doesn't switch soon to someone like Wes Anderson, she's not
going to look so much courageously open as scorn-worthy
common. Her social class was enough on her mind, that she made
the "right" play.

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Original Article: Gwyneth Paltrows utterly
obnoxious conscious uncoupling letter proves shes
the last great star
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 8:06 PM
SalonTroll Was she married, or just -- as she understood it --
happily coupled? I'm not necessarily for keeping terms like
marriage or divorce as part of the lexicon, if there are terms
available which better suit where we're developing spiritually.

This sounds so Easternish woo-woo, but our nation -- or at least
parts of it -- is spiritually evolving, isn't it? Gay marriage,
legalization of marijuana, racial tolerance aren't we headed
toward Nirvana? And do we go there best presided by legal, or just
whole-hog yoga?
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Original Article: Joan Rivers does it again, claims
Lena Dunham spreads message obesity and diabetes
are OK
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 6:49 PM
Mowry I like that she appears naked, and why she does so. I'll
celebrate her allowing herself to actually have a cupcake, when I
see her eat just one. You're totally with her when she's savouring it
because it is delicious, but your enthusiasm wains when, ooooh,
there goes another down the gullet, then another one, and another.
"Yes, Hollywood templates are rancid, but still, don't you think
"
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Original Article: Joan Rivers does it again, claims
Lena Dunham spreads message obesity and diabetes
are OK
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 5:40 PM
Lena Dunham has, in her opinion, exactly the right attitudes about
everything the fact that she can't stop eating cupcakes is hardly
presented by her as admirable -- but not generally communicative
that something substantive is off with you. (I'd agree with her that
not resisting the cupcake can also mean the "Groundhog Day,"
actually envy-inspiring just partaking of life when it's before you --
showing you're acclimatized to being brash.) It probably isn't good
for your health, but is disconnected overall from whether you've
got your head on straight, is what she communicates.

I like her take on a lot of things, but there may be a sense in which
she is subsiding the importance of your being obese, if, that is,
being obese means something along the lines of what a Freudian
would assess it as -- oral stage fixated, or something.

Anyway, I'm certainly not a hater I've benefited a lot from her
show, and am very grateful.
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Original Article: It isnt easy being twee: Why the
Wes Anderson aesthetic is good for everyone
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 3:52 PM
wmterhaar Old money and working class aren't necessarily at odds
-- both ostensibly understanding their social obligations to one
another. Roosevelt was old money and was the people's friend.
Who's out might be the middle class.
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Original Article: It isnt easy being twee: Why the
Wes Anderson aesthetic is good for everyone
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 3:37 PM
@bigguns I like Lena Dunham and Wes Anderson. But I also
really like Piers Anthony and Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump),
both artists who know the dark but choose the light. But the former
are appropriated by twee, while the latter -- very carefully, and
probably not.

Why? Because the latter aren't markers which helpfully collaborate
with your class -- they're too available. They muck up the issue,
and might mean your being sorted out. If amongst your peers you
go heavy on Anderson and every once in a while mention your
liking of Gump -- you're okay. If you go light on Anderson and
heavy on Anthony -- you won't be. "You must be common," is how
you'll be assessed; and therefore sullying to a group performing as
the eternally brave manifest in our times, the sole bequeathers of
light into our regressing, sodden, maddeningly barbaric times.

Don't be fooled that it's about you innocently declaring "you like -
-" Much depends on what you've selected to pin your hopeful
childhood innocence on.



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Original Article: It isnt easy being twee: Why the
Wes Anderson aesthetic is good for everyone
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 3:17 PM
bigguns Writer makes point. Readers prove point. Teamwork!

This was the writer's point. He wants us to understand our world as
one where there are only a few poetic souls surrounded by the
damaged. He wants a society where aristocrats have refined their
image and consolidated. They're of better souls, and our role is to
try and emulate them.

We get a lot of articles like that here, which are the equivalent of
Deschanel's "I love cats," and the author is bewildered by the angry
response. The net thinks they've scored, but what they've done is
played their part -- further confirmation that the same group of
people who find their way into all the respected publications,
should see nothing awry in this fact: everybody else is just too dull
to reach the poetic heights that "you" can.

Salon used to tell its commenters not to hold anything back. For
real, wherever you used to click to find out more about
commenting told you exactly that. When the new editor took over,
what we were told was to "play nice." Here was the displacement
of the hippie for the assumption that'll empower the twee. He was
sensitive; we probably aren't.
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Original Article: Divergent and Hunger Games
as capitalist agitprop
MONDAY, MARCH 24, 2014 1:11 AM
Al Zayha In this post you use your bombing innocents as muscle. I
would encourage you not to do that -- especially when it works to
belittle the average Joe, who frets some over whether to choose
Glass or Yahoo.
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Original Article: Divergent and Hunger Games
as capitalist agitprop
SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 2014 1:33 AM
I'll add that I'm certainly not making open-praise for individualism,
just for people to be raised with sufficient love and nurturance that
they possess a ripe, distinctive personality -- a well-developed
soul. Only that the form of collectivism I liked in the 1960s seems
almost hated by what's arising in the left for it's MEism -- these
hippies were full of themselves, narcissitic; gorged down on peace,
happiness, and togetherness, and then when in the mood for it,
coastal homes, expensive foreign cars, kids in distinguished private
schools! It was always, mostly about them, the increasingly
confident new "old left" is deeming them.

I listen to them and posit them as naturally oriented into that group
in "Divergent" that everyone in the film has the sense to walk as
far away as they can from, when opportunity chimes -- the
monkish, self-abnegating one, where people are afraid to temper
their bare food with more than a quick dash of seasoning.
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Original Article: Divergent and Hunger Games
as capitalist agitprop
SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 2014 12:56 AM
I appreciate but am not certain about this analysis. My concern
would be that if people in mass can't realize that the people
supposed to be divergent and stronger-souled actually aren't, if it
doesn't concern them that every other person reading the book and
everybody to the side, back, and in front of them in the theater is
convinced they'd be one of the rare-bird divergents as well, then
these aren't a very healthy stock of people. I'm not afraid they're
malleable, but that they're built to sacrifice themselves for a group
hug.

I appreciate the observation that we won't know fascism when it
arrives -- if we want it, it'll have to overtly seem the very opposite
of every form we're familiar with; it'll have to come with no guilt.
Fascism came to Germany, though, with people turning on Weimar
individualism, its spiritual emptiness -- I'm guessing its
materialism. I'm wondering that we might actually be entering a
time where something still worthy is going to look increasingly
impossible to defend. Wouldn't it have been better if Weimar
Germany, with all its ostensible decay, had just continued?; that
Germany didn't go down the path it did in the 30s and "evolve"
into the Volk, where you didn't contribute to secretly distinguish
yourself but to display an orientation you wanted to be commonly
shared; and instead capitalist individualism continued its day
UNTIL about the 1960s, where collectivism took a form we can
totally get behind?

It concerns me that people like Chris Hedges has such a problem
with the 1960s for its individualism -- it heavily qualifies his
genuine appreciation for the progressive movements then. It
concerns me that Thomas Frank has such a problem with the
liberal professional class, making them seem so egotistical and
greedy. I don't trust the public mood, nor that our most regressive
couldn't switch on a dime to hardly caring a damn about austerity
measures, nor keeping afloat a 1% -- neither of which the Nazis
gave one wit about. Under their leadership, Germany recovered
form the Depression first.

Thanks for the interesting review; the good prompt to think some.

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Original Article: Deadly myth about millennials: The
dark truth about a misunderstood generation
SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 2014 2:29 PM
America hates its kids. I gather it's been fun sport, but they had
better watch it. If somehow we all become united nationalists
again, in competition against places like China, Mother Russia, and
we look at our own youthful promise and see how much work has
to be done to build them up in esteem and skills, we might not look
so kindly on those who allowed such sad lengthy wreckage upon
them. Your best-trained were slipping into retail and you were still
savouring the role of narcissistic master surrounded by fretful
kids? You could of had elves but bullied them into goblins instead,
because they cringe and cower to authority while proud elves
don't? Your time is over, stewart; bring on the return of the king!

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Original Article: The destructive myth about religion
that Americans disproportionately believe
THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014 1:42 AM
@Humbabella It is far more believable that poverty tends to cause
religiosity than that religiosity tends to cause poverty.

I thought Jesus was all about the miracle that love from God was
actually possible so long as you masochistically devoted yourself
to Him -- Jesus himself took place of your own offspring, which
previously you were supposed to sacrifice a portion of to that
wonderful, benign deity. If so, I could imagine Christians as a
collective allowing themselves to prosper for awhile, but
eventually also actually being happy when economic austerity
measures buried any further possibility of that.

It is possible that in search of just this outcome -- the obliteration
of any further possibility to accrue wealth, which was making them
feel intolerably selfish and abandoned from parental love -- they
unconsciously voted for politicians that ended the era of
reasonably prosperous working class Christians, beginning of
course with their electing in Reagan.

I know, there are still some monstrously wealthy Christians in
America; but they're really just playing a part: one group has to be
the suffering -- the brutalized child before the self-absorbed,
narcissistic parent; the other have to be the obnoxious God -- the
parent who might just forgive you for your sins if you suffer, and if
you don't say a word while he himself gorges down everything in
sight.

The nature of your relationship with your parents as a child
determines what religion you'll turn to or create, and how much
growth you'll be capable of permitting yourself.




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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 6:30 PM
Resolute Emporium I would say that the Germans oppressing the
Jews was an example of actually an inferior people dominating a
superior one. Nothing about DNA. Just that the thing that drew
Germans to hate Jews was that they had been sufficiently better
loved in childhood and so possessed an ongoing ability to enjoy
and participate in Weimar-enabled societal growth. To love-
deprived, brutally raised Germans, Jews, who were actually just
showing remarkable ongoing emotional health, came to seem
guilty for being spoiled. Jews seemed appropriate "poison-
containers" for "selfish" acquisitions they wanted to disown
themselves of, so they projected in mass onto them, and tried to
wipe them out to feel pure. What is always going on when one
people tries to wipe out another.

Europeans who had evolved to the point where they could embrace
science and reject superstition, alchemy and magic with ease, were
an example of an oppressor that was superior to the still-
superstition-bound peoples they dominated -- dominated, let me
once again point out, principally for purposes of rape and
exploitation, not for whatever enlightened purpose they saw it for.

It's a fact, but not one to be celebrated -- for compared to where
progressives are now, they're pretty much barbaric peoples
themselves. You look at their first advances to protect children,
animals, women, the weak, and it's just paltry stuff to what better-
raised, more loved descendants were readily capable of centuries
later. Their anti-slavery material, as we know, for example,
however still commendable for the time, served a double-purpose
of pornography they got off on.

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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 6:03 PM
We all know this is not about convincing the author, but I would
like to point out why this is. Right now, if you were to go to Russia
and try and talk sense to many of them about the Ukraine, they
couldn't possibly be moved. What they're doing is bonding with the
nation as Mother, and preparing themselves to war against an other
they've projected all of her unwanted aspects into, as well as all the
aspects of themselves they need to be disowned of -- specifically,
spoiledness, self-centredness, selfishness, and vulnerability. The
result is that they are pure and strong in staunch defence of a pure
Mother Russia -- her favourites, as they had always hoped to be in
life. And you're simply not going to be allowed to get in the way of
that.

That's what's motivating her, this author. Every time she angrily
makes her point, aiming nothing short of reclaiming a whole
tradition stolen from an ancestral Mother, she feels her own mother
beside her, loving her for her sublimely admirable defence. And
it's the most enfranchising feeling ever.

We all get the same way when we can fuse with something we can
see as maternal as well. So if we start identifying ourselves with
old clannish habits we had forgotten this long while while we
gorged mostly on "corrupt modernity," and feel refreshed for
having done so, cleansed of poisons and joined anew to something
more meaningful -- this is what we'll be up to. If we all identity
ourselves as working-class Americans again, known foremost for
our humility, our intrinsic anonymity, and our deference to our
nation's needs - - including, of course, eager self-sacrifice -- this is
what we'll be up.

Let's be on the watch for it, because it'll mean we too are
entranced, beyond being reasoned with.
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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 5:27 PM
@ssohara The same can be said of any culture, though, because
we are all human beings. Human beings all share both the
capacity for greatness, innovation, discovery, compassion... and
the capacity for cruelty, evil, stupidity, etc.

Apes barely recognize their children when they're off the breasts,
and often starve for not being fed. That might be where we all
started from. Not even Winnicott's good-enough child-rearing.
Nobody's fault. Just evolution had this new trick called empathy,
and it was like a mole amongst the dinosaurs -- containing the seed
of greatness, but almost worth forgetting about at this primitive
point.

From there, we've all grown. Though cultures which remained
pretty much the same for thousands of years, haven't done much to
keep themselves permanently fixated on their ghastly origins. Pre-
literate societies, pre-scientific societies, probably had childrearing
of such an insufficient kind that they spend quite a lot of their time
in animistic dream states, merged with their inner perpetrator
alters. In dream states, everything was infused with their
projections, so science matched less well with their experience
than magic and would have been rejected. Plus science lead to
constant growth, which wasn't permitted because the adults hadn't
advanced to the point where children existed for anything more
than to satisfy their own unmet needs.

I'm sure they all had art. But I think if we honestly spent enough
time in certain cultures -- without willing ourselves to see
beneficent primitivism, as so many anthropologists have done, and
which in fact their whole occupation depends on -- everything,
even the art, might seem less about nourishing life than coping
with previous trauma. Decorated pearl shells rubbed and cherished,
healing their hurts, and convincing themselves they won't be eaten.
It's not motivated by as admirable an instinct, nor is it anywhere
near as qualitatively beautiful as Mozart, I'm afraid.

I have no idea where the original belly dancing falls on the
spectrum, what originally motivated it and the function it served.
But let's not simply assume it was part of the simply beautiful of
wo/mankind, that counterbalances the part that's bad. Sometimes
the bad, or the grossly insufficient, infuses everything.
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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 3:27 PM
Resolute I'm of Irish descent, but I'm wondering before we
became historically oppressed peoples if we were all that, though.
I'm wondering because Romans once gauged our most ancient
ancestors as abominable child sacrificers and cannibals, and used it
to legitimize their conquest. Which was bad. Awful. Cause all they
wanted to do was rape, steal, and conquest. But archaeologists did
eventually reveal that they were nevertheless child sacrificers and
cannibals, though.

Which didn't mean they should have been invaded by the Romans -
- who just wanted to rape, steal, and conquest, as I said. But
someone should have politely stopped them. And if reformed their
original culture disappeared or was appropriated into a different
form, well, if the new version reflected the proclivities of a people
who were less demon-haunted -- probably for the good .

Sometimes I wonder if all the primitive or pre-literate art we like to
glory at is all that as well. Humanity's original art in caves, the
blood-red ochre paintings, were associated with human sacrifice
and child rape. The Venus statues, were as it turns out probably
raping wands. The author herself believes that all-female culture
surrounding belly-dancing was something glorious, sexual and
exotic in a superior way than when it's done for men. Women
getting together can do some terrible things, though. Women chant
as they gather around for clitoris removal rituals, for instance. And
a lot of women -- scholars -- still say the nicest things about that.
Maybe the practitioners of the original forms of belly dancing
should forget what they're doing and appropriate what some of the
Westerners might be up to -- especially the really nice ones we've
heard from on this site, those who really empathized with the
author's pain. Their version might in fact be born out of a more
loving spirit than that from our collectively darker past.
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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 3:29 AM
Gadgiiberibimba Always draws on personal experience, early in
our lives -- she's an effective repeat of a humiliating demon we
never quite got advantage of. She delights in casually dismissing
us, being adrift from us and not seeing us straight, as she was
dismissed early in her life, probably within that all-female clan she
likes to celebrate -- by her mom, no doubt.
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Published comments
Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 2:33 AM
homefly I think within some quarters of academia the idea that
you should maintain emotional distance when discussing matters
of rape incurred to your people, is being challenged. They probably
remember that hysteria was a way to keep women and besieged
indigenous out of power, identifying calm rationality with the
white European male. To them, your stance is actually laden with
power politics.
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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 2:02 AM
Dr X Emporium "Umm," Mmm" -- you and Randa are basically
of the same kind.
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Original Article: I still cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014 1:31 AM
Her ace in the hole is that liberals won't identify with the
conquerer's position -- that those they dominated weren't beautiful
indigenous worthy of thorough respect, but actually heavily
beholden to many abhorrent, barbaric practices. Until they do, her
"you've enfranchised yourselves with an art from a country your
monstrous ancestors brutally, carnally ravaged, and still today
favor its grotesque appropriated form over its far more beautiful
original" has power. She can sashay over you with pleasure; as she
so-silly-girl does here in mocking your 3000 responses to her
article with it just being some casual blow from her nose worth
pretty much nothing to her. You've got to be aligned to terrific
power if when the horde masses, you in delight upon their
unexpected company pro-offer them a mischievous quip -- "let
them eat cake." And for now, she is.
Liberals might lose their interest in primitivism if something else
helps define them against regressed conservatives/republicans.
This might just be avid defence of the modern state, the early ones
that colonized, which at least in European cultures was also
concurrent and absolute party to the first brave advance of science
over stifling superstition.
Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 7:03 PM
gadflyonthewall If they back him because they know she's far
worse, they may need to increase the mores on acknowledging
maternal incest with children. They're afraid to go there, and so
settle for her "coaching" -- her ostensible self-serving, selfish use
of a child when aged, not when newly born; and also by deflecting
accusations from settling onto him.

Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 4:04 PM
@peaceofmind @Emporium Gandalf balking back the darkness,
is what I thought. So heroic and courageous, at least to me she's
not so entrenched, millennial love for her isn't so beyond
collapsing over her John Updike-like self-inflation, that having the
temerity to stand against an established elite wouldn't hurt her.
Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 1:54 PM
@Dolores Park You might be right. Though I think this is one of
those things my brain tackled somewhere in my past, and still
settled in favor of this particular usage.


Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 1:49 PM
Dolores Park Emporium The being well-loved part means she's
capable of courageous positions, not that she's necessarily right.
However, the fact that I think she's well-loved and therefore
dispossessed of any need to apologize for child-abusers (who are
usually our parents, and who's love and respect we're always
hoping to chase down), does encourage one to believe she might be
seeing into him better than you might be capable of.

I believe you when you say you just straight-up like his movies.
But I do believe that Hollywood decided against turning on him,
mostly because they want to keep him immune to being sundered
by "loud-mouthed," "self-interested" accusers -- they want an
aristocratic society which impresses itself through obvious double-
standards. He counts as one of the favoured for those with taste, so
you're not getting him.
Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 1:40 PM
deeznuggets That's a tenable argument. But you wouldn't hate real
women's bodies, just prefer no women's sexuality be fully under
their control.
Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 1:24 PM
dterrydraw Mommy issues. Is there any coincidence that after
summoning this spectre looming over the pathetically thin-
shouldered Allen, you followed up by referencing your gratifying
large walk-in closet? It was almost as if for a moment you saw
yourself in his withered-loined place, and countenanced by
assuring yourself your balls are as big as Texas.


Permalink

Original Article: Scarlett Johanssons awful defense
of Woody Allen and SodaStream
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 1:11 PM
Operation Enduring Boredom Emporium The psychoanalytic
speculative ramblings -- as you call it -- spoke to his fate if he is
ultimately deemed a child-abuser. Would some relapse in their
defence of him occur if they knew it wouldn't mean his total
destruction? That we could learn someone abused children and not
simply see a demon, but someone who suffered sadistic abuse
themselves as children?

I suspect that if there somehow surfaced hands-down inarguable
proof that Allen abused children, they'd switch to implying the
children might somehow have deserved or actually wanted the
"attention." They're keeping their own predators, people who
predated on them, in a sanctified position, probably because it
involves parents they still unconsciously hope to earn love from.
Permalink

Original Article: Lena Dunham nauseated and
disgusted by Woody Allen
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 12:54 PM
It's commendable she is so readily able to say she thinks he's doing
bad movies. Allen's hoisted by most of the urban educated as a
class identifier. They're afraid to lose their connection to his work
in a different way than she means here.

I think her stance conveys courage. It's the advantage of having
strong family back-up, of having been well-loved -- you can
actually come across as dispossessed of the need to cringe.
Permalink

Original Article: Scarlett Johanssons awful defense
of Woody Allen and SodaStream
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 12:33 PM
Garbo Here you need to educate yourself a bit. He's referenced
Sady Doyle in the past (where I learned about her, in fact) -- very
respectfully. Sady's a big "Hannibal" fan and is exploring mid-
century sic fi -- there is an aspect of juvenilia to her, for all her
ostensibly matured sense of feminism.
Permalink

Original Article: Scarlett Johanssons awful defense
of Woody Allen and SodaStream
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 12:55 AM
zenwick Pneumatic isn't a problem with breasts, but with
pronounced breasts. It's basically a way of saying your space is
being imposed upon, that they're making you feel squashed, and
that they need to be humiliated so you might sense their
momentary uncertainty, their relapse and backing off.
Permalink

Original Article: Scarlett Johanssons awful defense
of Woody Allen and SodaStream
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 12:41 AM
There's a sense that you slotted Johansson into a "paradigm" we're
especially receptive to right now -- the vocal celebrity ignoring all
the experts, seeing him/herself as courageous against a storm of
malinformed oppression idiot Fox News anchor against the
whole scientific community.

Well, okay. I think it works here -- she doesn't look so good. But
I'm suspicious of your own persistent argument for humility. That
is, perhaps for you, this -- lack of humility -- may in fact becoming
someone's primary crime, an over-riding crime, that could take
down someone who outside their area of expertise still is saying
something valid, important and vital. The strident, self-presuming
pneumatic actress, that is, might have been doomed for the sheer
fact of her galling egoism.
Permalink

Original Article: Scarlett Johanssons awful defense
of Woody Allen and SodaStream
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 2014 12:24 AM
If indeed Woody Allen was a child-abuser, I would hope he would
continue making films. Child-abusers were themselves abused as
children -- always. What happens is that the child blames himself
for the abuse, and as he grows up is drawn to abuse children who
remind him of his former vulnerable self -- thereby avoiding being
flooded by memories of his own abuse; thereby joined to the
mental state of the perpetrator rather than the victim.

So, I'm not exactly going to call for something harsh -- prison;
collective hatred -- for anyone who's subsequent life-destroying,
malevolent behaviour owed to that. Make sure the abuse could
never be repeated. Make sure those victimized are given
tremendous care themselves, so they don't do what they'll
otherwise be inclined to do and blame themselves. But if they're
now able to do art that adds something beautiful to the world --
what a miracle! please do continue. Other victims don't need to
know you were never able to admit to the behaviour, but do need
to know the abuse didn't completely break was was loving about
you.

And while we praise this man's efforts, we never allow ourselves
to live in a world where anyone becomes so important psychically
to us that we won't allow our image of them to be adulterated in a
significant way, which is still where are now, and applicable, I
think, to how our current re-assessing of Woody is shaping up.
Permalink

Original Article: How did my fellow Irish-Americans
get so disgusting?
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014 3:40 PM
tony Scully You've put your army onto the field, and it's
considerable -- somehow all the dead Hehirs seemed risen
momentarily to stand by you in pride. Someone down below is also
marching his Irish clan, and it's of the lowest common denominator
you want to be distinguished from, the uneducated and maybe not
most intelligent but they believe, most manly of the flock.

If I had to pick between the two, I'd go with what you assembled.
But you know, I think I preferred when I didn't like some of the
people you mention because I could count them part of my
ancestral stock -- that is, when I liked them because, like me, they
just seemed to care.

Permalink

Original Article: How did my fellow Irish-Americans
get so disgusting?
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014 3:04 PM
@DaveD So the Irish that went to Montana to work the mines,
aren't douches, aren't false macho, aren't longing for identity and
don't cling and don't incessantly chatter, but just plain old quiet-
type Americans with nothing to prove, who rightly hate East-
coasters?

If this is the identity their vested in, no wonder Democrats are
sticking to professionals, minorities, and millenials for their
success, because it's hard to imagine handing them out anything
that wouldn't leave them feeling compromised and priss.


Permalink

Original Article: How did my fellow Irish-Americans
get so disgusting?
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014 2:40 PM
Scott du Nord We fight those we've projected our own unwanted
aspects into. Alphas pick on sissies because they remember when
they felt feminized from being used to entertain and mop up
maternal depression (what children historically have depended on
for the sheer fact of being raised at all), and need to disown
themselves of and destroy this powerless, distraught self. The best
of men were raised better, closer to what they deserved, and have
no defensive need to go all Putin.

The worst of the hyper-masculine refuse to have sex longer than a
minute for fear of being poisoned by the vagina. You remain
someone who I expect has posted here at feminine Salon for quite
awhile, so if you want to go all the way Alpha you'd probably have
to begin by leaving the site. It might be erroneously contaminating
you.

Even the fact that you used the word "sissy" should maybe concern
you more, if when you say it you momentarily mimic the dolled-up
man with lollypop in hand, joined to the frivolous sisterhood of
humanity.
Permalink

Original Article: How did my fellow Irish-Americans
get so disgusting?
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014 4:19 AM
grumpyshoegirl Good to know. The only reason I counted myself
still a bit Irish was owing to my joy in listening to magical Enya
and watching the splendour of Riverdance. If I'm allowed to take
those "two" with me as I leave, well then
Permalink

Original Article: How did my fellow Irish-Americans
get so disgusting?
SUNDAY, MARCH 16, 2014 4:11 AM
With Irish-American identity now split between an optional
lifestyle accessory

Maybe actually go for that. What an opportunity! Next step is for
us to not factor it in as an option at all, and our identity is spared
by necessity being linked to the tribal. The English were asses for
dominating us for being odd -- actually, I personally think they
were just projecting their own unwanted aspects onto us, and so
weren't actually seeing us at all -- but it's quite possible we were
nevertheless up to things like Druidic sacrifice of children, and that
we spent half our time in animistic dream states that were so
enticing we didn't actually progress much ... however much I'm
sure our songs and dances kicked f*cking ass compared to what
they are now. I don't know for sure, but it strikes me we've all been
getting much better over time, less barbaric, so it makes less and
less sense to revere history.

Also, I'm not exactly sure what's going on in Russia, but I'm
guessing it might come to be associated as being about the
emptiness and triviality of modern times, and the wish to reconnect
with the authentic Russian. If so -- let's not do anything even
vaguely close to that.

Instead, ignore everyone who insists your current lifestyle is vapid
and trivial -- disconnected -- so long as you're voting as
progressive as you can. Buy the latest tech toy, be completely
ignorant of when your ancestral tribe was at its heights, and vote
for gay marriage, minimum wage hikes, legalization of marijuana
and safe bet you'll be completely unlike those who took down
the towers.
Permalink

Original Article: Hi, Im right here: An open letter
to Paul Ryan about poverty and empathy
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014 5:35 AM
Children of immature parents who were abandoned for long
periods of time, yelled at constantly, picked on, tortured, of little
interest to the parents except when they somehow served to abate
their depression, don't decide: "Well now, that sucked! I'm
extremely disgusted by my caregivers and vow to never do the
same to my children!"

What these 5 year olds do is figure out what they must have done
wrong -- something is costing them what they depend on for
existence, parental love and support. Since they didn't actually do
anything wrong -- their parents were doing this to them not for any
reason but because they were possessed by their own angry parent
alters at the time -- their brains can only decide that what they did
wrong was just to be vulnerable. Vulnerable, alone, pained
children/people are evil -- their brain decides. The enemy. Don't
ever be that; don't ever show empathy to that.

Later in life if you bring them to close contact with the poor you
don't educate them but enflame them. Everyday Germans in the
30s, fused with their angry parent alters, who saw the weak on the
street were ANGRY at them. "How dare you degrade the great
healthy German Volk!" And so sought to euthenize them. Less
damage might have accrued if they were spared any contact with
them at all. Ignorance, that is, wouldn't have hurt and might have
helped, because seeing them face to face reminded them of
themselves when they did nothing wrong but yet suffered
intolerably as children (German childrearing at the time was the
worst in Europe: what they did to the Jews, the tortures, were
repeats of what they themselves endured at the hands of their
parents); it encouraged their switching into their punitive parental
alters, and this sealed their fate.

Thomas Frank said that he grew up a big fan of Christopher Lasch.
Lasch -- in "Haven in a Heartless World" -- despised liberals
because they developed such arrogant attitudes towards non-
progressives families -- ultimately gauging them savage, uncaring,
un-evolved. The working class, Lasch argued they believed, were
piss-poor parents compared to liberal ones. Often monsters. The
problem with America wasn't ignorance, lack of knowledge --
what they originally long-assumed and hoped was the truth -- but
that so many were being raised so abominably that they were going
to possess little empathy for others. They were constitutionally
different. Near biologically different. And progressives knew they
had a bigger problem on their hands than they had originally
assumed.

These progressives were of course right. And those that'd admit to
this paradigm-adjusting insight, are now nowhere in press to be
found. "All we have to do is educate them, because all Americans
are the same," they argue ad nauseum.

And maybe showing in their absolute inability to adjust, how
paralyzed they are in a certain regressed outlook, that Republicans
aren't the only ones who have a lock in gauging growth a bad
thing.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014 4:36 AM
neve1 Karen B.E. I recall that I had a discussion with a woman a
while ago, she could not understand why Native Americans should
be called Native Americans. The idea that they could decide what
they wanted to be called bothered her, why could she not call them
what she wanted to call them. To me it was a no brainier, if they
wanted to be called something, then it is just respectful of them and
their culture to call them what they want to be called.

If they call themselves Native Americans we'll be encouraged to
forever be looking at them as if they're some quaint -- once
perhaps entirely noble -- race that just lingers. The problem is in
the "native" part, which argues to see them as originals. "We once
were all there was here," it argues. And compels the reply, even if
stifled in considerable attempt at empathy and respect, "yes -- 500
years ago, you were: you really still want to be that? That's the best
card you still now have to play?"

I'm for really respecting what people want to be called, but also for
--perhaps after this -- some suggestion as to why their preference
might be awry.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014 5:52 PM
Sigil Yoga has been "divorced" from its spirituality,
commercialized, sexualized and made all American.

So if you ask Americans if yoga has a spiritual element, they'd
laugh in your face? Many of them do tame it, commercialize it, but
if you were in a room with them chastising them for what they had
done to something more profound and vastly more
meaningful/beautiful, they wouldn't inquire about this ostensible
intrinsic spirituality but ascent to it: they'd tried to prove they
hadn't forgotten the spirituality at all; that they actually really
respect it, even as you shake your head at them.

That is, if Americans were as you present them, the moment you
argued the origins of yoga and spirituality, you'd have something
to actually prove. A problem you have been completely spared.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2014 5:22 AM
One thing you noticed about this article on appropriation, is that
the author claims to herself what the West is (ostensibly) barren in
-- beautiful female to female eroticism; something more playful,
more erotic, than woman to man. Another poster here defines pre-
literature cultures -- what the West, originator of the nation state,
has always been hostile to -- as weaves rather than linear, as
organic rather than blunt and enforced, as connective, and
feminine. The West has distanced itself from something deeper and
more profound, and is the worse for it. And jealous, it wants to
wretch what it has removed itself from but also humiliatingly at the
same time tame it. Some object; and would have them try and find
contentment in the spare, antiseptic path they've chosen. "You can't
have what we have not just because you'll ruin it but because it was
you who turned your back on mystery in the first place."

We want to appropriate something powerfully female. This is what
feminists argue, that patriarchy reveals in its trepidations that it
knows the feminine is ultimately far greater -- no avenues can be
erroneously left open for it to grow! And it's true; historically, we
do believe this, and appropriate to partake of its power.

Only the female power we want to pour ourselves into isn't the
tribe across the river's, but the one we learned as infants in the
company of our mothers.

Mom. Our consciousness developed primarily in her company. Her
love -- everything. Her ambivalence, her hatred -- the end;
apocalypse. If she was of the people's who disrespected women,
felt profound ambivalence towards them, then she wouldn't of had
children to give love to but to grab every bit from. And once
children started individuating, she'd reject them -- how dare they!
And then her quest goes on, for something else receptive to
satisfying the need.

Children from mothers like that don't recover. They may build
whole grand-male-institutioned societies to help them feel warded
against them, but they want as well to own the power that defined
their lives -- What might it be like to be the one who is the great
destroyer of life, as well as the great enabler of the most ecstatic
joy we will ever know -- love?

And so medieval knights dressed themselves in costumes which
repeated the brilliant colours, feathers and swishing clothes of their
mothers. And kings -- the vaginal maternal crown, as well as
placental sceptres. And as priests, tried turning themselves into
women, make themselves more female -- so to be more acceptable
to mothers than they must have been as trouble-making boys.

And so the most popular current appropriator of the black visage --
are in fact black boys, dressing themselves as mothers. The whole
phenomena of black face, indeed, may only have secondarily been
about blacks at all whites, that is, may have projected negative
aspects of their mothers onto the black race and quested to re-
imbibe them -- perhaps mostly from ownership of "labia" lips than
the black skin they dabbed themselves with.

Which takes us (in)to hips, the belly, the origins of our lives do
we doubt that the belly dancer draws for "their" awakening fetal
memories -- the central mystery?
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2014 1:20 AM
listtowardslight
Normally I think progressives would just agree with you, but right
now, I'm not quite sure.

For one, we're watching "True Detective," where the ones with
deeper roots in the pre-literate Bayou, who's art and rituals have
leaked through all the state's attempt at smothering, are rabid child-
abusers. And the rope they use -- well, let's just say that it's not
being used for weaving baskets. And if we're admiring the
anthropological mind of detective Rust, it's because it's going to
help him snuff them out.

Secondly, the European nations that attempted to kill pre-literate
folk culture, replaced astrology with astronomy, magic with
science -- and it's getting harder for us to champion any group that
could think science an imposition. Normally we're all with you,
because championing the traditionally picked on pisses off
Republicans to no end; but it's becoming more important to
champion science above all else. So the pre-literate cultures which
enabled female empowerment and "commerce" with such things as
their dance, art, and witchcraft, against a masculine state that
wanted the multivalent tamed and unified but who were also
against superstitions and for science, are going to get a more
appreciative reappraisal from us.

And you know, folk art may not contain a wit of empathy; it might
not even be its core. The Venus figurines are considered amongst
our first human art, and like what's at the bottom of "True
Detective's" Bayou sink, they may have been used mostly as child-
raping wands. The past is a nightmare we're just waking up from.
Published comments
Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2014 4:42 AM
Arab women are not vessels for white women to pour themselves
and lose themselves in; we are not bangles or eyeliner or tiny bells
on hips. We are human beings.

I've heard at least one person describe her interest in belly dancing
as having to do with good exercise, mostly, and a chance to spend
some time with the girls -- a tea party, I guess, but one that shapes
you up; numerous others have said they do it out of respect for the
art form, wanting to participate in it, its traditions, its beauty. I
haven't heard anyone admit that they do what this author argues
most white people belly dance for, to enter into the brown body

Postcolonialists will point out that Europeans ascribed the east as
home to dangerous luxury: it had deadly powers of allurement.
Pictured as one scene, it would be the brothel, the orgy -- or a
market place that would undue you with fabrics, colours, and
spices: gone is any resemblance to the stalwart knight in you. Just
as they imagined nations as bodies, and ascribed their own
preferred region as the head or the "lion" heart, the East was under
the skirt, with powers easily as considerable ... and to casually
undue all the wilful head and stout heart were committed to.

Who would want to empower themselves with a sexed body so
powerful the strongest willed become somnambulists to your
allure? The answer to this is in how many European kings and
emperors kept themselves cold-castled and monastic spartan when
the spoils from the east poured their way in, declining golden
crowns and purpled fabrics and all tales of Arabia. The answer is
in how many women would long to know how to, say, belly dance,
so to possess in some part this irresistible power to make men
beholden. Atheist intellectuals will show in their choice of this art,
in fact, deflating evidence that they still believe in something
greater -- magic; maybe a bit, the devil.

Browns are still being poured into, and Orientalism is being
reinforced as white woman choose belly dancing as the dance they
want to partake in. Because at a subliminal level, they "know" that
the history and depth they're being entwined with isn't standard
"cultural," some innocuous, harmless, denatured possession of a
nation's people; but something vast and wild and mysterious
beyond measure. Something deadly. The belly's sway is of the
serpent, calling us some place we fear but also want, need, to go.

Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 5:18 PM
ptraciw Emporium Your lower back muscles -- indubitably.

"Without any hint ": you would prefer we associate you with a
more tidy culture, would you -- British? Kind of like Michael
Douglas, after play a gay man, making sure everyone knows he's
really on the straight and narrow.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 3:36 AM
Serai1 I'm teasing, Serai, and I'll stop. But the fact that she
actually argues Westerners stop belly-dancing was, in a way,
admirably bold. We all applaud the ending of black-face, but here
she presented us with how it might have felt to the people who first
absented itself it, something they were used to, took pleasure from:
could we do the same to our contemporary equivalent?, is an
interesting question.

Should we? I think most of us agree it depends on the case --
black-face, passed it in full measure. She's saying if we're
committed to the principle behind that there's a lot more erasing
yet to be done. I think she's right -- it would be consistent to do
more erasing, and that honestly if we're going to stop her cold we'd
probably have to somehow argue that black-face wasn't something
that needed to be stopped, if it wasn't just mockery, but people
pouring themselves into vessels they found fascinating. Anyone
want to try that?

As far as my actual opinion of her argument, I put that forward in
full about 500 comments ago.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 2:57 AM
Serai1 Emporium Me, I'll enjoy whatever music I like, thank you.

Is this her crime, then? She put a small crink in your endeavouring
to enjoy whatever the hell you like, and this set you off like Marie
Antoinette being asked to forgo some cake so the people might
eat?

Maybe you too could learn to forgo a bit of "cake" so that
subjected peoples get a bit of their own back.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 1:52 AM
Serai1 Emporium Alright, I'll start. I've already had my chance to
say goodbye to Seeger so I'll just pass him by entire I vow to
never listen to his music again, and let what I have listened to seep
from my brain. This is a big step for me as I love the guy, but I'm
convinced it's necessary and also manageable.

What strikes me as manageable as well, is stopping our
appropriation of belly dancing. It's resonance for us is magical,
enticing, and it's hard to imagine its absence, but we know it's
something at least do-able.

And here then we're all on along -- through baby steps -- towards a
goal that each step along the way will actually seem plausible:
extricating the entirety of everything we've ever borrowed from
cultures we cruelly colonized out of our culture; assign it back to
them, the people we battered and suppressed while grabbing away
their golden cultures for our own use, and back away enough to let
it grow naturally.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 12:57 AM
blue Emporium Good thing postcolonialists have given us
something to focus on then. We know there were Europeans
colonizing, and we know they raped and ravaged the diaspora.
With this we can do a wrap up. Just extricate from ourselves
everything we gained from that wrong.

If people cruelly start complicating this good deed by revealing the
diaspora as some complicated mix of stealing and pillaging as
well, which'll lend to justifying holding our stolen items tight and
undoing our moral evolution, we'll have to will ourselves to see the
diaspora as an ecology -- something that may not of been entirely
nice but that had sorted itself out before we bullied our way in.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 12:38 AM
Victor Erimita No sweat and kinda.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 12:36 AM
@blue @Emporium You could just stick to your own culture's
creations, OR those you don't stand in a bullying relationship with.
Borrow French or Japanese -- no problem!

Peter Seeger was a magnificent artist, and it's regrettable that once
we've matured in judgment we'll realize we have to exculpate him
from our culture.

But when we use the memory we've cleared up to introduce
ourselves more to music we've birthed, or music borrowed from
cultures we stood more as equal "bros" to, we'll realize at some
point we've supplanted heaven for a compromised mid-way
purgatory, that had made us more sour than we had realized.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 12:28 AM
Victor Erimita If she took it from us, it's not appropriated. Big
bully stealing from small = appropriation. Small sweet innocents in
harmonious perfected relationships with one another, taking from
big bully = to their gigantic credit: does no damage, and sometimes
even big jerks have things going for them.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2014 12:02 AM
@Jon Greenbaum Pete Seeger was stealing the intellectual
property of Zulu artists?

Yes he was -- Western culture over colonized: the mathematics
delivered in this article as to determining when borrowing is theft
and suppression. I understand you don't believe this but you'll feel
better once you've exculpated Seeger out of your system. Next
time you're in the mood for it, you'll listen directly to descendants
of Zulus, and however much I'm sure it's beyond great -- especially
when you've schooled yourself to be properly receptive to it,
entwined as it is more in relevant context and history --
spared contagion of criminality, trust me, it'll end up sounding
soother to your soul.
Permalink

Original Article: Why Frank Underwood hates
children
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2014 4:34 PM
SpudSpudly Relatively obscure? Salon just wrote an article that
the fact of him was enough to make the movie-focused Oscars
irrelevant.
Permalink

Original Article: Why Frank Underwood hates
children
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2014 4:22 PM
f0rTyLeGz "Go the f*ck to sleep" was targeted to more affluent
parents. You get slammed for saying so, but there was deep
ambivalence to children in that.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2014 3:05 AM
Dai Jackson She wears the baggy pants instead of a tutu and
practices and learn from those who know better than she does.

The shirt is unessacary and offensive. Cornrows have no direct
relationship to krumping and neither do gold teeth. She added
them in an attempt to look more authentic but ends up making a
mockery of the dance and the people it came from.
she starts krumping, and she is also good. She ends her dance by
twerking then adopting a BBoy stance.

I'm pretty sure that a young African American might innovate in a
way that bears little resemblance to tradition and have it IDed as
having made a mockery of the dance and've been rude to ancestors.
We're becoming a very conservative culture if respect is given so
much automatic due, and the brash, slighted so quickly as obscene.


Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2014 2:06 AM
@shuleyapili @Serai1 And as for warfare, you should know there
wasn't as much warfare as it is presently. But you're right, there
were wars; and those nations did not uptake cultures of their
enemies. You think the Cameroonians are busy exchanging dance
styles with the nations that used to war with them when the former
practise breast ironing because the latter targeted their women so
much that disfiguring them was seemingly the only way to save
themselves from being stolen?

Steven Pinker has just written a book arguing warfare has actually
decreased over time, so your argument -- favourable to those who
for some reason feel the need to compliment disgust at
colonization with making folk heroes of the oppressed -- is
currently in some disagreement.

I'm actually surprised it hasn't been more controversial, his book,
because his argument is effectively that tribal people slaughtered
more people per capita than nations do. Transferred to colonialism,
it would mean the Europeans who eradicated / subjugated tribes
were eradicating / subjugating peoples who were killing more
people per capita than they were.

If this is the truth of it, where are we? It doesn't mean we don't
reconsider rejecting traditions we've borrowed from in the wrong
spirit -- in the spirit of appropriation, of theft, that is. If Europeans
were projecting their own unwanted demons/attributes onto other
people and eradicating them for their possession of it -- which is
what all war is about, by the by -- maybe some of this pathology
does somehow carry along with the artifact / tradition
appropriation that went along with it?

Saying humans all do this, shouldn't really satisfy, because if what
human are mostly depends on warmth in childrearing, this may be
on the considerable upswing, as spanking becomes illegal in
countries, and footbinding (old reference, sorry), genital
mutilation, authoritative parenting, "hard love" is more and more
being considered beholden to the more regressives in our cultures,
not the mainstream.

I still say that at the end of the day I think we be very cautious
about halting any practice people are currently making good
human play in. Depression culture is already a halt to a lot of
people's good times, and this may not only partake of but be an
effective manifestation of its deadening defining spirit. This writer
may think she's about making people grow, intellectually,
emotionally, and spiritually, but unbeknownst, she might just be
salvo for an effective avenue that's developing to further ensure no
activity takes place spared an aspect of scrutiny. "We acted as if
we were all under watch" -- a subsequent time and generation
might reject us for.


Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 10:28 PM
RNoelle You should be happy that your culture is bringing people
joy.

Not if it comes at the expense of demeaning / erasing her culture,
which she argues it does. In her mind, not speaking out would be
denying "your" reaching a higher joy, which comes from learning
to be disgusted by being able to take pleasure in practices that
cause harm to other people.

You are not a feminist if you are not lovingly supporting all
women, and you are not unprejudiced if you are not lovingly
supporting all races.

She believes she is supporting women. She's not simply arguing
for what she believes is right, but what is best for those who
currently take so much pleasure from an artform they've ostensibly
appropriated. Pushed to leave the profession/ hobby aside, she
believes they'd find something else to involve themselves in, that
they'd know wouldn't come at the expense of anyone else, and so
would lend at the end to more profound satisfaction.

She believes her scope to be much, much larger than your own.
Ostensibly she'd read this comment section ready to be challenged,
but would sigh at so many not showing they were even quite able
to see what was straightly put before them, and so leave sadly
further confirmed that the world still needs to dumbly Disneyize
the multifarious and interesting but different.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 9:02 PM
Serai1 sandiproy Emporium If a white person does a better belly
dance, I hope she's frank about her accomplishment -- "I've set the
new standard." This author would dislike her for not having
abandoned the art form, even as there's no way she'd be able to
note any legitimate improvement at all. But it'd be up to us to
decide what we'd have on our hands here.

Do we decide it was true German technological innovation, but
over Jewish bodies kind of thing? Or rather that its quantity of
substance was such that it became template for origins, the original
-- the starting point, like Shakespeare out of whatever mass of
written/oral history from whatever peoples, he
borrowed/appropriated from.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 8:41 PM
sandiproy Emporium But what I am talking about is basically
plagiarism. That is taking something from a culture and then
calling it your own without giving it credit

Sigourney Weaver from "Working Girl" kind of stuff, I get it.
Nasty stuff. I'd speak out and rage if it happened to me.

But then again, you can't improve upon a culture. I mean culture
doesn't really follow a scientific method of "progress." Sure you
can make a certain foreign cuisine more American, and there is
absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it is definitely wrong to
call it a "perfected" whatever-cuisine-it-used-to-be.

I think most of us would say that in the film "Amadeus" Mozart
improved upon Salieri's tribute ditty, because we know such things
are possible and that it just happened. Before the birth of Christ,
child sacrifice was a common practice -- one to the gods, and then
you get to keep the rest. With Christ, God was imagined as
mollified not by killing babies but by masochistic surrender of
yourself through life. Not good, but you got to live, and this was
qualitative progress. And so on, as parents moved on to
authoritative modes of rearing -- I'll love you if you do exactly as I
tell you -- to, eventually, what we're seeing more and more of right
now -- permissive childrearing; I'll love you regardless, however
much I'm hoping you'll have faith in what you want for yourself.
Some of them have perfected childrearing, and it's not wrong to
call it that.

Does this apply to pizzas, dance? If their form at a time was
representative of an immature culture, like medieval music -- yeah,
quite possibly.

I'm sorry to hear your friends are keen to traditional, original --
"pure" -- conservative cultures. When people do that they're
usually trying to show themselves as unassuming and unspoiled --
pure, not sin-ridden themselves -- as well as folk members of a
great, beneficent community. Germany in the 30s was that, and it's
not good.


Permalink

Original Article: Meet Lammily, a toy doll with
realistic proportions
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 8:19 PM
Good idea. But the people behind it shouldn't stop there but move
quickly forward to where the show "Girls" is -- intelligent
discernment over how to accent the looks you've got.

All we used to hear about are how couples of approximately the
same looks get together; and now, of how people of about the same
income -- ivy leaguers dating ivy leaguers. We need more
exposure to the sure truth that people of similar overall emotional
healths tend to pair together -- that trumping looks, income.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 8:04 PM
sandiproy Watch the movies -- there's nothing more cool than
Indian culture right now. Intelligent, educated, attractive, urban --
the works.

Blonde sorority girl, however, is a recipe to be dispatched and
to appear to have deserved it, like you sorta did.

We should be open to the idea that someone could appropriate a
practice, and improve on it. It's a problem if this doesn't amount to
fair objective judgment but to dumb stereotypes -- what we do is
always better! USA! USA! But if they improve, they improve.

If they did it -- genuine innovation; qualitative betterment -- while
also suppressing another culture, this is a significant problem; but I
wouldn't be too quick to assume that the culture that kept the
innovation in its unimproved-upon form was necessarily of
morally superior fibre. Cultures that are resistant to growth --
anthropologists be damned -- are cultures that stifle their young;
cultures that grow, are ones that see their kids taking their culture
in ways they never foresaw or even intended, and can educate
themselves to be okay with it.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 5:02 PM
curator74 You don't have to celebrate another group's cultural
heritage; what you have to do is celebrate the person before you.
I'm Irish/German, but if someone thought they were being
respectful to me by being familiar with my traditions and ascribing
my primary possession over them, I wouldn't be much impressed.
Don't be too quick to defer, I'd ask them. Don't go too hands off:
maybe these traditions -- like magic over science -- are something
that if they've got a hold on me simply for the fact that the giant
blob of clan had gestated me forth, are something I need to be
rescued from. I may hate them all and have set out out of town, and
meeting "you" has put me right back at the family table again,
being slopped the same awful potato stew I'd been instructed to be
loyal to and proud of.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 4:31 PM
I wonder if the author just needs some more powerful experiences
of people seeing some of the neat, unique things she does, and out
of evident admiration, mimicking it -- trying to work their way into
her, and so be capable of the same display she is, in a wholly
understandable, even encourageable, way.

That is, reading it you get an unmistakable sense that for her
someone else's borrowing is almost necessarily about being stolen
from and suppressed -- as if she was the child of a narcissistic
mother, who always wanted the attention primarily kept on her.
Her insistence on the autonomy of her own body, certainly seems
redolent of this. Natalie Portman's character in "Black Swan,"
standing up to her mother, who had poured herself into her, will
nilly of "Portman's" own wishes.

And if it's maternal abuse against daughters that is her primarily
complaint, Arab culture has been the subject of considerable
attacks on this. That is, unlike her display here of the fascinating
eroticism between women, many commenters have described the
horrors of Arab women surrounding their girls, chanting songs,
while torturing them of their labias. If cultural forms end up being
entwined with some not-so-nice aspects of everybody's culture, do
we go about terminating them entirely? Or keep working on them,
so that they're entirely redolent of something commendable,
pleasurable -- even if it's someone else who accomplishes it -- an
outsider?

If what is at sake here is our not feeling paralyzed from being
playful -- the planting of authorities that have us fretting picking
up any old thing for experimentation and self-growth -- we should
not respond kindly. It was wrong that you were abused but you're
not going to be allowed to get in the way of the more genuinely
open and playful people out there who's instinct -- better than your
own -- may be fundamentally about opening themselves and the
world up. If they get their chance to use whatever at hand to enable
themselves to grow, they'll become more the kind of people who'll
make sure more people are being helped than hurt by what they do.
They'd give you a respectful listen, remaining open to being
changed, even as much as they wouldn't necessarily accept your
argument at all.





Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 4:55 AM
Problematic Privileged Pillbug Ally (Inserting my Emporium
Okay.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 4:43 AM
The comments to this article were only due to be interpreted one
way, but it'd be nice if we at least made it hard on them -- some
counter voice in the comment section, that'd stir authorities as not
sufficiently "quellable": it carried too much yet of it's own
independent truth -- postcolonial style.

If this was something that could swatted away as easily as we're
presuming, it wouldn't have been posted. It's newish at Salon, but
elsewhere it's been going on endlessly, and is quite tested.

She'll argue that others borrowing and learning from her, is about
suppressing her -- like an evil stepsister liking what Cinderella had
done, and stealing all for herself. So the moment we say we all
benefit, it's a lie. The moment we say common culture, it's a lie.
The moment we say it's a sign of respect, it'll be, well, a bit about
that -- but by someone villainous who'll make it so that no one
knows to look to the original source anymore, and who'll despise
"you" for proving yourself in some way evidently better.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 4:14 AM
@Jason Loeffler @Jason Loeffler

Arab culture is literally murdering my people (gays) as we speak.
It's a codified death penalty for us. So why is this the culture that
gets to do the talking and the preaching about respect? Talk about
offensive cultural misappropriation!

Liberal Richard Dawkins would give you a high-five, but he's not
of the liberal crowd that's in ascension.

The liberal group that is, will show you to be interested in
stigmatizing/subjecting peoples first, then finding reason for it --
the classic racist colonialist move. If you had said that "poisonous
elements in otherwise honorable Arab culture " you'd of had
them only as friends, of course. As is, you'll be respected for your
gay identify to the skies, but slated nevertheless for re-education:
"Arab culture hates gays" some nasties have got their hold on
you!

Times we're in, no functioning progressive can go without
contortions.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 3:47 AM
The only thing we do by filling this up with 400+ comments is to
add further weight to the idea that our nation is a bulbous mass of
terrifying racists. This is the point of the piece, its social function.
It's itself misappropriation of a kind, but liberals in general are
okay with it because they like the idea that every brave step by a
"Lebanese" girl to air her voice, is still to be greeted by a
dangerous, intolerant crowd. Proof of how far yet we have to go --
regardless of the casually carried forward variety we were
surprised by at yesterday's Oscars -- it helps cleanse them of the
reality that if the minorities in their movements start having
problems with the whites who previously overall lead/guided them,
they have been discovered out to possess no effective reply it
helps dispatch something worrying that has occurred to them about
this.

The hope is, effectively, that once right-wingers have been
dispatched as a dangerous social force, once the Republican party
looks legitimately like it might disappear once the "greys" are
gone, that, satiated, liberals -- regardless of color -- will lose their
desire for any kind of fight, and will just go about better building
the nation, without the war talk.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 3:14 AM
Aunt Messy Emporium kate reavis Removed and the exuents I
dispatch to you, my lovely dear.
Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 3:05 AM
The truth is that every culture that white culture has abused had
better be as stout and good as presented, because liberals have
boxed themselves out of an reply if they turn out as capable of
power machinations as any.

The truth is that if you're coloured and walk into a feminist
discussion group, and start accusing the whites there of assuming
you, of appropriating you, they'll fight back for awhile but will
eventually pull a full retreat -- or if they've got the creds for it,
ascension, to some place without public interaction, any kind of
comment section.

Twitter was afire about this recently, as we all
noted: http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-
twitter-wars




Permalink

Original Article: Why I cant stand white belly
dancers
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 2:41 AM
I grant you that anyone that clenches a possession to be totally
theirs, IS a human being. But I guarantee you as well that there are
better.

Hopefully you don't extend yourself too far into someone else's
culture, because we sense that anything you snatch to yourself is
going to be about impossible to retrieve for other's play and
extension / expansion.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 1:19 AM
One of the nice things about botched facelifts is that they may
helpfully keep alive the idea of altering our appearance drastically.
Everyone here seems to agree that the ONLY acceptable
possibility to is go for modest, graceful changes which has us
all sounding suspiciously like the conservatives at court.

"Classicism is fine, but there are other aesthetics " someone
might helpfully seep into the emperor's ear, granting Mozart a
sounder listen.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2014 1:12 AM
Aunt Messy kate reavis And that was a tad mean.
Permalink

Original Article: Abandoned daughter or spoiled
brat? Teen sues her parents for cutting off tuition
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 11:03 PM
AndreKenji Emporium It's not about money, but about how loving
and progressive the aggregate of nation's people are. I bet those
countries that are currently free but to some extent"excludent," are
no doubt on the eventual course to be fully including they're
closer to thinking this is something they deserve, which is what is
currently stopping them.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 10:56 PM
Amosduncan Mike Royko did a column years ago about an Oscar
appearance by Mary Pickford. She was elderly and getting a
special award. Many found it tasteless in that She appeared, well,
elderly.
Royko pointed out what people are really afraid of death,
Death, DEATH.

And if we come to prefer rictuses written on our aging actors'
faces, what disease are we suffering from? Some dumb case of folk
humility would be my guess like as if we're all now more bound
-- small, acquiescent children as we now all are -- to be loved in
heaven.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 10:13 PM
In sharp contrast to the some of those profoundly appearance-
altered presenters Oscar night, it was a field of considerably more
natural-looking older actors Bruce Dern, June Squibb, Meryl
Streep and Judi Dench who were among the actual nominees.
And it was the still actively working 88-year-old Angela Lansbury
and 68-year-old Steve Martin who picked up honorary Oscars.
Why might that be so? Could it be because none of them, not even
Streep, have ever been famed primarily for being beautiful?

This is not the only possible explanation. None of us are in the
mood for a pre-fall, arrogant Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong.
We once loved them mightily, exactly for being bigger than the
game, shedding all ostensible confines of human nature, but are in
the mood to applaud now those who in comparison seem chastened
-- no matter how good they become, they'll be self-effacing, and
not ever claim to own their sport.

We saw instantly in all these aging their further aging, maybe
even their eventual corpses. To prefer, to find contentment in this,
this effacing, over they're for a moment stopping time, to behold
immortal them, may suggest a symptom of our Depression
sickness, not our maturing preferences.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:53 PM
Christopher1988 h0tr0d Brave reply, and interesting; I'm glad you
risked it.
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:48 PM
Patricia Schwarz "Naturally aging faces"

Wo/mans part of nature, and is proving a powerful agent of its
overall character. And if we slow aging, eliminate it, pull it back,
will people who let themselves look old still be granted your
appreciation, or be deemed unnatural?

We should hope the mind ever-grows; maybe we ought to engineer
the same thing with skin that is, as we age, our already great
skin becomes even that much more silky smooth, are already-
limber bodies, possess that much more sublime sway? Why
content ourselves with having the maturity to admire people who
don't devote so much of their attention to their appearance?

Permalink

Original Article: Abandoned daughter or spoiled
brat? Teen sues her parents for cutting off tuition
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:38 PM
Dutch Reagan Quite right, when you get evolved enough, you
start even having trouble recognizing anyone as someone you'd
want to pick on.
Permalink

Original Article: Abandoned daughter or spoiled
brat? Teen sues her parents for cutting off tuition
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:35 PM
Shadow Ferraris are lovely cars, but a bit more than we can afford,
and for my taste, I admit, a bit too suggestive of the reckless. Settle
for full paid education, guaranteed living wage job, and a Volvo,
and we're agreed. (Youth, forgive me my bourgeois preferences!)
Permalink

Original Article: Kim Novak and the curse of the
beauty
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:19 PM
Ten years from now I suspect we'll all be google-glassing
everyone, everything we see. One of the settings will be to view
people according to their preferences -- we'd see Novak as maybe
just a shade off thirty, as well as perfectly trim. We'll have to
decide what we make of that would anyone look past fifty, if
society didn't necessarily lend any maturity, gravitas, to this
decision?
Permalink

Original Article: Abandoned daughter or spoiled
brat? Teen sues her parents for cutting off tuition
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 9:03 PM
@McAvity @Emporium Hopefully they'll succeed in full, and
collectively, the coalition of the ascendant, made up of
professionals, minorities and millennials, will doom regressive
America into higher minimum wages, superior health care, and
generous, science-informed education, that'd make Sweden
blanche in envy.
Permalink

Original Article: Abandoned daughter or spoiled
brat? Teen sues her parents for cutting off tuition
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 8:54 PM
Once a generation reaches voting age, we should hoped we've
raised them in progressive enough a fashion that they'll vote for
candidates that'll collectively enshrine free higher education in this
country, accessible to all -- that is, that they, their parents, their
parents' parents, pay for it, even if many of them are beholden to
passed-over "perspectives."

If someone asks one of them if they're forcing their parents to pay
for something they're not quite prepared for, they should reply, "Of
course, they've raised me spared many of the sin-pursuing demons
that have limited their own lives. Even if they can't right now
admit it -- for perhaps these demons having temporarily caught up
with them again -- how they raised me shows that mostly they've
been with how I'm enfranchising myself now -- You go girl!"
Permalink

Original Article: Lupita Nyongo vs. Matthew
McConaughey: How his Oscar speech got it so wrong
TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 3:59 AM
If we liberals have come to hate MEism so much, then we're all
just different shades of conservative.
Permalink

Original Article: Atheisms radical new heroes:
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and an evolving new
moral view
MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2014 2:57 AM
@andyh @Emporium The desire to let yourself know, is not a
human given. The person willing to tolerate a media providing a
more immersive and more interactive knowledge of the world, is
already on a pretty good path -- however much what he or she
intakes can take them even further.

The problem with this eventually is, though, that most of us can
end up feeling uneasy once we've broadened ourselves too much.
This isn't a matter just of too much adjusting and finding ourselves
at the finish completely untethered from origins -- New York
cosmopolitan from being Kansas farmer-born -- but that growth
always carries with it our first memories of what growth meant for
us -- which is leaving our mothers and fathers to attend to our own
concerns solely.

Outside of some of the progressive, both-partners-highly-involved,
parents we see these days who are so interested in their children
they spend time with them throughout their lives, and who's
interaction involves excellent reads of the children's needs and
lends towards complexity and depth, most parents still require their
children to satisfy their own unmet needs, and show it; and cannot
help but react with some, or some considerable anger when
children are understood as refusing them this (just like their own
parents once did).

At an early age, parental denial, fury, is apocalyptic, and our
capacity to tolerate growth, not stifle it, in future, will depend
almost entirely on the precise measure of how our parents
understood us then. In the aggregate, in most modern societies, we
tolerate quite a bit, then start feeling abandoned, and then start
feeling punishment-worthy. We follow up by projecting our bad-
selves into some other people, and, now parent-loyal, go to war
with them. This is probably the situation in Russia today, which for
too long has let itself loose from Communist restraints.
Permalink

Original Article: Atheisms radical new heroes:
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and an evolving new
moral view
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2014 9:57 PM
Middleislemember I guarantee he strikes a lot of liberals as a
crusader, not someone becalmed. Read his twitter feed and his
comments on Islamic culture, and ask yourself how many atheist
liberals would not in fact prefer he she the hell up.
Permalink

Original Article: Atheisms radical new heroes:
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and an evolving new
moral view
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2014 9:49 PM
In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined(2011), Pinker identifies six periods in which violence
decreased significantly, proving, he argues, that we are getting
more moral.

I'm fairly certain he wasn't the first to argue this, since the "we are
getting more moral" part sounds triumphant Victorian.

The part about how we moved towards states and commerce out of
whatever we had been part of before, requires explanation. Is it
possible the people changed first, became less violent first, and
these same more evolved, more empathic, less violent people were
attracted to different, unheard of, new-fangled kinds of organizing
themselves, new societies? That is, democracy out of
totalitarianism, not because "technology had empowered," or
"requirements of competition required," or land-locked or small
groups empowered, but because people were over generations
becoming more loving, thus more moral, thus obviously
democratic rather than ants at the feet of a bullying emperor.

Lloyd DeMause is the one who has explored how slowly over
time, mothers have been able to provide more love to their infants
than they themselves received. These better-loved children are able
to tolerate more societal growth, more pleasure, happiness, and
have less of a need to project "bad selves" onto other people for
violent persecution. Thus America as it is becoming in some parts
today -- more tolerant and flexible than it has ever been. Thus the
fewer lives lost to battles, wars, per capita, that Steven Pinker --
unaware (?) agreeing with DeMause -- argues has definitely been
the story of history.
Permalink

Original Article: The psychology of hate: How we
deny human beings their humanity
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2014 8:29 PM
Am I to understand that if I was to conclude that Germans in the
30s and 40s had a decreased capacity to empathize and feel, and
therefore were possessed of lesser minds than the Jews they killed,
that I am guilty of dehumanizing them? That is, that I'm not just
seeing them straight but have become a bigot? I think so, for
assumed in this article is the idea that Germans viewed Jews so
harshly owing to centuries worth of accumulated stereotypes --
from birth, their generation was apparently the one bound to
explode like Vesuvius! -- not because something had gone wrong
in their heads, cutting off of mirror neurons in the right insula, and
so on, as what happens with murderers.

The brain of someone who routinely empathizes is just not the
same as someone who routinely sees demons (ones they've actually
projected onto them) in other people. There's plenty of brain
science behind this already, to what happens to infants born in
love-absent, stressful environments -- their permanently impaired
ability to regulate their emotions and feel the pain of others, owing
to hyperarousal of alarm centres, damaged forebrains -- so why
the concern to show people as "sociologically" universal?

Is it because if you don't instruct people to that, there's the matter
not just of tea partiers and Russians but of Ugandans not tolerating
gays, and that Nigeria massacre? That if you don't instruct people
to that, there's not just the matter of Northerners probably being
right to see their slaver Southern "brethren" as mentally impaired,
but possibly too some of the indigenous peoples who were routed?

The case being made here is becoming harder to make when we
progressives are feeling less sure of our grasp over the nation's
intellectual climate. We're more in the mood to talk brass tacks,
where we won't oblige tea partiers / global warming deniers /
homophobes that they're just miseducated, suffering from too
many years of shallow education. We know we're not talking to
people with the same brains as we've got. We know it. Exposed to
a scan their haywire minds would look as transmogrified as an
alcoholics. You'd take a step back -- yikes!
Permalink

Original Article: Losing my son to drugs
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2014 5:26 PM
Article about the economy (can you imagine) at Salon.com:

We lost the working class. I'm not sure how it happened. Was it
inflation? deflation? jobs over seas? just bad luck? -- did it have
something to do with me: maybe I abandoned it, them, somehow?
I'm not sure, but I'm obsessing over it, remembering all the joyous
times when we were all together as a nation -- smiles over the
space mission! -- as I stroll down destitute Detroit streets now,
each view a recalled memory.

-----

Commenter A: One thing's for sure, it's not your fault! Nothing to
do with you!

Moderator reply: I know, I know, but it still hurts. It was a nation
all together as one.

Commenter B: It was a social phenomenon, couldn't be controlled
and can't be cured!

Moderator reply: That helps. I thank you.

Commenter C: Your account brought me to tears! I too am sorry
for the loss. May we find meaning in it one day.

Moderator reply: I'm dripping tears with you right now. We will
overcome!

[all consoled, players exeunt stage right; Thomas Frank decides
against following them, and switches to a different website.]

Permalink

Original Article: Losing my son to drugs
SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2014 4:20 PM
@dsmat5 @furyhecla

A lot of this -- her article -- would read the same by a certain kind
of mother who's son had just, say, left home for college.
...

In a sense, there's now no chance her son will further evolve apart
from her -- what adulthood invites upon the mother-son bond
(Cap'n Crunch cereal?). Devoting her life now to overdose
protection, there's a sense she's got her son perpetually before her
again, with her perpetually at liberty to apply administrations.

If he was alive, he'd be telling her to desist -- "my life is my own
now, ma!" -- which is a tough thing for a mother to hear, especially
those who required their children as extensions of themselves.
Permalink

Original Article: The Dead Poets Society takeover
of America: How memes ate our politics
SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2014 4:56 PM
I'll suggest this as well. The most important caregiver in our lives
is our mother, with few of us having had fathers around enough to
matter a fifth as much as she, even if they were tyrant assholes that
made us quake in fear. When people respond well to nurturing
films like this one, I think they're responding to an echo they know
firsthand and foremost from her.

When they don't, I wonder if it's because the strong loving affect of
the film has become to them inadmissible, because owing to earlier
"misgivings," abuse, they've either built up walls against all strong
affect or have gotten used to living in shells in having had to long
get used to abandonment. And when they point to the film's
neglected and abused, it's not necessarily out of empathy, but out
of whatever is going on in the minds of right-wingers when they're
so upset that innocent children are being lost through individuals'
decisions to have abortions.

The ones actually to be trusted about women and children, are
ultimately those with the most healthy emotional resonance -- that,
foremost -- who'd have intrinsically gotten that Dead Poet's Society
is moved by quite a bit of heart, and would be appropriately upset
that seemingly for the crime of being legitimate sunshine, it's being
eviscerated from up on high by those who cast inappropriate but
effective-enough charges of sexism or ignorance or privilege at
those who out of love and respect would attempt to keep some
tribute to "her."
Permalink

Original Article: The Dead Poets Society takeover
of America: How memes ate our politics
SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2014 4:21 PM
You have a sense that the boys in the film "awoke" in a way the
author hasn't. He seems bitter, that is. And not because we're all
under threat of having our politics aestheticized, which is
something I think he actually wants us to believe, mostly because
along with it comes the idea that only meritocritous sleuths --
people like him, who fumed at this crowd pleaser from the start --
are not going to be fumbling into old preferences -- great, we're
going to be made to look up to the bitter assholes who hated us --
but rather because there's a sense he's one of the kids who couldn't
let himself stand on the desks in tribute to his own independence
and the great man who was being chucked out for provisioning
kids with self-esteem.

I don't buy that he's more feminist than most. I think he shows that
he feels he's been made to imbibe women's point of view in a way
that feels leaching of whatever his own preferences might have
been, in how he seems to cast out accusations of sexism like its
poisonous spittle now onto somebody else! If I was exploring his
work I'd be on the lookout for two things: one, the championing of
females with all-pure maternal characteristics; and two, sexist
villains damned to high heaven, whom if you look at carefully
actually possess strikingly female characteristics. I'd look for
splitting, that is. A denial that he has anything but admiration for
women, along with evidence that some unfortunate is going to be
made to bear everything he has always resented about their being
in charge of his whole life, and righteously eradicated for it.
Permalink

Original Article: Glasshole nation: Techs culture
war takes another ugly turn
SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2014 1:50 AM
kepetr59 If google glass is a danger then it's like as with guns, you
don't just limit their availability but somehow try and do some kind
of therapeutic work on the populace who want them.

If google class isn't quite like that, if people who'd never own a
gun would be very interested in it, then maybe we can trust that
social mores will eventually eliminate many first-occuring
problems, in a way we'd be right not to ever expect with guns.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Jennifer Lawrence doesnt want a
second Oscar now
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 11:06 PM
MatthewSalon Emporium If it was just "disregard of his pinkeye,"
D'Addario wouldn't have called him exemplary -- it looked like he
was trying to work through a blight, beyond where a doctor would
have stopped him.

I'm not for athletes competing with injuries if there's any
suggestion that they like the idea of sacrificing their bodies for
their nation -- that it shows what they're made of, or some macho
rational like that. We could do for a few more athletes refusing to
risk their bodies any further, with the Nation calling them having
no more influence than if a stranger was -- since we know nations
seem to call loudest when they're looking for the accumulation of
young corpses -- just as we can all do more to stigmatize the
romanticization of macho self-sacrifice.
Permalink

Original Article: The dying right: Why Christian
fundamentalists are in panic mode
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 7:07 PM
jessiegarons2in This is an interesting comment. And if they grow
powerless enough, fall behind even militarily enough -- which they
should, without those more comfortable with progress and creative
umbrage to invent things for them -- maybe a few hundred years
from now more moderately powered "countries" (or whatever is
our preferred psychic surround then) will call them primitives and
even start picking on them.

Maybe the young progressives at that time will brave spending
time amongst them, even as it angers their parents, and realize
them as unjustly cast off as "primitives," as we have done to the
perpetually stuck aboriginal cultures in our time, who in truth
are as warmongering and religion-lost as is the Christian Right.
Permalink

Original Article: The dying right: Why Christian
fundamentalists are in panic mode
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 6:30 PM
Chris Hedges says that the "liberal class has been bought off by
corporate money and promises of scraps," only cares about "its
comfortable and often well-paid perch," "has consciously sold out
the working class for [] money," "is just trappings and
privileges" ready to be "brutally discarded" "by their subject
populations."

Chris Hedges writes that "[the liberal class's] greatest sin [of its
possessed multitude] [] has been its enthusiastic collusion with
the power elite to silence, ban, and blacklist rebels [] who once
could have given the working class, the words and ideas with
which to battle back against the corporate state."

Chris Hedges argues that "it is from the liberal class that we get the
jingles, advertising, brands and mass-produced entertainment that
keeps us trapped in cultural and political illusions."

Chris Hedges argues that the liberal class has "busied itself with
the boutique activism of political correctness."


But, yes, Chris Hedges doesn't much like the Christian Right
either.
Permalink

Original Article: Jennifer Lawrence doesnt want a
second Oscar now
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 4:34 PM
ath7169 This time it'd involve denying an actor not in a role worth
a chuckle, who's grounding is regal looks and high intelligence
(degree at Yale). I guess D'Addario believes we'll turn as an
audience into the older, vampish, "American Hustle" Amy Adams,
and cuss and scowl at her proclivities.
Permalink

Original Article: Jennifer Lawrence doesnt want a
second Oscar now
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 4:13 PM
Two recent heroes of yours are Bob Costas, for disregard of his
health, and Jennifer Lawrence, for still being abashed at her
success, just wanting to be an ordinary person. The individual who
denies gets your vote. Sounds like a traditionally conservative
preference, something we'd see at play in a Clint Eastwood movie -
- by the "hero" -- with the "villains" unwilling to deny their health,
nor absent themselves tributes, just so they seem malleable for
others' fantasy requirements of them.

Costas and Lawrence can be moved about. Costas by patriotism,
and Lawrence in order to show she's not full of herself, spoiled. I'll
applaud them when they grow out of it, 'cause it's just awful to see
people who can be owned.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 2:26 PM
ahansen Emporium Elite colleges these days are a plurality -- over
50 percent non-white. I imagine the accusation that'd be made
against white affluents of the 60s counter culture, is that the Black
Panthers were those they could use to rile up good, mom and dad.

And against their views on minority empowerment in general, that
they were totally for it, but presumed they'd always be the heroes
who liberated them, expecting their loyalty and gratitude in return.
And when minorities increasingly refuse to grant them this --
servitude -- they in a huff retreat back into privilege.
Permalink

Original Article: The Dead Poets Society takeover
of America: How memes ate our politics
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 3:13 AM
Alec Elixir The teacher was getting them to work against a
temerity that was going to affect them very negatively in life. It
was a note of the 60s -- you are a special person; cultivate and
value your own opinion, foremost, then see who you might want to
leverage as good students of the poet, also.

That scene influenced me. I could feel myself untightening
afterwards.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 2:20 AM
Haematopus Emporium You may well be the type who gets out a
lot, but grading people's writing on the internet while suggesting
your favorite -- dead white male Orwell, no less -- is stereotypical
cave troll. Do you mansplain too?
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014 2:14 AM
redtex Chomsky has recently been talking up the virtues of the old
working class -- blue collar neighbourhoods -- and denouncing
arrogant liberals who -- ostensibly -- have been deliberately
humiliating them with their social engineering. I'm worried his,
Hedges', Franks' view on the left will start gaining ascension, and
the meritocracy will increasingly be seen by a lot of democrats as
well, as arrogant elite.

Chomsky's a great man, but this kind of talk is dangerous. There
are times not to trust populism, and this is one of them.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 7:32 PM
JustSlider Now, many of those values are good stressing hard
work, family, charitable giving, education, etc. (and shared by
other cultures).

I think we need to stop ceding them this, as there are some
potentially dangerous people around -- strong left-learners, like
Chris Hedges, Chomsky and Thomas Frank -- who are making it
seem as if this is their core -- that they are America's bread and
butter, rather than what they've always been, people more on the
regressive side who were able to keep up for awhile with post-war
permission.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 6:25 PM
ahansen The sixties radical would be too fundamentally white and
affluent to have much influence today. Younger generations would
be easily pointing out how intrinsically sexist and racist they
(ostensibly) remain. Someone from the 60s would love how "Dead
Poet's Society" celebrates personal authenticity -- you're take, not
your approved forefather's -- foremost, while the younger gens
would be pointing out its vile racist, sexist assumptions, as well as
its bloated boomer"MEism."

You'll be tripped up all over the place, and will soon be left simply
seeking sanctuary, just as many white feminists are from feminist
forums they used to be wildy active on, for not being able to
disprove they don't intrinsically view black women as their
presumed lackeys.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 6:00 PM
Gex Xers believed that the baby boomers would never get out the
way. They were going to be a generation that was never going to
get its time. Here in this article we're seeing sense that holes are
going to start appearing in the baby boomer phalanx, for some of
them not being able to -- Alec Baldwin-like -- say things that'll
depose them, regardless of the status they've accrued, or even if
they're adamant they're actually as liberal as you can get. If you
were a gen x academic, wondering if some of the baby boomers
who're hogging the best posts might be deposed early, I think you'd
be guessing that they're not being entirely natural to this Obama
era might even have them try and affirm themselves better with
you -- who definitely are /is. And this "sucking up," a sure tell that
a king earns immediately being deposed, would lend you to be
more aggressive in your establishing that you ought to be the one
taking control now.

Gen Xers are sensing, with their baby boomer parents and baby
boomer icons either going crazy or damningly, irrecoverably
slipping up, that the next 30 years might be theirs to pomp
themselves out and be totally alpha -- what they, again, had never
suspected would accrue to them. I think part of the reason they're --
a generation that prides itself on its familiarity with all the nuances
of resentment -- maintaining this inanely simple cant -- "I love my
father; I bleed to make him better and I'm really sorry to pass him
by" -- is because it steadies them while they take accession.
Cloaking themselves in indubitably accepted narratives -- the kind
of idiotic "Forrest Gump" sap they've always despised -- will help
steady them as they embrace baby boomer-like largesse, and all the
self-condemnation they've heretofore avoided by being forever
second class but that might now accrue to them from now being
beheld to that.
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 4:27 PM
" that keep our country strong?" should read " that keep our
country strong!"
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 4:22 PM
Benthead Emporium Do we progress further by admitting that
kids can feel terrible when their parents lose their grip, or when we
admit there's actually some pleasure to be had there? -- I invited
my sagging father to my home, in order to doubly dethrone him!
Which point of view are we more likely to see in a Disney film
(and which the masses would want to entrench for everybody), and
which one in a film the intelligent take seriously?
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 4:13 PM
Here's another thing it might be useful to acknowledge. The idea of
the once-strong father who's lost his tethers in old age, is
something of a romantic trope in American culture. It suggests
something of a good man, without perhaps much scope, who was
only ever going to be able to understand his world one way. Too
much expectation that he change or modify, and in defence he'd
route even more to the familiar, become the old man on the sea.
Visually you imagine him as essentially alone and unreachable,
and like in the film "Nebraska," it communicates something
actually of manly resonance about him.

I'm pondering this because I don't always sense when we hoist our
fathers into this trope, that we're necessarily sidelining them
permanently. They might be recovered yet, if we change our mood
and for some reason want to champion what remains dogged and
stubborn in us. I don't know how many children of parents
possessed of the emotional resonance that they could ever find
Republican culture appealing, are going to be able to keep up with
progressive change themselves. For now, they're doing so; but if
for example with this person if change ends up meaning de-
schooling and the termination of grades and scrapping peer review,
if universities and science lose their sense of authority -- not to
more primitive institutions but to something more hippie spiritual
and less elitist -- would he be locking himself in a room agreeing
non-stop with old folk at the Times Literary Supplement that the
young have lost all respect? How dare they treat with such blithe
disconcern institutions that keep our liberal society vital that
keep our country strong? Anti peer review, indeed!!!

Would he call his dad over, this time to commensurate?
Permalink

Original Article: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a
generation was captured by thrashing hysteria
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014 3:41 PM
Every generation is in revolt against their fathers. Would it have
killed you to admit to having some glee? -- "walked through you,
now didn't I asshole?!" The "not blaming your father" is the worst.
Faux empathy, that many of us will collude with. In it you feel the
narrative guile doing the job of sidelining him in a way that leaves
you feeling guilt-free, beneficent -- even as you just really left him
seeming hapless.

Personally I wonder if you were Republican and Libertarian -- like
your father -- when it was convenient for you. A lot of guys start
that way young to put some kind of block against their mother's
influence / domain -- who's the person we all spent way more time
around than we did our fathers -- and are able to drop it when they
feel more established in the outside world. It can be something like
joining a brotherhood Frat once just in college.

"I'm overeducated in the humanities" faux shoulder shrug
everybody!
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 8:52 PM
danny j Emporium danny j Emporium Everyone claims they want
to be more prosperous, but when they actually get it it can drive
them amuck -- who are they to treat themselves with such
largesse? How now to claim any self virtue, if it doesn't come so
much from an evident lack of selfishness -- see my wounds?

I believe that most conservatives will only be okay with the like of
minimum wage hikes, and perhaps on toward living wage, when it
doesn't feel attached to a movement detached from blue collar
assessments of life. That is, if its professionals who are for it, are
behind it, it'll feel somehow attached to their worldview, to an
authority that it's perfectly okay to keep on assuming more and
more for ourselves through life, without anyone having to lose for
our gains.

If it comes from the bottom -- as Thomas Frank wishes it would --
it'll be part of a more blue collar ethos, where it'll be about people
being able to allow themselves more in life, only because they're
sure to entrench a political order that'll sacrifice whatever requisite
number of innocents to call it even. No one in 30s Germany had a
problem with all the new highways being built, the new vacations
they could take, the sudden sorta immunity to money problems
only because these anti-liberals, possessed of punitive blue collar
"heartland" ideals, knew they were allowed it for it being but
pearls layered on the hem-skirts of a dangerous, revenge-focused,
volcanic erupting Germany.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 8:44 PM
danny j Emporium Everyone claims they want to be more
prosperous, but when they actually get it it can drive them amuck -
- who are they to treat themselves with such largesse? How now to
claim any self virtue, if it doesn't come so much from an evident
lack of selfishness -- see my wounds?

I believe that most conservatives will only be okay with the like of
minimum wage hikes, and perhaps on toward living wage, when it
doesn't feel attached to a movement detached from blue collar
assessments of life. That is, if its professionals who are for it, are
behind it, it'll feel somehow attached to their worldview, to an
authority that it's perfectly okay to keep on assuming more and
more for ourselves through life, without anyone having to lose for
our gains.

If it comes from the bottom -- as Thomas Frank wishes it would --
it'll be part of a more blue collar ethos, where it'll be about people
being able to allow themselves more in life, only because they're
sure to entrench a political order that'll sacrifice whatever requisite
number of innocents to call it even. No one in 30s Germany had a
problem with all the new highways being built, the new vacations
they could take, the sudden sorta immunity to money problems
only because these anti-liberals, possessed of punitive blue collar
"heartland" ideals, knew they were allowed it for it being but
pearls layered on the hem-skirts of a dangerous, revenge-focused,
volcanic erupting Germany.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 6:48 PM
@Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus

I see. You believe we are on the precipice of a gay holocaust (a
"homocaust", if you will).

People target gays when they themselves are feeling effeminate,
unmanned -- this can come from a regressive bonding back to
mother, something maternal, after feeling abandoned for incurring
unallowed self-growth. They do other things as well, like in their
talk trying to make themselves seem embodiments of the
masculine abstract, proudly hoisted above emotion, like you do.

It's unfortunately easy to see you, as attacks on gays increase,
belittling uproar as a bunch of fem liberal pussies upset at an
ostensible "homocaust," oh my! That's why you're part of the mob
elitist progressives need to keep staunched.

We're on the lookout not so much for emotions run amuck as
people who rejoice in their ability to go cold to others' pain.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 6:12 PM
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus Bleeding Heart and Proud When
Jews were refused service in Germany -- before laws were in place
that prescribed it -- what was going on? Was it just a case of
Person A refusing to service Person B, or the first ripples of
something terrible? We know what's going on here, and we're not
going to allow it's fate to be ruled in any dimension where it seems
appropriate it be lorded by Euclid, logic, law, history or the
ahistorical, the specifics of philosophical founders' intentions, or
anything not infused by immediate human reach and passion.

There's great hate here, and you're primming your suit and wanting
to talk principles. Doesn't that seem strange to you?
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 5:26 PM
@danny j @Emporium Each of them -- Buchanan, Hedges, Frank
-- hate on professional elites -- the meritocracy -- and love average
heartland people, those below -- even as much as they recognize
that their current form is a massive drift away from whom they
once were. This is where their trust lies. Buchanan will tell you a
million good stories about them, especially as they were before
they were abandoned. So too Hedges, mimicking Buchanan in
calling what the abandoning left has been up to mostly a selfish
pursuit of "boutique cultural issues." And Frank describes them as
his own innocent family betrayed and preyed upon.

Each one has some kind of a coming of age, a loss of innocence
story, where they fully learn the ills of a movement they had either
accepted or participated in good faith -- Buchanan, free-trade;
Hedges, journalism with NYT; Frank, thinking his good faith
effort might have an influence on the Democratic Party . This is
the equivalent of their momentarily letting themselves ambitiously
range, hope big, before collapsing back into simple family loyalty.
It's about their not being able to shake off hometown to belong to
the crisp city.

Some of us actually like that "the heartland people" don't have as
much a voice, that "class" isn't discussed by beltway wonks,
because some of us don't believe the truest story of what has
happened since the 80s as the abandonment of the people by the
elites.

Rather, we think the rest of the country -- the people -- stopped
being able to keep up, wanted a stop to increasing widespread
prosperity, wanted themselves to start showing signs of
miserableness, wanted a stop to progressive social change, because
without it they'd feel perpetually at risk of replaying abandonment
and otherwise sadistic treatment they experienced when they first
devoted their attention to themselves rather than their caregivers
when they were young. The kind of early experiences mistreated
people build themselves superegos in order to forestall repetition.



Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 2:45 AM
BeansAndGreens nywriter You can sustain a collective where
everyone agrees for short while, but eventually those who've had
better childhoods keep on accepting and pushing for growth that
their less well-loved neighbours no longer can. So you see
neighbourhoods breakup, with progressives heading to the coast
and endeavouring not to listen to their former, increasingly fascist
neighbours, and whatnot.

The only way we make peace is if progressives regress. We could
have a long period of Civil War-type strife, unless progressives
start following more Thomas Frank and Chris Hedges' mien, which
I hope doesn't happen. A disunited society is a sign we're doing the
right thing -- one more thing we should of had a long time ago
that'll drive those who've already "stopped" increasingly bonkers.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 2:36 AM
nywriter We utilize government to do things that WE want done as
a group that we cannot do as individuals.

We can't often do them because it'd make us feel guilty to do so,
personally responsible. But if we institutionalize the practice, it's in
a different sphere, apart (ostensibly) from us. Thus the army
crushing women and children overseas, has nothing to with our
own personal need to see innocent women and children get hurt.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 2:28 AM
I personally don't know how much of a difference there is between
Pat Buchanan and Chris Hedges -- and maybe Thomas Frank?
They both believe America's actually least emotionally evolved are
in fact its bread and butter-- you forget about them, you're not
taking the country forward but fin-de-siecle being oblique to its
sustenance.

The urbanites who likes that the "color" of the nation is more under
their determination -- "who gives a bleep about Kansas? -- are
their worst enemy.

In truth, I think they all feel the regression of those they're
defending -- but weren't their own parents a bit or a lot more
regressed than they were, as well as less well situated, wealthy?
And maybe they can no longer take the distance, the denial, this
means they've earned themselves for themselves. Time to reshow
loyalty to those "you've" spent much of your life trying to improve
yourselves upon, for the sense of aloneness, of apocalyptic
punishment, of things come home to roost, is palpable.
Permalink

Original Article: Pat Buchanan: Repeal all civil rights
laws!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 2:03 AM
@commonwealth Terrific address. There's something terribly
dysfunctional in his inability to admit what he is sane enough to
have at some near conscious level recognized -- that many of the
people he so wants to love, can go from being good ordinary
Americans at one minute, actually very likeable and readily
defensible, to crazed lunatics the next.

You go to Germans in the 1930s and show them at home, and
they're reasonably good (though not amazing: none of them are
products of loving childhoods) people who do this switch,
actually switch brain hemispheres -- to the right one, home of our
traumas -- and disconnect the capacity to empathize, who'll go to
the streets and if not cheer then (preferably) eagerly participate in
kicking to death people they can only see as pollutants, vermin.
This is the key thing: everyone has a normal self; a lot of us
unfortunately have this other self (a parental alter, we've
internalized) it often doesn't require much of a nod to switch into --
and it's a mask of angry hate for anyone guilty just for being
vulnerable -- like children.

Buchanan will only let himself see the former, in swaths of the
American populace he needs to see as unpretentious and unjustly
abused, and whom we require progressives to keep their stiff rule
on. America was formed from the most evolved -- the most left at
the times -- and the least the world had to offer. Insufficiently
differentiation-worthy descendants of the latter, would reinstitute
slavery -- the institutionalized ability to repeat childhood abuses
incurred upon oneself upon some corralled group -- in a heartbeat.
The world has gotten that much out of control for them.

We're going to have to relentless, and even at some point press to
give therapy to them, for their complete spiralling out was
inevitable out of our ongoing progress and the nature of their
unloved, "you're a spoiled shit who thinks only of yourself who I'll
abandon every time you differentiate yourself from me," Bates-
hotel, childhood origins.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Paul Krugman wont save us: We
need a new conversation about inequality
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014 12:56 AM
@mz sookie The argument cannot be about 'inequality.'
Americans have always entertained the perverse hope to become
filthy rich; that's why there cannot be a classic revolution. No one
wants to be the proletariat here.

That was the situation in Weimar Germany, when everyone wanted
to be upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. In 30s Germany, however,
what became more important was your being "true" German. For
real, the judge who's grandfather was Italian was at something of
an astonishing loss to the plumber who's grandfather kept German.

We could do the same thing here. If populism takes hold in
America, and the only thing the nation cares about are the elite and
the poor -- not the middle class -- couldn't you imagine the average
American taking some pomp, in this ostensibly frozen class
structure, in his / her not rising beyond his / her grandfather's
station? He welded, and so too you. And it's nice the nation finally
discovered you again, valued you again, but you've been doing the
same the whole while.

It'd be a lie -- before they were exactly as you described. But this
has been edited out of them, by themselves, as this new self-
conception has taken hold. They're the sons and daughters of
hardworking, unassuming 19th-century lower class arrivals. The
prosperous baby boomers, were an aberration, bubbled out of
aberrant circumstances -- America post-war suddenly being larger
than life a million bucks suddenly in the hands of those who
weren't going to know how to demurely spent it but rather of
course buy the whole car lot plus a palace or two they're virgins
to this grandiose, overwhelming thing, so it's understandable,
however much never to be repeated.


Permalink

Original Article: Paul Krugman wont save us: We
need a new conversation about inequality
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014 12:12 AM
@krabapple @Emporium Last article from Frank:

In fact, there is no need to lift a finger to do much of anything,
since vast, impersonal demographic forces are what rescued them
from the trap I identified. They now have the luxury of saying,
as Paul Krugman did on the day after the 2012 election, Who
cares whats the matter with Kansas?

had Krugman "not lifting a finger to do much of anything," as him
luxuriating in his indifference, in his not needing to give a damn
about Kansas.

And here he's the very picture of the "elite" we've left the talking
to, and so who too is very much afraid of talking class.

Populist argument hasn't so much been left to them / him, but
hogged to themselves / himself, out of trepidation at the thought of
what would happen if the populace, if imbeciles, claimed the
argument. He's distrust / dislike, of the ordinary Joe. To me, a case
(against him, by Frank, maybe by some at Salon) is certainly
building.
Permalink

Original Article: Paul Krugman wont save us: We
need a new conversation about inequality
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2014 8:46 PM
Still, to read around on the subject is to get the feeling that certain
liberals like it that way. Needlessly clinical is exactly their style.
The subject, for them, must be positively cloaked in wonkery. They
dont talk much about class, like some troublemaker from the
30s; they talk about inequality, which is a delicate and intricate
signifier. Oh, it is extremely complex. It requires so many charts.

It's certainly worth exploring why they feel this need, why they
have to greet poverty, the rest of America, as if doctors trying to
temper the distress of their very first AIDS patient circa the early
'80s -- trying to keep form before something that might possibly
burst into deadly pustules before them, oh my! But we might be
glad nevertheless of their manner.

Obama's presidency has been 7 years of abating distress; everyone,
everything, is "handled." Anyone hoping for satisfaction from him
is going to come away instead as if quit -- the guy wasn't going to
let us run our moods into him ... so impossibly cool! And we've got
-- reforms. Healthcare, gay marriage, marijuana, possibly
minimum wage increases. It's as if the left hand has been occupied
quaying the growling dog while the right has done what it can to
track some progress. To me this isn't a bad way for things to
continue to go.

It'll mean the further tracking of progress which will improve the
lives of even the mad-dog people around us, who are
discombobulated and useless owing to the progress we've already
tracked, and who will only regain leverage, feel solid, when
politics devolves to meet their sadistic and sacrificial needs; and
it'll mean populism -- people dissolving their everyday sane grip so
that they're perpetually Sunday group purgers and moaners --
never gets a hold.

If we track some progress through a frustrating period of sacrifice
and blockage we actually want, feel safe with, we might make it
through until a romantic momentum -- a 1920s or 60s -- can take it
over. To me that's our best bet. It is complicated.

And oh, this is the second article in a row with the prominent Salon
"newcomer" taking shots at Krugman. A long time ago I
mentioned this was something I was waiting for -- Salon building
momentum to go after him. Krugman's full of himself, in what we
should recognize as in a good way -- he's well loved, and so he
beams -- there's nothing masochistic or self-denying about him! If
liberals can't any longer stand him either, it's because they've
regressed to seeing self-love as something spoiled and worthy of
punishment progress, even in such a joy-suppressing / denying,
very unhippie, "clinically" administered form as we've been able to
tolerate these days, might be becoming too much even for them.
Permalink

Original Article: Paul Krugman wont save us: We
need a new conversation about inequality
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2014 7:50 PM
History is full of inequality. I know some small-people historians
think they find egalitarianisms in pockets here and there -- in the
folksy witchcraft people, before mean masculine Science took
over, for example -- but basically it's left to the anthropologists to
point at whatever perpetually stuck people they've devoted their
lives to studying, to show that at least we started from the right
place which in fact we didn't, for the reason these tribes have no
"big men" is that they haven't even evolved to the point where they
trust anyone with power.

It's difficult to imagine anyone spelling such a great connivance
that man has never figured its way out of the taught lies that keep a
few of them grossly entitled and the rest weary strugglers.
Common sense would say that for most of history most men have
for some reason obviously wanted "big men" out there.

Mostly I think they/we need these inflated people out there to keep
Chaos at bay. Chaos being the wrath of maternal destruction,
which these men -- inflated to titans -- ostensibly can handle for
awhile before they too crash into her bloody menstrual Ragnarok,
and we need to quickly patch together some others. As childrearing
improves, as mothers aren't so lonely and abandoned that their
children become emotional sops and even their sex toys, as they
fear the jealousy of their own mothers less -- postpartum
depression -- and so don't neglect their children as if to show
they're still primarily devoted to her, fears of Chaos abate, mostly,
and it finally seems just obvious that we wouldn't allow some few
to overlord the rest of us.

But I don't think this is what is happening now. The reason we've
got this split is primarily so that the small people don't feel
possessed of anything so spelling of their selfishness, their
spoiledness, that they'd feel worthy of being apocalyptically
abandoned for it. What they are accruing for themselves in
abundance -- scars, evidences of suffering, from being beat on and
beat on in the game of life -- gives them the "sunshine" they need:
like warriors spit out of a ravaging war, they feel earned of care
and even maternal gratitude.

And if there's any sadism still in her, well, they haven't left much
for Her to chew on, now have they which is a feeling of
invulnerability so flawless and sublime it's worth a small gloat.
We're hearing so much of atheists these days but we're seeing far
more speared Christs.

What populism should mean is just us becoming small and re-
bonding to the national mother, the mother nation. I think this will
make us feel elated for awhile; we might build a lot of things like
the 30s folk and German Volk did. But very soon after most of our
attention will be to punish those we've split the worst aspects of
our mothers into, as well as the "guilty" parts of ourselves we long
to be rid of so that be become only good. Hopefully Thomas Frank
will point out the bad parts of what we'll be up to as well.
Permalink

Original Article: The matter with Kansas now: The
Tea Party, the 1 percent and delusional Democrats
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2014 5:50 PM
Childrearing. The better loved in society are comfortable with
progress because their own growth as children wasn't complicated
by harsh abandonment or intense anger by their caretakers (most
importantly, by their mothers -- the primary caretaker in almost all
families). The worst loved feel threatened every time, because
theirs was, and they're possessed of the most god-awful of punitive
superegos to prove it. If society just keeps advancing, the worst-
loved will never reform out of being human discombobulates
because they're not empowered to make society into a psychic
extension that catches and disowns them of their own insanity --
institutionalized racism, for example, rather than venomous, all-
consuming private hate -- and will remain that way unless the rest
of society reaches its peak tolerance as well, and begins to
transform our national narrative, the overall feel of our nation, into
one that resolves everyone's growth panic.

This can happen by resolving America once again into a folk
community, like America imagined itself in the 30s, with each
member small but bound to a provisioning mystical community.
Here out of Washington what we'll sense is family ties, traditions -
- not urban sophisticates denying / laughing off the past but rather
visibly showing their allowing it to imbibe / possess them. Thomas
Frank has some of this in him, this longing to have the edges off
and belong in his small fashion into a community; let's hope
enough of us don't switch from reading Monocle to reading
Baffler, because it's about slipping into a fugue.

First the warming human community, then the attack on
scapegoats possessed of all we just can't any longer count as part
of ourselves.


Permalink

Original Article: A nation ruled by creeps: Woody,
Cosby and James Tarantos demented balance
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2014 4:15 AM
If some of these legends fall -- people we thought were past the
point where their reputations could be radically tempered with --
it'd be a fascinating thing in some respects. It'd be as if someone
dug deeper once again into the lives of our Founding Fathers, and
what they uncovered, brought to light at a time when a sufficient
quantity of us no longer needed god-men anchoring our past,
actually meant, say, the removal of one of them from our dollar
bills in preference for maybe a female women's right leader, based
on an honest overall assessment of them. At first you couldn't
believe it we'd sidestepped yet more of the ostensibly necessary
primitive in us -- the demeaning sociological assessment of
humans "as requiring religion, shared meaning-making
institutions" -- that depends on cherished icons, rights and rituals.
Wow. What else might be capable of shucking off -- do we dare try
even materialism, Capitalism?!

That is, I think with many -- not all -- of the people who are upset
that Cosby and Allen are looking as if they're not past having their
reputations radically tarnished, are not just upset at more male-
bashing, this ostensible current desire to make every male of the
species suspect by sex like women had been through millenniums,
but that we're showing a capacity for further progress. A lot of us
need "institutions" to stay the same because something in how we
imagine them helps keep our psyche in a state of equilibrium that
lets us go about our lives "sanely" -- "the poor" trap our own
neglected selves, "the army" carries our sadism, and so on. If
somehow Cosby, the just-past great father and Allen the still-
current legendary film maker, could be removed of all that we'd
projected onto to them to keep them immobile as fixtures of our
American cosmology, then this society steaming ahead to further
gay rights and drug leniency and female empowerment and overall
derogating once half-acceptable political notions to mere Tea Party
crazydom, is just going to keep on rolling. At the thought of this,
already destabilized psyches are going to fragment even more.
Stop! Someone has got to put a stop to all this growth! We're
coming to pieces already!

What they'll do to maybe successfully indeed stop it, swerve
America more along Russia's current path, is something I'll think
about and maybe post if it gels.

Woody Allen may be innocent. Same too, Cosby. We're learning to
be more comfortable with victims, with victimhood, rather than
reject them, it, for reminding us of having been victims ourselves
and its heard accusations against those who's reputation we still
need to protect else feel abandoned -- our parents; our primary
caretaker particularly -- our mothers -- so it's necessary to reassess,
and I'm glad for it.
Permalink

Original Article: Another woman speaks out over
Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2014 2:28 AM
@AlGreene Okay, but you might want to reign it in there we
liberals can only hear so much about multiple wives and what goes
with it other than the responsible feeding of them, before our
cultural allowance starts cracking.

Please don't tell us the age of his wives, for instance and
nothing as well about how the number of wives might have
swelled his ego.
Permalink

Original Article: Another woman speaks out over
Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2014 9:40 PM
Pacyderm bobkat lauri jst SpudSpudly People who've been abused
as children can be drawn to seek out abusers in adult life -- the
repetition-compulsion is ingrained, and it's actually a way of
gaining control over previously-suffered abuse. This may not be
available in Psyc 101, but Lenore Terr and some other wonderful
psychologists / therapists understand the reasons behind the bizarre
things that the victimized will be compelled to do.

Basically, what I'm saying is that we don't have to stick to a "rich
and powerful person manipulating the awed trusting young naive"
narrative to take on those who want to say it's her fault. If the
allegations are true, Cosby preyed on people he intuitively
understood were hindered from past abuse to be able to say no to
him. That's what all abusers do -- they're drawn to the weak.

And if we want to get at why adults would want to do this --
victimize people well, that would be nice: it'd look to amount to
really appreciating all the ramifications of having been abused as
children -- it can draw you to want to play the part of the predator
as well. We still apparently need to believe in evil.

Permalink

Original Article: Another woman speaks out over
Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2014 9:01 PM
bobkat Emporium You know what I was getting at, though. We
don't need Bill Cosby anymore, just like we longer need Lance
Armstrong or Tiger Woods. Our task is to see if there are any other
figures who've replaced them who we need to see a certain way,
and if proof was available as to otherwise, as difficult as it might
be for us, we'd adulterate our image and see that justice is done.
Permalink

Original Article: Another woman speaks out over
Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2014 8:43 PM
Yeah, he was the nation's father -- there was no way we were
going to dislodge him. We're only open to the full reveals when we
no longer need figures to be magical. We should learn from this
and attend a little more carefully to every figure we currently need
to imagine as provisioning and good -- whether or not that's the
full story.

For example, if it turned out Nelson Mandela had been a
philanderer, would we all be pretty much ready to devour
whomever stepped up to report the story, if it wasn't something
that could somehow be managed within his current image? I
suspect we would. He may have been as pristine as we like to
imagine him, a truly honourable man, but it really doesn't matter --
we still need him as a pillar.

And this means all our no-longer-required pillars from a generation
or two ago can easily go bye-bye, and we'll feel like we've evolved
-- how fantastic it is to know we could let those crutches go! --
created a social sphere finally a bit more hospitable to terrorized
victims, become essentially more egalitarian and small-people
democratic, have less of a need to sanctify father-figures / all-
provisioning mothers, but we may actually have not.

We do a momentary check. Do we still need them? And if we don't
they can be hefted off to the sacrificial block, what-me-worry. And
if we do

Trouble Aren't you just being a bit opportunistic, dear?
Permalink

Original Article: John Oliver, San Franciscos newest
anti-tech protester
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2014 8:10 PM
EvenForBigCats You want to make change? It's not going to
happen because you are harassing an engineer outside of his home
or throwing rocks at a google bus.

People seemed about to throw rocks at SNL executives if they
didn't hire a black woman, and about two weeks later
Permalink

Original Article: The Last of the Unjust: A new
look at Eichmann, more evil than banal
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2014 7:22 PM
In the Stanford prison experiment, students were randomly divided
into two groups -- and if they were guards they became thorough
sadists, and if prisoners, cringing, placating masochists. Personally,
I don't think this experiment was about human nature. I think you
can be someone who never loses their head, switches into some
other kind of person, owing to circumstances "permitting" them
you can be the person doing something abominable only because
there was no way out, no choice -- the fully rational person is
simply caught completely out.

The Germans weren't like that, though. The ones who just ten years
previous were Weimar permissive liberal became the conservative
Volk -- millions of them -- that thought it only sensible that all the
"filth" in society be cleansed away -- anyone, anything, "unfit." So
is this what happened? All the Germans became Stanford prison
experiment perfect examples who clearly aren't obeying orders but
following deep inner compulsions, and the Jews were immune to it
throughout?

In my judgment, it depends on how they were raised. Germans had
about the worst childrearing in all of Europe -- their parents told
them they themselves were the filth that needed to be eliminated --
and when they started guiltily allowing themselves a permissive,
enjoyable culture, they were driven to kill their bad child selves,
that they'd introjected into other people. Jews had far warmer
family relationships, but those who didn't would have taken
advantage of an authoritative situation to switch into "guards" as
well. I have no idea if this applies to this person, as I'm not
familiar with him.
Permalink

Original Article: Bob Costass red scare: Why the
eye-infected anchor deserves his own gold medal
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2014 5:56 PM
Do guys really need to know that not complaining "until absolutely
necessary," being warriors, persevering, soldiering through, is the
model still to emulate? Because what? Without asking for it people
will then attend to them, give them mothering love?

Maybe he is usefully cutting through all the cant -- however much
this is still warrior imagery. But what I know him for is being
"soft" -- easy-going, amiable, a good, respectful listener, excitable
as a kid, exposed -- over time and accumulation teaching guys it's
okay to be this way. Personally, I'm almost inclined to edit out this
"rehabilitation," like I did when Andrew O'Hehir tried to prove the
President Carter could also be warrior "strong."

What we need to know is that you can be a great Olympic athlete,
without actually having had to overcome that much -- for a lot of
us, if that's not new it's something we're hesitating to acknowledge,
and perhaps becoming more inclined to just expunge/expel. More
evidence of people volunteering to sacrifice their lives for the
games, if you please!
Permalink

Original Article: Hannahs new Girls gig as a GQ
copywriter is the shows best satire yet
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2014 6:51 PM
I don't think it's about selling out, rather, about whether living in a
way that doesn't make us feel especially spoiled actually fits sorta
well with us. Anyone out there who is having to compromise
themselves to get by, may have to deal with self-hate -- which,
actually, I kinda doubt, because it's what the world expects out of
us: none of us are all that special -- but won't feel like the world's
radar is on them for living however they please.

I very much doubt that if you listen to how Lena Dunham
describes her life, it'd be that she's just living it. Good stuff, of
course; but you'll hear how she's been burdened, chastened,
reigned in, as well. What we have to hope for her is that her
strength to follow her vision isn't bested by her feeling safer, less
abandoned, by subscribing her art to our expectations -- her
character -- even truculently -- instantly dating a black man when
we start pressing, for instance. She's doing pretty good so far.
Permalink

Original Article: How do we watch Woodys movies
now?
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2014 6:16 AM
Dylan111 And this of every idiot on the web.
Permalink

Original Article: How do we watch Woodys movies
now?
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2014 6:14 AM
alchemy-flying Emporium Distill some saged potions, and you'll
figure it out.
Permalink

Original Article: How do we watch Woodys movies
now?
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2014 6:06 AM
It seems like every male great from a generation + ago is getting it
(I'm a huge John Updike fan, who's living with what DFW did to
him). I'm sorry that Woody Allen is getting the full treatment after
someone wonderful like Ralph Nader, but I think we're all pretty
clear that this guy was in a position to maybe help some young
people but instead dipped toward using them. But they are the 60s
and 70s, something we maybe can't explain but which we know
was of a latitude and human height, a truly glorious human height,
we've -- bless you current everyone-hybrid saluted -- shrunken
from.

It's a tough thing for us pasties to do. We've got to damn some
great men for hurting people but pathetically steel ourselves into
believing our current lot, that'd never do the same thing, are
endeavouring the same level of Art. I'm not saying there's not some
good stuff being done, but how much from people who aren't good
mostly because they're compliant, expecting reward?

I would consider to salve our current situation, we look to some of
the overlooked from a generation ago that didn't just take lift from
a bounteous age like the 60s but easily rivalled it in inner-goodness
... maybe crested above. You and I can't think of any in film, but I
can in literature, so that's where I spent my last couple of nights
after thinking of human harm and human genius, in respect to
Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow.

Some time later, we're in an age where kids get to tell their parents
to go to hell -- and win; and from that lot there'll be no confliction:
we get the most avant-garde and the most good, and there's enough
repass, enough awful demons that've taken their fill, that we get to
fete them in full enthusiastic glory.

Permalink

Original Article: Stephen King on Dylan Farrows
open letter: Theres an element of palpable bitchery
there
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2014 3:14 PM
The thing you notice in the letter is how saintly the mother appears
and how evil, the father. One might think this the result of
coaching, but really, if your mother, if your primary caregiver, is a
sadist, you don't need to be coached to instead make an angel out
of her. You know she doesn't want you to know this about her, so
for survival sakes, unconsciously you split her off -- with her being
left with all the good, and someone else, the bad.

I haven't really heard from many young feminists these days about
how terrifying and overwhelming their own mothers can be (you
heard quite a bit in the 60s and 70s), but I do see it now and then in
film the latest "Carrie" being an excellent example. My guess is
that Allen probably did all that he is accused of, but that she
farmed her daughter out to him, knowing what this would mean,
like mothers used to do by abandoning their children to wetnurses -
- often near overt childkillers. Thereby the mother avoids her own
mother's condemnation for directing attention away from her onto
her own family. She feels spared of being spoiled and selfish.
Permalink

Original Article: Compartmentalizing Woody Allen:
What America chooses not to see
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2014 4:08 AM
I wonder if Mia farmed her out?
Permalink

Original Article: Weinstein, Tarantino and the
standoff over movie violence
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2014 2:32 AM
Every time we progress as a nation primitive dunderheads lose
orientation and kill people. I think progressives only get a decade
or two where their more primitive peers can try and keep up with
them. After that they're untethered, and you've got to just accept
they'll sneak in some terrible carnage.

If he gives avenue to "Lone Survivor" -- Evil, in the loudest form
we can try and make it -- that's all we need to know. He's at the
behest of primitives motivated mostly to inhibit innovation.
Permalink

Original Article: What makes a book a classic
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014 3:47 AM
I've got only 5 authors on top my closet. John Updike, Gene
Wolfe, Barbara Kingsolver, Piers Anthony, and Ian McEwan. I
don't go to them all equally, but enough to want to pretend this is
the case. I know that Updike, Kingsolver and McEwan are
understandable as a collection to anyone bookish, but I have
confidence the whole collective is going to make it's way on
through to anyone of a certain orientation.
Permalink

Original Article: What makes a book a classic
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014 3:33 AM
mkandy Miller wrote a book about C.S. Lewis, who essentially
masturbated in appreciation over Tolkien's written work, so that
can't be it.

Maybe Tolkien only gets his FULL day when other authors admit
to being inspired by him. This will mean bringing Gene Wolfe
finally fully to light, which isn't about to happen when the current
trend is still to ignore self-absorbed, sexist authors like he, Roth,
and Updike in preference to placaters like effete Gaimon.

This would be awesome, however much I'm not sure he's even up
to Piers Anthony, who is nowhere but whom I'm sure will prove
classic. Honestly, he's about the closest I've ever read to Updike,
exempting possibly maybe Kingsolver. New York is wonderful,
but they're not all New York.
Permalink

Original Article: 6 reasons female nudity can be
powerful
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2014 11:05 PM
Armando Cedillo "Matronly" interesting. She is that. You had
me temporarily think of Gertrude Stein.
Permalink

Original Article: Glenn Beck attacks film critic who
didnt like Lone Survivor and so do the trolls
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 11:05 PM
Are the people angrily tweeting at Nicholson aware that the stakes
in war and the stakes of film are vastly different, and that one can
acknowledge and respect the grave duties inherent in the former
while acknowledging flaws in the latter?

There's a dodge here, cowardice. Most critics who dislike the film
probably aren't going to show puncture-proof praise of troops.
There's only a few people out there who don't cow to the "grave
duties of our troops," don't effuse their support of the put-upon
everyman, but most on the left usually seem a bit unfocussed when
they praise "those who serve." As if, if they themselves we're
reporting on the battlefields, they're unsure if they wouldn't in fact
actually default to seeing the troops in Kubrick's, in a "Casualties
of War," in a "disloyal" way--the only sane person amongst those
lending themselves to the frankly repugnant and carnal, not the
sober and grave.
Permalink

Original Article: Lone Survivor: A pro-war
propaganda surprise hit
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 10:22 PM
Caliman Okay, but Andrew is arguing that just being attended to
while you come apart through spores and gargling blood-- "its an
operatic, slo-mo Christ-like agony, with sweat and bone and blood
and bits of flying gristle"--marks your honor. Do you think "his" is
an interesting rejoinder to Owens? That Owens of the green sea
gas horror is ardent for those who'd die succumbed dramatically,
amidst a number, on a battlefield?
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Lone Survivor: A pro-war
propaganda surprise hit
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 9:55 PM
Suburban Sheepdog I hope the times don't make me worry that
maybe-not-war-incurring-but-still-war-covering you gauged me
wimpy, tiny, undergrad crit-lit. It'd be a bit like someone heaving a
shovel realizing they can probably get away with braining the
spectacled.

You realize how much of course Nazis hated smarty-pants liberals.
And praised those honourable on the battlefield, and shot on the
spot, those with qualms -- sorry, I mean "the dishonorable."
Permalink

Original Article: Lone Survivor: A pro-war
propaganda surprise hit
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 9:43 PM
Thomas Doyle How many people who wholly approve of the
Afghan war are at the forefront of enfranchising women and
homosexuals in their own home country? How many people
wholly opposed to the war are the ones actually foremost there? I
hope you asked yourself this before posing this doozy.

I'm guessing you're right about the Taliban--through no fault of
their own, they're probably still very disturbed, often massively
abusive people, whom the fully sane would want to see stopped,
helped--but if their prejudicial if their cruel tendencies were
really our foremost concern, somehow I guess war and blasting
them all to death would have only played out as an option.

Maybe, we might have speculated, long-run there was another
approach to engaging them and helping them become more human,
left, and liberal--as I assume you're wishing for them with your
leftist fore-fronting of homosexuals and women--than just that for
starters.

As to your useful Nazi example. I for one doubt there was ever an
action of warfare THAT NEEDED TO OCCUR, that ever was
foremost done to help the victimized. It's always the excuse,
always--study colonialism and the sophisticate' raging against what
savage primitives were up to with their own people that could no
longer be tolerated!--but somehow it disappointedly seems to play
out as just a nation's having built itself to a time when they want to
explode against a foe containing disowned aspects of their own
selves. There's Freud in this; also Jung. But I would hope once
again we'll become okay with this.
Permalink

Original Article: Lone Survivor: A pro-war
propaganda surprise hit
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 9:06 PM
Suburban Sheepdog Emporium I cannot seem to escape the
feeling that you and Andrew are disappointed any American made
it out of there alive.

Alright. I wish every one of them made it out. Personally, I'd rather
have filmed that rather than the one out of nineteen, because I'd
hesitate to play to an emerging preference that sacrificing your life
is a way to gain-sake unquestionable love and honor. Sorry, the
military played to your need to sacrifice yourself--so to be forever
bonded to your mother nation--so to put you out there in some
dumb combat of no significance in no part of the world worth
pinpointing on a map.

You imagined for yourself the glorious drawn-out moment of your
courageous letting go, and others grouped around respecting and
admiring you, and because there's enough of you out there we got
the eager supply for cruel wars.
Permalink

Original Article: Lone Survivor: A pro-war
propaganda surprise hit
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 8:04 PM
Suburban Sheepdog But then you ignore the fact these men died,
in large part, because they chose to act honorably regarding non-
combatants, thus ensuring their own doom.

I'd ignore it, even if it happened like that. For the greater truth is
that most Americans are so primitive they'll foist this silly
narrative or its equivalent on every American military story they
tell. They'll make it so that it's the only story. And so when the
dumb aggresses, the smart gives no truck.

As for why the Taliban go down with one shot and the SEALs are
harder to kill, it's called marksmanship and body armour.

Please think about this a bit. Andrew is saying that the movie is not
thinking fact but preference -- that we prefer "our kind" take a
number of blows, and get their full salute, before being offed. Each
one of them gets the full-swan psychodrama. Whatever the truth
about marksmanship and body armour, it's pretty clear this is our
preference -- you'll note how even in "The Hobbit" orcs are
dispatched every time they're touched, but for Legolas or Kili to be
wounded, draw blood oh my god, the universe is to be twisted
into new shape!

I actually don't mind it so much sometimes, this preference, but I'd
mind it if most people didn't realize it as exactly that, and thereby
something to be switched around in the real world so not just USA
hogs the honorable.
Permalink

Original Article: Jennifer Lawrences American
Hustle director calls her schedule 12 years of
slavery
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 2:17 AM
"12 Years a Slave" reinforced our preference for actors to maybe
not make it out movies completely okay. Put them in scenes where
under the authority of "for the movie's sakes," or rather, for
historical victims' sakes, directors can, if they wish, switch into a
sadistic self bent on hurting the vulnerable and leave unscathed --
as per what happened during the Milgrim experiments, when the
participants there had perfect excuse.

Russell showed genuine concern here. Those who enjoy actors
becoming besmirched into "Starlets" probably don't want this 30s-
style "demeanment" of actors into the-still-very-affluent-but-
increasingly-factory-system-afflicted-and-servile to lose
momentum.

Somewhere someone this year wrote that "the Counsellor" was the
last test for the authority of actors as they once got to be and it
lost to our emerging preference.
Permalink

Original Article: The long, strange saga of Armond
White
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2014 12:59 AM
Well, it seems like we have a lot of people out there like Daniel
D'Addario scrolling every day a new outrage that shouldn't be
permitted. He makes a lot of telling points; but you can't help but
notice just how scarily long the list seems to be becoming. I'm sure
most of us will take enough notice of it to tighten in what we might
have to say -- surely for our profit -- but what happens when
someone out there Ralph Nader-like just blithers along and speaks
their mind without taking any of us into consideration? Will we
reject him mostly FOR THAT, rather than content? I hope not;
because soon enough it'll be us doing the disservice to the
Soderberghs.

I love some of what White has to say about class, but I'd hate it if
he were in any way stalling some of the artists I've heard him rage
against, whom I want more than anything to receive
encouragement. I hope this doesn't end up being about feeding the
need for creating a dump hole into which anyone overall gauged a
troll could be haplessly deposited. A society where we expect,
once every two months or so, for one previously notable to be
sacrificed -- where in truth, the need to sacrifice begins to
presage the outrageous/cruel remark/behavior. To the New York
intelligencia, is Nader tar? is "Vagina" Naomi Wolf? is Richard
Dawkins (even)? I think these good people are or are close to it,
myself. It bespeaks something dangerous for others who's
inspiration is too much themselves to be attending to how they're
playing amongst everyone else. As if being full of self, a douche, is
the problem. Better form in letting someone else play the ass, as
you move circumspectly along. I know this doesn't quite apply to
White, who's well aware of what others think; but the guy's built
out of spirit too.

There's been some heated twitter wars between notable critics
where I was glad no way was anything scary at risk. But I admit
that it didn't feel as safe from such as I would want. More was
close to being on the line, because I think we might be in the mood
to sink the reputable. A false move, a perfect rebuff -- and you're
gone. Even if all done between ostensible friends -- we'd sense
someone had entered "the territory," and that fact would have the
authority.

Permalink

Original Article: The fake war on grandma kisses
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014 1:31 AM
Shadow I wish I were you. My grandma stalked children like a
predator, sucking every bit of love from them while they squirmed
in distress. My mother felt a bit trepidatious in putting me in her
hands, but rejoiced in the feeling that with her own mother
occupied and happy, she felt some room to attend to her own
growth.
Permalink

Original Article: The fake war on grandma kisses
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2014 1:27 AM
A lot of parents feel the urge to sacrifice their kids to their parents -
- that's what the whole sacrifice-one-get-to-keep-the-others came
from two millennium ago, and the whole sourcing of current
postpartum.

My mother still tells me just to please -- and I sense her urging me
to sacrifice my complaints to fill other people. Still, she gave me
enough love that I feel I can tell her that "it's no longer going to go
that way," with some possibility that after a long pause and detour,
she'll join me in helping our heritage evolve--goodbye primitive,
love-denied ancestors! And if this doesn't work out for her, I'm still
staking my own road, and hope her own desintigration isn't too
painful.

But there's only so much you can do.
Permalink

Original Article: The year the book became a luxury
object
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2013 6:44 PM
Yes, this was the year the book became a luxury item. Fair piece.
Permalink

Original Article: The Wolf of Wall Street,
inequality and the Gatsby myth
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2013 4:56 AM
@susan sunflower It's tough not to glorify people when it's their
time. I've had managers at jobs who treat their employees
abhorrently, but a fair recounting of who was living the more
interesting life -- them, or their unsettled employees -- would mean
for sure them. I live in a neighbourhood that is gentrifying
massively, and though I avoid their hangouts for their scent of
you're-meant-to-feel-it assertion, the better, more confident artistic
expression, is there.

Watch "Walter Minty." Here you get one of those guys who's
devotion has kept a company relevant for twenty years +, but
seems simply embarrassing when a company feels totally that it
can transplant a template where no one means more than their role.
Walter gets these great "prompts" -- spirited, Romantic
"girlfriend"; grounded family; rugged hero who even the "wolves"
salivate over in admiration -- that end up meaning that though he
loses his job he can evolve into equal in presence to the "wolf on
wall street" boss who has everyone else in his company cowed in
fear, and whom the age, even the movie agrees, is mostly theirs
now.

This isn't necessarily more fun to watch than "Wolf". It doesn't
admit to the masochism that it baits most in the audience with:
feeling small lends to your surely being virtuous. And it's a lie: it's
doubtful the few true Walter Mintys out there are living as
enjoyably, as compellingly, as these assholes are. Sparks of
inspiration, meet jet engine.

Someone at the New Yorker has just suggested these "wolves" are
(the Great Gatsby's) Buchanan's point-of-view, but this isn't true.
Gatsby, was new wealth, when the old was feeling less sure of
itself -- and the wolves are feeling it.

They're really Gatsby -- those the age wants to inflate -- stripped of
course of all that otherwise commends, for our age being the
punishment for a previous one's egoistic proclamation that human
beings are good, and deserve -- all of them -- to know happiness
and pleasure.
Permalink

Original Article: The Wolf of Wall Street,
inequality and the Gatsby myth
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2013 8:12 PM
susan sunflower The times you're living in empowers certain
kinds of people. If the times are genuinely -- actually morally --
good, people like the flappers or hippies are the ones to watch. If
you're hectoring their debauch, you're not seeing it straight. When
times are bad, it's going to be the like of these assholes, who were
going to need a lot, I mean a lot, of kindness to become people
who don't need for you to lose so they can feel great, and who were
meant to experience zero of it (strangely, Martin McConaughey
kind of does offer a bit at the beginning, which may explain why
some critics who hated the film lurch back to this scene, as if long
adrift in spank and sewage and desperate for recognized
firmament).

The problem about acknowledging that it is fun to watch these
guys nonetheless -- the times are enabling their stories, while
cowing and deflating others, and it shows -- is that you should in
my opinion be able to recognize it with sadist Nazis (or maybe
Germans in general in the late 30s, as we understand better that
they really were one and the same) and their prey. That is the test
I'd put to Richard Brody for instance, a very good man, who in
discussion of this film genuinely bravely talks out
"monstrous potentates whose vast and dark range of experience is
precisely the source of their allure."
Permalink

Original Article: The 10 best movies of 2013
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013 11:04 PM
Douglas Moran Emporium Andrew O'Hehir Douglas
Moran Emporium Andrew O'Hehir In true gentry style, his
courteous, good-humoured reply had a lot of teaching in it -- which
some might find plainly arrogant: critics pursue and are
entertained by novelty, something new and smart; ordinary people
by a repeat of the same 'ol sack of shit. Under cover of the
ostensible key difference -- number of movies watched -- is being
pushed a class difference, a difference in quality of person.

To which you replied you're still not going to see "12 years," even
if God had placed all the wisdom of the universe in it, if there's any
risk of it spoiling your dinner. But you're obliged to have had him
visit, and ensure him you'll keep reading his reviews to make sure
you make an informed decision as to which film out there won't
depress, anger, outrage, or unsettle your blood pressure in any
way.

With such self-mockery here, I gathered you conceded that the
films he likes are probably those anyone who has a larger stake in
the world probably ought to watch. The bumpkin was visited by a
lord, and afterwards felt contented and even thrilled.

So, yeah, I'm thinking noblesse oblige.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013: The worst tweets of the year
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013 4:22 PM
Frederick Vox Docentus Emporium I think he actually means
"imperialist," as per the recent Salon' Richard Rodriguez
interview.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013: The worst tweets of the year
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013 3:54 PM
Richard Dawkins
The author and professional fly in the ointment of religion had
faint praise for Islam in August, when he dryly noted the religions
poor showing in the Nobels. Gosh, if only the whole system of faith
were built on prize winning, it might have been a real burn.

Well, he thinks you guys are junk too.
Permalink

Original Article: The 10 best movies of 2013
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013 3:38 PM
Douglas Moran Andrew O'Hehir This was like something out of a
Jane Austen novel.

The lord discusses aesthetic preferences with one of the respected
men in his nearby town -- a pastor, an affluent farmer, a doctor.
The lord will be the master in this conversation, but he takes care
to give room for the town leader to imagine himself less afflicted
than the lord is, that his comparative ignorance and suspicion of
change is a sign of his being contented in settled, rich, bourgeois
propriety.

So the town leader for a moment gets to pretend he's master in this
conversation, by tending to the lord's affliction in a way that
highlights his own contentment. Chest out, pleased in feeling a
proprietor -- who, being a small master of the universe, is of course
mostly just going to indulge in daily contentment rather than
jostling foreign novelty-- he then quickly lends the rest of his
thought to acknowledging the real superiority of the lord and the
stultifying aspect of his perpetual fixedness.

The lord has the refined intelligence and awareness; the lord
rightly has the authority to instruct. And he, even if he harrumphs
his way through the reviews, nevertheless still listens. This doesn't
make him a joke; he's still a battler. But deep down he
acknowledges his betters. In his middling home set up so
middlingly, on the table -- even if mostly unread -- is apt to be the
Times.

The town leader doesn't want the authority of the lord. He feels
comfortable in some place middling -- the lords keep the psychic
terror "Krakens" at bay. But he likes that the lord's preference for
him owing to his being the ideal John Bull-type the royalty can
rely on, means he ranges his own grounds with that much more
righteous pomposity.

Here it means being an agent in the comment sections, who may
not be an O'hehir or a Taylor, but owing to their concern to single
him out in a friendly, acknowledging fashion, he's a warden to
everyone else.

For this empowerment, this flattering divine touch, of course he's
still reading his reviews, however much he's thereafter openly
begrudged. Mr Collins to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, nothing ever
will sink the truth benighted in this grand moment of grace!
Permalink

Original Article: The 10 best movies of 2013
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013 1:39 AM
@Andrew O'Hehir @Douglas Moran

When you see 200+ movies a year, you become a specialist, and
you're looking for something you've never seen before. Whereas
ordinary moviegoers, by and large, want to see essentially what
they've seen before, done well or with a new twist, and with a
familiar outcome.

This description of ordinary moviegoers would seem to have
nothing to do with how many movies they watch. Anyone who
wants to see what they've seen before with a familiar outcome isn't
going to seem to naturally evolve into someone who prefers the
new and different if they upped their viewing habits. Rather than
finally yearn to barf it up, and then change it up, they'll eat their
predictable bland plate of steak and potatoes with the same
pleasure Homer Simpson would his one-billionth donut.

That is, it's more honest to say that even if the critic can only for
some reason make it to ten rather than the two hundred films they
prefer or at least usually have to watch, they just naturally are
people who take most pleasure, not in the repetition of thrills, but
in the piquant, the fresh, the new. They're beyond repetition-
compulsion; are more evolved than middlebrow -- and it's not
owing to practice.

There certainly are critics that are that. True leaders, better than the
average dope, I mean. Still, there's a good number I reckon
unconsciously pick choices they can imagine leaving the mob in a
fit of frustration. Became the critic, to indulge the delight in
stymying. Critic film geeks.
Permalink

Original Article: The 10 best movies of 2013
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2013 11:33 PM
Andrew O'Hehir slnreeder It does have a lot to say. If you're a type
of person an age favours, you're going to have a lot of fun,
genuine fun, and your liberty is going to be worth watching; worth
admiring.

This is all good if you're flower-power in the 60s, or a sophisticate
in the 20s, but somewhat less now.
Permalink

Original Article: Moms girly presents to me
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 6:18 AM
Maybe the use of assault sounds melodramatic, and I admit that
being plied with finery was an extremely first-world problem.

Yes, I'm a tribe of brown-skinned bow-possessing people, and was
ready for affront. Forgive me my tribal ignorance, but would your
being DNA a female but psychologically a male have something to
do with some part of your genius subconscious mind finding any
means to circumvent away from your abhorrent mother?

This is probably an ignorant question. But when I hear about
mother as blockage and your sexuality being ostensibly intrinsic
but also obviously a way out, I wonder.

Now I leave you to go hunt hippopotami, who have fat so thick ten
spears might not sink -- did you know that? Regardless, I sharpen
my spear, and if successful, I bond with my adopted animal spirits,
and rest. Peace to you. Merry Christmas to you. Adieu.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013s gay rights winners and losers
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 5:45 AM
mary steyr Emporium That, miss mary steyr, is a very Catholic
thing of you to say. Who outside of Authority, has a worthy thing
to say, indeed.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013s gay rights winners and losers
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 5:01 AM
Let's be careful about enfranchising popes. The previous
equivalent of our time was the Depression 30s and 40s, where we
had a pope, who okayed Hitler and shut doors to a continent of
deserving lives.

No way, no chance, no news of today will enable me to say okay to
any Catholic pope. I'm not going to inflate him, so later he can
have a say on others corralling those who slip into the limbo
between his applauds.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013s gay rights winners and losers
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 4:29 AM
bigguns Victoria L. I echoed her concern, good miss bigguns.
Have a happy, truly, and of course, but please apply the same to
me as well.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013s gay rights winners and losers
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 4:19 AM
BeansAndGreens Victoria L. I understand people lauding a
apparently progressive pope -- and I emphasize the apparently --
but his influence has lead to good people bullying someone from
saying, hey, it's boy-fucking-in-the-ass Catholic church -- let's
watch our becoming his latchkeys, okay?

Something un-okay just happened here. I hope you all took note of
that.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013s gay rights winners and losers
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 3:20 AM
BeansAndGreens Victoria L. Wrong. Pope Francis got Time and
everyone lauding, and who's to know that it's not going to prove
about make the pope's voice powerful -- for perhaps a very
different tomorrow.

There was only ONE way to become respected in today's world,
and he met that test and became A-list -- at the table, regardless. I
myself don't know if later history will show that "relevance" was
the most important thing this year for the pope, rather than means
to it.

Victoria L, keep on reminding about the abomination of
Catholicism. It's not enough if it's just bitter; for its past and earned
distrust, add bite and teeth.
Permalink

Original Article: Decorative Christmas villages: A
model for sustainable living?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2013 1:37 AM
I wonder if this author has read Dave Eggers' "The Circle." In that
book there is this "Google" community very much concerned
about encouraging people-interaction. People are encouraged to
share, mix, to embed their story in within the larger community.
Not "collide," maybe, but certainly intermix. And they too, like
this author, are a brave sort, quite aware that a lot of their vision
might smack of kitsch, and show a lot of childish longing and
naivety, but, um, they still really like it anyway, and can't be
embarrassed away from making it their leading vision.


About their own community, which as well isn't architecturally
"cookie-cutter" by any means, they might just as well described it
like this : "As you walked, you saw friends, passed your favorite
local restaurants and shops, kept an eye out for any suspicious
activity, and noticed who[m]" could use your help. For them, as
with this author, "suspicious activity" involved those behaving
counter to "common sense" -- those who for example tend to
sequester themselves, thereby denying the larger community their
input and providing a bad example which worked against the
"imprint" of sociality and generosity the layout of the community
was designed to push.

Eventually there's a hunt to show-up one of the absurd , counter-
human "Neanderthals" who's insisting on his isolation. He's not a
gun-toter, but rather a literate -- in spirit, obviously possessing a lot
of Eggers and Franzen in him. Like them, he's the type to believe
this "routine connection between communities" has created a
culture -- not of variety, of something "overlapping" and dense, but
rather something flattening and abolishing: a culture of niceness
(Franzen); a culture of decency (Richard Brody).

- - -

Human beings did progress went they left the caves, but an honest
person accounting for progress would also note it happening when
individuals left communities when communities turned bad.

The last time we heard more about communities than we did about
the individual, was in the 1930s. It was also a time when individual
distinction was lost to something larger -- communities didn't
facilitate the flaneur, the wit, the cosmopolitan, but the ordinary
person who shared the same hearth as you do. I myself am still
very suspicious of any salute to the dense urban mix where you
can't imagine the cosmopolitan getting lost therein to define
themselves any damn well way he or she pleases. You ain't seein'
me twinkling inside the storybook setting, even if I can fool myself
there's no risk of it, 'cause it's Park Slope, or Brooklyn, or
Berkeley.





Permalink

Original Article: Is Santa Claus worth the
heartbreak?
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2013 4:09 AM
Aunt Messy "backhanded across the face and get to spend the rest
of the day watching people eat and smile." Wow.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Is Santa Claus worth the
heartbreak?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2013 6:34 AM
Pain_In_The_Agnostic Aunt Messy BoshSpong You don't quite
win here, PainInTheAgnostic. Christmas may not be foisting
anything onto children. The end of the year may naturally draw
them to recall a rebirth ritual, something experienced as more than
real, owing to it having been ground into their psyches when they
first became conscious.

If Santa is the chubby blood-red fetus going down his birth
chimney attached to his placental bag -- if it's themselves, at their
earliest and most impressionable state, recalled -- telling kids he
isn't real or not telling them at all, "abjects" them worse than
leaving end of year as if something normally lost but always more
important, wasn't making its presence once-again known.
Permalink

Original Article: Is Santa Claus worth the
heartbreak?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2013 5:45 AM
I wish you had more experience of parents who did "Santa"
because they were utopians. Imagine if the reason parents did this
was because they wanted to ground their kids with the possibility
that life could be about wonder (another hippie 1960s, anyone?),
before the inevitable takeover into the-rest-of-the-prosaic-world-
insisted sobriety-reality. This would be so awesome of them!

You make it seem as if some heavy blanket smothered over them
that if kids peel off, then already prepared, world's foes will be
faced that much more confidently. This is good, but still a lot of
going the other way than I'd wish it.
Permalink

Original Article: Is Santa Claus worth the
heartbreak?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2013 5:20 AM
I hate stories about Santa not being real. It's as if we're all --
outside of childhood -- living in a world that is "faerie / demon"
free. This whole Santa-isn't-real reveal is just a ritual we do to
convince ourselves we see things outside of sobering maturation,
strictly denatured.

Does this sound Reagan looking upon USSR?
Does this sound Tea-bagger?
Does this sound democrat Slate-founder Michael Kinsley saying
austerity is good because we all need to eat more spinach?
Does this sound our need for banks, army, homeless, leaders --
archetype "institutions," which blink half-real all the time, as if
we've deposited some part of our own psyches into deadly outside
form?

Aboriginals see their own "Santas," their own imaginings, the
whole of their lives. Half of their lives is indeed going into uber-
lucid dream states. We're less than this, but it's still in us. Consider
this the next time you feel reborn in the New Year: an elf on the
shelf spent a heck of a lot of time watching you, and decided you'd
earned a pass: thereby only, the refresh. You appeased the demon.
You appeased the demon. And so you get a second chance.
Permalink

Original Article: The Trip to Echo Spring: Great
writers, getting drunk
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2013 4:20 AM
The Disney people though it awry that a mother would just leave
her children to a stranger to take care of, and you blasted them for
being unsophisticated enough to know that it was just common
social practice for the time.

And here you say this: But Laing pulls it off, musing over their
universally miserable childhoods full of suicidal fathers,
controlling mothers, economic insecurity and longings for escape
and such recurrent themes as anxiety, insomnia, inhibition,
lying, denial, the obliteration of memory, the faltering struggle of
recovery and the grace achieved by the two men (Cheever and
Carver) who were able to stay sober.

Where as we know, a whole lot of this needn't of been
particularized and validated by you, but also managed into
common social practice (of the 1930s or whenever). That is, why
the hell aren't you poo-pooing Laing for particularizing
childrearing practices that were probably everywhere -- it was
what everyone was told to do. Why bait us to be like the Disney
folk who'd see something that'd strike as foreign and strange and
abusive (abandoning) and say, hey, wtf? -- why did they do this to
you?

Why not more "pish-posh: As if I'm going to going to listen to this
dreary shit, when there's a city awaiting, and a cosmopolitan self-
accessorizing to be fit onto me!"
Permalink

Original Article: The 6 creepiest Baby, Its Cold
Outside covers
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2013 1:49 AM
@Bostonian in Brooklyn Daniels' point is for us to find ourselves
so conflicted into knots, paralyzed, we can be pushed over if he
and his friends need a bit of extra room for their party.
Permalink

Original Article: The 6 creepiest Baby, Its Cold
Outside covers
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2013 1:32 AM
@liz kranz It's not impossible that Daniel could come around to
see this. But you see, his reaction is determined right now mostly
by the fact that he knows most of us see it as lovely / charming and
harmless.

Imagine him at court with his sophisticated friends in the only
great castle on the landscape. Imagine that as much fun as they're
having inside -- which might well include a lot of the testing and
flirting and stuff-for-further-gossip as this song -- they might like
to step outside, onto the grounds and beyond. And imagine that it
won't do to have the "temper" they've built inside have to maintain
itself midst the kind of aggressive notes uncowed people with
totally different cultural DNA, would grossly jostle them with.

So in preparation, he and his friends try to bind weights to every
pleasurable instinct we might have -- heavy pressure is applied to
every one of these pleasures, so that as we squeeze here and there
to find some way to cope with the weights, there ends up in the end
much less fruition -- smoke tendrils making their way from under
cobblestones, rather than trumpet noises in clear air, that can
essentially without steeling yourself be walked through and
ignored.

So he and his smart crowd can range out of the castle onto the
cobblestoned grounds, and beyond across the paved landscape -- if
the party should carry them there.

After this mastery has been demonstrated, a good long ranging
across the total landscape, if one of his friends brought up this song
and pointed out its actually pleasing resemblances to the sexual
rivalry that so entranced people in the 30s, he might even
acknowledge the point, and in consequently hearing it again fresh,
enjoy it.
Permalink

Original Article: The 6 creepiest Baby, Its Cold
Outside covers
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2013 12:25 AM
I maintain that you have a profound distaste for populist longing.
It's like you have to stomp down whatever everyone else is
aspiring to, so your own business can be done in better peace and
quiet.

There's play and intimacy, in this song. Drama. It cheers you up
more than anything.
Permalink

Original Article: Saving Mary Poppins
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2013 7:15 PM
Operation Enduring Boredom Graham Clark Very interesting.
Thank you.
Permalink

Original Article: Hack List No. 4: David Brooks
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2013 6:57 PM
@lauralooch @Graham Clark
Most of us are just products of our upbringing, our traumas,
our failures, our transgressions. We all bleed the same.
I think that there aren't any true moral monsters out there, not even
Hitler, who was starved and tightly swaddled as a child,
experienced daily whippings with a bull whip, saw his mother as a
death-dealing medusa, and who believed his own sperm might
poison the blood of his female partners.
I don't know if I should just nod at your vision of a collective
brotherhood, though -- "bleeding the same blood," sounds like it
plays more to conservatives' vision of things rather than
progressives', who surely aren't as prone to float themselves as if
broken and bloodied "on the cross," like the doomed warriors in
300 (have to think about this one, though; it doesn't actually seem
to apply to Dave Eggers, Miranda July or Spike Jonze, for
instance).
And the part about "sticking to tribal codes because therein is
social safety," awaiting a "moral giant to break down the walls
between tribes" hmmm.
I think the problem with this is that when I encounter someone
thinking this way, I'm not sure just how present they are. I imagine
them petting these poor broken, vulnerable, unpresuming souls,
and thereby giving themselves some succor -- for it's a multiple of
their bruised childhoods that actually seem to populate these
places.
And this waiting for a giant moral man to arrive, scares me a bit. I
feel like I could point out that they don't have to wait, that there's
plenty they can actually do now, but if they had to attend to me I'd
be an irritation. As if lost in a reality-balking vision -- like Monty
Python's Lancelot -- we're still in that part of the narrative where
there's nothing we can do, even if we, like, actually can. The
righteous king only arrives when we've accumulated enough
despair for this to feel a glorious miracle -- a lesson that you
should never, ever, lose hope.
We're not all of the same blood. Conservatives just like it when we
show submission and make ourselves pliable. Progressives show in
their infuriating impishness, that theyre not about to partake in the
con.
Permalink

Original Article: Saving Mary Poppins
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2013 4:40 AM
Serai1 I said nothing of the kind. Being handed over to strangers to
be raised, is worth a raised eyebrow. Disney's people raised them,
which strikes me as commendable compared to Laura's "it's just
what people do," and your "what are you, someone who believes
children need to be coddled all the time rather than learn the world
for themselves"? "What of it if there are predators and dangers --
without them kids stay soft and unprepared for the harsh adult
world."

Progressives have historically insisted on the more kind approach,
and if lucky, changed everyone else's opinions eventually; or if
unlucky, weren't a match for those invested in harbouring and
sanctifying barbaric customs and shipped off elsewhere.
Permalink

Original Article: Saving Mary Poppins
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2013 3:55 AM
But among other things, the Disney team felt they needed to
explain why someone like Mrs. Banks was hiring a stranger to
take care of her own children. (It was common practice for a
member of her class.
Sensible of them. What exactly does it mean for something to be a
common social practice? Seems like it almost puts it beyond
further analysis, even perhaps sanctifying it. If a whole bunch of
people want to reject their children, sacrificing them to some
delegate of the destructive grandmother, is this common
practice? Or just impossible, you silly! of course?
while in C.S. Lewis novel, they dont give their parents a
second thought and end up spending upward of a decade in
Narnia without a qualm.
Brutal. It's like what immature parents are capable of who only
have kids for the light and attention kids put to them, and then
abandon them for Paris or chocolate or fantasy/romance novels or
whatever when they're out of cute infancy and onto pleasure-
complicating late childhood and adolescence. It's only
great because if you identify with it, you imagine the abandoned
hoping the whole time you might be thinking of them, which you
hope they one day discover, you weren't, not at all.
No, she had to be nursing an unresolved trauma daddy
issues, of course all of which can be laid to rest by handing
over her baby to that ultimate daddy figure, Walt Disney.
Now you're concerned over the handing over of babies? She should
have coddled it and kept it to herself, to ensure it had the legacy it
deserved? But at least the people she had wet-nurse it in some
respects did a better job of raising the righteousness of this
concern.
These writers, she once wrote, cheerfully licked me into shape
like a set of mother cats with a kitten.
Wonderful. I have nothing but fond memories of those intent to
lick me into shape as well. Actually, that's not quite right. I used to
complain that their always scolding me for dragging my feet or
whining or behaving like the inmates of a "Bear Garden" suggested
there was something rather perversely wrong with them, like they
were projecting onto me, and possessed were spanking some ghost
of their bad selves rather than me for whatever awful I just did.
But I came to appreciate it was actually all a fair cop. Every once
in awhile I still think it maybe a bit awry that they felt the need for
me to take off my pants and fondle me, but that too I understand
now as just common practice -- every school master once did this,
as Richard Dawkins recently reflected. Just common social
practice for a particular time and place, so it couldn't have done
much harm.
With this piece, you've complicated our appreciation of the
enchantment of not knowing -- exactly what gives birth to those
terrors in non-Disney fairy tales that so appeal to children anyway?
The universal? Or particularly dreadful experiences particular to
each one of them that fortunately are being winnowed out through
time (though maybe not so much with this Go the f*ck to sleep
fad).

And how again is everyone moving on to the syrup of Disney just
our dumb American hatred of the cosmopolitan? Sounds
convincing, but maybe it should be tested. The movie was uplifting
and an awful lot of fun -- one further magnificent bravado show
that post-war wasn't going to be anything like the Depression
period before it. And from what all youve told me, Im almost
afraid to read the book -- it'd be like letting hooks onto me that
post-war Disney magic had spared me ever having had to really
know.
Permalink

Original Article: Hack List No. 10: Malcolm
Gladwell
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 11:29 PM
atiyah Emporium He's sundered himself of all pretension; he's
quite willing to be an agent of forces stronger than himself. This
ego-lessness means feeling an approval that would sustain him
against all those who still think the fundamental concern of our age
is get facts right. It isn't. It's to get lost in a fugue state of reality-
distanced narratives -- like the Depression one of those who work
hard will be rewarded -- that makes bitches out of facts. Precision-
true facts will only get attention, when they illuminate a reality
that empowers our myths.

If you sense you might be on the wrong side of this, as I do, yeah,
that nice, placid, modest Cdn man -- who's on the empowered right
side, and at some level knows it -- can be very friggin' scary.
Permalink

Original Article: Hack List No. 10: Malcolm
Gladwell
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 10:12 PM
When important public figures these days seem to begin first, by
making themselves seem chaste or small, I wonder if this is
because they're about to be involved in pleasures truly sickly, but
will be absolved for it by having cast off from themselves all
pretensions. Gladwell is a small Canadian; Chris Hedges
announces how he was once an enfranchised NYT jerk; and Dave
Eggers makes clear that he was once the snarliest asshole there
ever was, as he now -- as if the least pretentious and most innocent
of boys -- opens each and every one of the short story submissions
sent to him as if to be greeted by something vastly greater than he.

I think that Gladwell can almost imagine a smart, not-so-ready-to-
be fooled, skeptical person, reading his work, and wanting to
address him over this and that that doesn't really seem to square up.
And he would look down to this person, pause, and smile, knowing
that each moment he draws out is keeping him/her fixed in a
narrative that is being over-run by people who bought the whole
damn thing wholesale.

This intelligent, skeptical person, would begin to feel crowded, out
of place, and Gladwell would experience a highly pleasurable
sadistic tremor, informing him this person realizes that there are
very few people actually like him/her still left in the world, and
that they might not be able to trust their ability not to be lured out
into some place where they'll find themselves precariously
vulnerable.

This guy's one of the glaze-eyed, positivist sharks, owning our
world now in full confidence. The skeptic crab or lobster, loses the
moment s/he makes himself known.
Permalink

Original Article: Paul Krugman: Inequality is the
defining challenge of our time
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 8:53 PM
hexis Absolute economic equality sounds good to me. Shouldn't
we all aim to about where Google employees are in their hive;
once you're counted in, you've as much right to the amenities as
anyone else, however much more important to the company their
coding might be.

No one's living Versailles, and no one would want to float that
much higher above everyone else -- how vulgar! Everyone haute
bourgeois, as a standard we should all seek.


Permalink

Original Article: Hack List No. 10: Malcolm
Gladwell
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 6:34 PM
stencil Vail Beach Lee Viola jzenman Parene is truer to the idea of
a salon, though. Lots of things sparkle in his pieces, which tintillate
at you even as you focus on his main argument.

Though I think to some he's more of the boudoir -- definitely
feminine-inflicted. Which every solid Englishman would reject for
GG's straight forward conjuration of the knight on the field.
Permalink

Original Article: Secrets of the convent: Will
millennials become nuns?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 4:44 PM
mcasey5 I could swear this is a piece on Obama in some Tea
Party rag. These women are nuns, committing their lives to God
so they can pray for others (read: you).

Wouldn't you expect this to sell better in some Tea Party rag,
though. Salon is a liberal, progressive magazine, with a lively
entertainment and life section, and you're admonishing/reminding
us that they're committing their lives to God and that they're
praying for us.

Really, it's like you've made them those summoning a future wrath
upon us, and would expect us to find this endearing.
Permalink

Original Article: Secrets of the convent: Will
millennials become nuns?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 4:31 PM
Classica American Are you sure it isn't that you just feel relieved
when you hear of women submitting themselves to empowered
men.
Permalink

Original Article: Secrets of the convent: Will
millennials become nuns?
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2013 4:29 PM
DSMAT5 Let's say someone was trapped at home with a needy
mother who insisted her daughters serve her. Let's say that every
time these daughters tried to individuate, they got it bad from
mom. Maybe real bad. Let's say these daughters were trapped in
this environment for many, many years.

Then let's say they get out into the real world, and declare that it's
not for them, that its leading them astray, into sin, and that they
want to live unselfishly and devote themselves to someone bigger
than them (again). Should we appreciate and respect their choice?
Or would this be the ignorant and cruel thing to do?

Someone of us think that this is essentially what is happening with
all nuns. It's only understandable from people who've been abused.
The healthy rightly couldn't possibly understand why anyone
would do it. Life as self-nullification. Insane.

Like this author, many of us are thinking we might be better people
if we learned the Depression's or the monastery's "financial reserve
and material minimalism"? Possibly true. And if so this should be
looked into as well. We don't want to come out of a Depression
full of human stiflement and pain, and have people collectively
agree it got their bad materialism out of them.
Permalink

Original Article: Secrets of the convent: Will
millennials become nuns?
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 8:12 PM
These people are afraid to individuate. Every time they did so in
the past their God (read parents) abandoned them, for "selfishly"
attending to themselves rather than their ma and pa. So they go
back home, stripped of everything, and for committing themselves
entirely to God (their parents) they feel loved. Terrific master, that
God.

These are very abused, very sick people. What we need to do,
when we have the resources, is take them out and show them a
good time; and when they panic for their unsupervised good-time
meaning ma and pa surely abandoning them forever this time, help
them deal with their "abandonment attack" by talking to them,
tending to them, but absolutely also, refusing to let them sunder
themselves of any further independence by retreating back home.

Then we work on shutting down these institutions so they can be
prevented from inhibiting people's growth and individuality.
Retreat them back to primitive History, where they belong. Maybe
Salon might write an article telling them to suck it, and show how
progressive they really are.
Permalink

Original Article: Secrets of the convent: Will
millennials become nuns?
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 7:30 PM
Born in the aftermath of the Great Depressions financial reserve
and material minimalism, Sister Mary Josephs transition to the
monastery felt simple.

They had financial reserve and material minimalism? The
withered Depression people -- those sad, grim lot, found Utopia?

Well, okay, but here's me thinking they had drawn-up the
drawbridge on life, and masochistically found contentment in the
burgeoning tenement or rundown home, as well as sewing up their
socks, primarily so that no one would think that if you chewed
down on them you could possibly emerge with a generous
mouthful of fat.

The raging, hungry Demon circling, would visit down on others.
Permalink

Original Article: 2013 was the Internets worst year
ever
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 5:59 PM
Everyones Internet is still individual, because an argument
provocatively argued, intended to inspire a response more fervent
than agree or disagree, inspires nothing more than sustained
reading. Sustained reading is time spent not clicking any other
links. It got less important in 2013 and could well disappear next
year. Maybe its time to spend more time logged out; I know a
website that could recommend a praiseworthy book.

This is okay if it's completely real. Spared any self-fashioning, as
they say. I know how dispiriting it is to to have to fend off "the
Internet" while you key on people contributing intelligently and
sincerely in our salon. But I also know how dispiriting it is to see
intellectuals gauging that they're actually mostly just now in mind
for more quiet repose just with their friends (the only ones around
who too still covet beauty), because in this too is the conservative's
love of a class-distinct society without discord.

Make only so many people producers, have them dump their
product onto everyone else, and have them up their drawbridges
and away into their studies for smoke and cigars, before any
responses might tendril up to contagion their ears. The perfect
solution.
Permalink

Original Article: Richard Rodriguez: New Atheism
has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 5:29 PM
Fifty years later, our technocratic, secular president gave a speech
at the Lincoln memorial, honoring the memory of the speech Dr.
King had given. And nothing President Obama said can we
remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our
memory of the soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And
whats happened to us and I would include myself in the
cultural left what has happened to us is we have almost no
language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk about the
soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this
point in our lives, this point in our national history. Thats what
weve lost in giving it to Fox Television.

This guy should attend more to Dawkins' tweets -- there's
definitely "oratory" in it, and it actually makes a lot of these
technocratic liberals uneasy, as did Nader's oratory.

Since we're in a repeat of the 30s, we're all of course doing the
responsible thing and reminding ourselves how Hitler came into
power in Germany. All his ranting about soulless materialism and
a lack of a sense of belonging. And this is so that when we hear
that people are giving speeches that aren't necessarily going to be
remembered in 50 yrs but adequately serve the occasion now, we
remind ourselves that we're in the company of leaders we don't
expect magic from and hardly want deified. We're bourgeois,
civilized -- a president just an important job, not a nation's phallic
papa, a la civilized Belgium.

This gentleman has a problem with the current left, its focus on
making brown and black bourgeoisie, while letting the working
class rot. What he does not realize is that it was precisely the left's
interest in progress, in not romancing working class life but in
exploring the heights of bourgeois refinement, that drew the
working class to abandon them. They elected in Reagan/Thatcher,
because they knew these leaders would ensure they were never
brought willy-nilly into the true life-affordments the left were far
more ready to grant themselves. It would make them feel spoiled,
and abandoned by their comparatively punitive and self-focused
parents. They wanted self-lacerations and misery to feel absolved
of a greater punishment. And this is why the rancid world we live
in.

The left did right, continued to push to empower women and
discriminated peoples, to force unprogressive attitudes out of
public acceptability, even though this of course was going to make
them as if in a different world from the white working class.
They've got to hope, that their own number stays strong, doesn't
begin to as well feel strangely lost and abandoned and craving
"meaning", and welcome back old-fashioned ways as if
discovering something more "true" let's hope liberal
Brooklynites dressing like their grandfathers and having every
shop they enter feel sparse and colonial, hasn't any substance
behind it.
Permalink

Original Article: Poverty nation: How America
created a low-wage work swamp
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 4:17 PM
stephened cleo48 Every full-time job should enable a home and a
couple of kids. It's repugnant to walk about in a nation where not
only can these people not afford health insurance, but are to be
"dressed" in such a fashion you have to fight not to think of them
as lesser people.

And no one should want a job to enable them to live twenty times
more lavishly than their fellow human beings. This too works
against how you truly feel, that it's beautiful to be alive in a human
community, and that you're pleased to be in such satisfying work
ably helping your human family.

I said in another thread what I would do if I was in possession of
Sauron's ring, and that was of course to use it plenty, all the time.
And it would be about giving myself luxuries, giving myself what
really are the finest. But it'd be too to make sure everyone else gets
to live this finely as well.
Permalink

Original Article: Poverty nation: How America
created a low-wage work swamp
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 3:51 PM
begemot the cat American workers will believe they deserve a
living wage, if it means they're part of vigorous American
heartland keeping illegals out.

I think this is what progressives are going to find, the everyday
people they care about will find themselves most fueled to fight,
when it's part of satisfying their primitive means to feel pure. It's
going to come with increased homophobia, anti-feminism, racism,
and suspicion of outsiders.
Permalink

Original Article: Poverty nation: How America
created a low-wage work swamp
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 3:29 PM
@DanielGree @DanielGree There was a time when work
working for fast food places was smeared not because of its pay
but because it was beneath the poor. It infuriated working class
tax payers.
Fast food is beneath people. Speed repetition, what a waste of life.
And people who find this objectionable aren't being braked by
punitive Calvinism -- a belief system -- but because they're out of
families who've only evolved so much over the millenniums, that
they still only conditionally love their kids. Kids out of these kinds
of families, kids who have parents that still so much need love
themselves that they expect their kids to devote themselves to
them, begin to feel abandoned if in life they let themselves have
too many good things. The prosperous postwar years were leading
many to feel this abandonment, and so they willed in awful leaders
who were going to push them back into dependency, so they could
feel like good, loyal, unspoiled children, and closer to their parents
again.
America's problem has been for a long time, that it is just flooded
by many of Europeans least loved. Lars Von Trier has said that,
and he's right. Those nations that are more actively supporting all
their people, aren't that way because they're more homogenous.
They're that way because they're out of more loving strains of
humanity, with each generation improving on the love given to the
next. Go to a liberal part of New York and watch parents with their
children. Listening, engaging, supporting, and you're seeing
children receive even more love than their still fairly well-loved
parents did. You're seeing evolution. Now go somewhere else, and
watch, and you're seeing children existing as a sop for depression
or the like. You're seeing people who will come to see themselves
as bad and who will view enlightened progressives as probably
doing Satan's work. It's not an ideology thing, but a brain thing.
I think that Americans are going to work their way into believing
they deserve a living wage. But this will occur only because they're
in sync, in fidelity, to regressive parental/ancestor attitudes. It'll
come, along with increased homophobia, racism, and suspicion of
outsiders. We're probably 30 years away from a time when
American society improves out of progressives leading the way,
and pulling everyone along with them. Another 1960s.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Our old-timey addiction: Why we
cant get enough of century-old images
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 4:52 AM
heartsmindsvision Emporium Thanks.
Permalink

Original Article: Sodomy laws still exist?!
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 3:56 AM
Of course, there are plenty of reasons to criticize in the Indian
Supreme Court decision but lets not act like our hands are
clean.

This discourse sucks. It's telling people to exhibit modesty, to
temper our enthusiasm, to look to our own sins, and it is actually
related to the conservative regression we're seeing in India. No, we
don't react to this by feeling like we too are sinners, because that's
just using this news to spread contagion, and I don't want to look to
India now as if it's the source of inspiration

We tell India to do fucking better, and take pride that our loud
instinct is to voice our objection this way.
Permalink

Original Article: Our old-timey addiction: Why we
cant get enough of century-old images
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2013 2:46 AM
This fixation on the way we were has historically been
considered an affliction, but today, psychologists tout nostalgias
restorative effects. In studies, participants reflecting on memories
have reported stronger feelings of belonging, affiliation, sociality,
self-esteem and meaning.

A take (and please, some allowance):

If we were to hear that Russia or India was going increasingly old-
timey, and that it was lending them feelings of cohesion and
belonging, would we greet the news as appreciatingly as this
article would have us New Yorkers' bonding with their ancestors?

Completely different thing? After all it's places like liberal
Brooklyn where everyone's going mountain men, channeling
ancestors who worked 60 hrs a day in steel and wood to survive in
the new country?

I don't think so. For the liberal men, I think their current affiliation
with grandfathers who stoicly "worked the mines", enables them
something they've been searching for but had only until now found
insufficient means. They want to go homosocial, unironic, but need
some defence so they can believe themselves distinguished from
the pleb sexist Americans they've been attacking remorsefully this
last long while. Now they can be Men, without the defence and
sundering of being ironic -- even somewhat brutal and alcoholic
and definitely women-ignoring ones -- because they've fused
themselves with the great spirit of Men who sacrificed themselves
beyond what any flaccid contemporary could possibly manage.

They're beyond attack, because they see themselves as committed
to a path that will lead to profound self-wasting; their bodies with
all the other male bodies, who lost it all on field or in workplace.
Faramirs committed to sacrificing themselves, beyond being
recalled by even Gandalf's insistence that they're behaving beyond
reason. They're Biff from "Death of a Salesmen," agreeing that
they're the worst of men, but still (therefore) bypassing female
obstacles to engage firmly but devastatingly with fate and Father.
Dwarves who'll go the distance, to reclaim their ancient homeland.

Women too, see in the photos their own chaining together
masochistically into groups, in compensation for their men-folk
spending less and less time at home. They're bonding with
ancestors who went knit and gossip groups, wishing their men folk
could only spend more time at home.


The current nostalgia is not about looking back, but about
resurrection, re-bonding -- with grief-afflicted and sundered and
comparatively highly conservative people. People are becoming
more true to ancestors a way back, those like our grandfathers who
were confronted with the Depression and WW2, and who would
literally have crashed your head in if you insisted they were surely
therefore mentally ill and PTSD. Their participation in these events
means they're archetypal; not singular themselves, but of a
company of men.

Anyone fearful of the watering down of progressive movements
from within, might want to compare the bonding going on here
with what happened in the 30s in Germany, when people dumped
flaccid liberal Jazz Age Weimer for ancestors of old. In that
regressive period, university profs did not defend their Jewish
peers.
Permalink

Original Article: The real New Atheism: Rejecting
religion for a just world
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 7:51 PM
Geowalk07 I'm at work Geowalk07, but I'll try and get to this
soon. Be sure, though, I'm thinking of highly educated people in
publishing who find Dawkins as gross as they do Nader and Naomi
Wolf, wishing them the hell out of their way.
Permalink

Original Article: The real New Atheism: Rejecting
religion for a just world
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 7:37 PM
Hitchens did enjoying shaming people too much.

I've got a bunch of people on my twitter feed who are
uncomfortable with how loudly Dawkins is pointing out how
moronic and cruel Islam is. I think they think they're completely
right because what Dawkins is doing interferes with a civil society;
that though of course some cultures have practices that are hardly
liberal, if they can be counted as a benign or even worthy cultural
practice -- or even just somehow, looked past -- they might
somehow be tempered if they can at least be fit into some liberal-
sanctioned societal grid.

Dawkins reply would be that they're afraid to confront, too afraid
that control will be lost to hate-mongerers, like what's behind the
imposition of civic society over religious practice in Quebec. Or
worse, they don't let themselves fully feel the oppressions in other
cultures, because they're enjoying warring against the pleb idiots in
their own country; and as well, feeling like enfranchised
internationalists with a sophisticated appreciation of the character
of other nations. It dresses them better to be mild and tolerant.

I myself find Dawkins exhilarating, and that as much as he might
seem like Hitchens, there's less that's suspect about his
motivations. He sees people in pain, and he is going to end it,
damn it! The guy stepping into the school yard to stop the bullying.
But it is still about blaming people -- assigning people as worthy of
hate. And this gets in the way of our getting ahead. So too many
who'd prefer objections be tempered down, like the mild man
who's the subject of this article, 'cause many of these like where
society is and want to freeze it, even as their liberal categories cage
practices that everyday add more and more pain to our world.
Permalink

Original Article: Everyone should wait tables
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 5:53 PM
If I was someone working in a face to face job like waitering,
retail, or hotel work, and felt like I was adding to others' lives, I
don't know how readily I would agree to people subjugating me as
someone doing "honest" work, like I'm within some kind of work
purgatory -- 2 years service to humble and ground me for the rest
of my life.

Don't any of you go to restaurants or shops or hotels where people,
new additions and experiences into your life, relax you, calm you,
acknowledge you, maybe even on occasion add genuine magic to
your lives? I swear that to me they're all in the therapy industry --
not the showy stuff; the grand human being who within an hour
twice a week overtly prompts you into discovery -- but the
ostensibly innocuous regular human contact that without drawing
attention to itself, is just as much required for inner shifts we might
make.

Wes Anderson has something of this perspective, it appears. Grand
Budapest is about someone with the greatest job in the world -- a
bellhop.
Permalink

Original Article: Dave Eggers: It takes a particular
mix of madness and courage to write short stories
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 5:03 PM
Eggers admits he was once a total asshole. He decided at one point
-- no more! -- and became someone who takes joy in every freshly
opened envelope.

He thinks it's just sincere, and a lot of it does read to me as pretty
sincere. But as well I sense someone coddling the sparrow beat
down by the storm, broken-wing still trying to climb into the air
again.

I kind of suspect that in each writer he meets, he's looking and
hoping to be amazed, but also for recognition that you too have
come out of wounding.
Permalink

Original Article: Everyone should wait tables
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 6:06 AM
Face to face, is a privilege. Therapists -- good ones -- do face to
face. It's intimacy, where affect is potentially so strong you can
find yourself changed, regardless of stoic retreat.

The problem is that we're still a primitive society, which for
purposes of effecting a superstructure against Chaos, we still
acclaim people allowed to be most remote from us -- they've got to
be at the top of a formidable tower. If you're a waiter, or retail,
what you actually are is at the front-lines of affecting people.

Each time, you're so close you could touch, and rattle. Even if
you're in a society primitive enough to think this is the lowest
thing, limited to mere minutes each time, regardless you can still
potentially change lives.

That is why everyone should seek to be a waiter. It's one of the
highest things.
Permalink

Original Article: Your boss wants to be Nate Silver
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 4:35 AM
Classica American I don't think so; they're focusing on the reward
part too. Rewards and punishment are a paradigm out of being only
conditionally loved. Parents punishing their children when they act
out of line, and rewarding them when they conform with their
wishes. It was just everywhere in the 19th-century, and a solid
portion of the 20th -- and obviously it's still just plain normal to a
heck of a lot of people. But it's not what a lot of liberals knew at
home, and they gaze at it -- both parts -- like they're looking at
History.

Theirs was more complicated -- and certainly the punishment part
was way less stressed, and much less scary! The best even had it
ideal, where rewards were given when their kids showed up their
parents, revealed how limited, how stuck, they were -- but as well,
just how open their own growth would prove. Not just in what we
normally think of as accomplishments, but in emotional tensility,
in overall maturity, as well.

Of course, these types, aren't really all that attracted to Capitalism
anyway. They see it as out of only a conditional acceptance of
people; as as interested in seeing people fail as succeed. They go
more the Socialism route, which actually wants everyone to live
rewarding lives. I don't mean USSR; I mean 60s communalism.
Permalink

Original Article: Your boss wants to be Nate Silver
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2013 3:54 AM
The fear of more metrics is that it's part of a need to make
managers akin to the likes of Zuckerberg or Nate Silver -- that is,
on the autistic spectrum, able to detach themselves from fully
registering other people's emotions.

I have no idea if there is a limit to what metrics might measure.
Usually in history when I hear talk of them, it's always "the
German psychologists vs. the humanist William James" -- one side
being suspect because you can't trust that they're not actually
afraid of human emotions and feeling, and it's that that has them so
involved with emotion and human colour-stripped numbers rather
than their power to reveal, that is.

But truth is, the hippies were opposite of that -- plenty emotion-
registering, that is -- and plenty has been written about how they're
the ones responsible for the great computer/web development, so I
don't necessarily think this must always be the full picture. In a
genuine Utopia, metrics might be just an unambiguously helpful
tool. But people like the above who's talking about its humanistic
possibilities, we wouldn't see much of in Utopia; they're guards in
a prison camp seeing all the improvement the new management
measures are effecting. They'll be detached from experiencing the
effects of their torture, as it's been normalized as ideal
comportment -- the best and most innovative carry themselves
exactly like that.

"We" obviously want to live in an environment for awhile where
our leaders cannot feel our pain. We want them to be autistics, who
could be right up close, studying everything about us, but still be
amazed later to learn that their subjects weren't happy as pie about
the experience. McDonalds telling its employees how to budget for
their nannies. Managers even; those up close. This is what
concerns me.
Permalink

Original Article: The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: Jackson leaves Tolkien behind
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2013 3:41 PM
Eric M. Van realreader Classica American Wolfe is invigorating
because he takes people who've been picked on and brutalized, and
has them figure their way out of the maze. Way too many smiling
father-figures for his work not to also appeal for it bonding us to
male lineage, though. Like Tolkien that way.
Permalink

Original Article: Your boss wants to be Nate Silver
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2013 3:06 PM
When society is regressing, we're back in the worst situations of
our family home, with one part playing the parents spying into
everything we do, and the other the children who feel so under
watch they feel frozen.
The reason metrics won't be fair to people, is that it's being
motivated primarily to make people feel like fretful lab rats. We of
course don't see this. And we find ample proof that it's simply
about improved performance, with the only possible defect being
that only the best will find employment while the mediocre fall by
the wayside.
But you look historically and things like constant enemas for
children had ample proof and were fully justified. Later, healthier,
more sane societies, could hardly see such proof, of course.
If enough of us regress, Science will be of no help. Every scientist
in the world will find proof that supports their emotional needs,
discarding -- not seeing -- anything that resists a worldview they
simply must have right now. Which seems to be, with even so
many Democrats supporting austerity, that most people are bad
children who deserve to be starved and punished.
It's never happened before, but if it gets bad enough even Science
might slip into something more immune to nagging our
consciouses. I'm noticing people are into swaddling their children
again -- locking them into their feces, and binding their movements
-- and that electroshock therapy has come back as "treatment", and
that elves on the shelves are looking for badness like Austrian
Krampusses, and we can only see it as shopper-friendly benign.
We could go pretty low.
Permalink

Original Article: Your boss wants to be Nate Silver
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2013 2:41 PM
Classica American You own the business. You are the boss. But
somewhere deep down in you was a little boy who was bullied by
his parents, who's reply was to decide to never let himself feel that
way again, and to find others he could rage at unaccountably and
upon whim.

We Salon readers recommend you stick to your sandbox; you
wouldn't do well with us because we'd read the therapy you need,
which would make you feel uneasy. And to fire us, you'd suddenly
find excuse to buy that expensive computer program, to find
metrics and leverage to take down those who's crime was just to
see you properly.
Permalink

Original Article: Ron Howard on Rushs surprise
Golden Globe nomination: Theres something about
the fact that we were not a studio movie
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2013 7:52 PM
Very nice to see. Possibly my favourite scene this year was
Lauda's asking for a lift from his future wife.
Permalink

Original Article: The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: Jackson leaves Tolkien behind
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2013 1:50 AM
realreader Classica American Tolkien believed people were bad
people would forget all the sacrifices of the past to indulge in their
present happiness. Great stoic manly kings ending in pretenders
feasting all the time. Also, that none could resist being corrupted
by indulgences (screw you Tolkien; if I had that ring, sure, you'd
see me around town in a party-filled limo sporting some sweet
duds a good portion of the time, a la Gatsby, but I'd be making sure
that was available to everyone else too poverty would have
been blinked away instantly, of course).

I know he was big in the sixties, but there's an awful lot of finger-
wagging, look what women riding bicycles will lead to, current
fundamentalist Christian in him as well.
Permalink

Original Article: Whos tracking your porn?
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2013 1:22 AM
KPinSEA It still matters when we decide to float this up as a
matter of public consideration. We all know that visits to porn sites
could be used to down an awful lot of people. Dave Eggers' "The
Circle" had as part of its plot the mass downing of disfavoured
politicians by public reveal of this sort of tracking data. It could be
that we're focusing on this possibility -- the easy ruin of almost
anyone in America; instantly -- as preamble, as a laying out, for the
next incarnation and character of Occupy.

Eggers' version, though, was of most people favoring the reveal, as
they were all members of the same unity -- the Circle -- not those
fearing being spied out by domestic but really "foreign"
investigators. If we all somehow develop into such a unity, and all
our past "sins" are made part of a past when we were different
people, still yet unclean, with a different relation to the state, we
might actually approve all the tracking, and want more of it to
target the Commie-Progressives who must hate the nation so much
to find so much wrong with it.
Permalink

Original Article: Why not Miley Cyrus for Person of
the Year?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 7:40 PM
I'll admit too that my first posts here were pretty hard on Daniel,
but he's just right here, if at fault for softening up a bit at the end of
this piece. I promise to reset and come back each time, fair-square,
fresh.
Permalink

Original Article: The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: Jackson leaves Tolkien behind
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 7:17 PM
Richard Hershberger The Hobbit movies take a shortish
children's book with a straightforward narrative and
shamelessly pad it to three movies in a bid to maximize profits

Jackson enjoys living in this world, that's why it's 3 movies. So do
a lot of us -- not just with Jackson's Tolkien, that is, but with
sequels of so many things. It's not Hollywood without any new
ideas, and just milking, but ourselves summoning a familiar milieu
to for awhile carry us along.

I'll summon the idea of Sauron's cloud of darkness to carry along
the orcs. Doesn't work true to the good and, admittedly, the
temporarily necessary, where we're all at. But our times are
compromised times, so here you go as well.

(there's a lot of autocorrect happening; anybody else notice that?
And how do people do that cool outlined quoting I'm seeing done
there? I'd prefer it to highlighting in bold.)
Permalink

Original Article: Millennials strike back: No, were
not just whiny babies!
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 6:12 PM
RebeccaBe jsuserman Rebecca Be, please try and recall there was
a time when people didn't decide that the uniqueness of each
snowflake was something to deride, nor the remarkable uniqueness
of each human being. If you're on this same team of believing no
one's special as these other assholes are, they might relent their
attack on you a bit, but you're way more lost to the human than you
ought to, than you deserve to, be. You might even start beating on
your kin, who casually assert that they deserve the house and car
and vacations as much as any of those asshole boomers did. Maybe
more, in fact -- a life of fun, without compromise.

The Hippies took humanity further than anyone else before, just
like the Jazz Agers did in the 20s. There's always a follow-up
where humanity, suddenly feeling alone and abandoned, clings
back to more regressive ancestor/parental ideas of how sin-ridden
humanity should be. Some of our chosen enfranchised (like Lena
Dunham) are going to get to be exceptions -- somewhat -- but the
rest of those we're coercing to think of themselves as nothing more
than a Depression assembly of bland-clothed ordinariness, should
hope to find some way to insist on their human right to be
enchanting anyway.
Permalink

Original Article: Why not Miley Cyrus for Person of
the Year?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 5:51 PM
And Cyrus isnt as influential as the Pope well, duh.

I myself actually had to think about that one. If it was just North
America, I'm not sure.

I hope that when Time puts another Millennial on the cover rather
than frump middle-aged or grandpa, it isn't some generic
Millennial holding five jobs, living with mom or eighteen other
similarly PTSD people, and still hoping one day to be a starlet,
with a caption of "THIS is how they finally got us to care" -- like
that NYT article about the homeless that everyone's talking about
Or about as bad, about those two nice neutered young royals,
who are loudly showing how unlike ma and pa they're prepared to
live life as if in a vise.

I hope it's someone young doing something as innocuous and
accessibly demonstrative as twerking, and everyone else wanting
to strangle them for it.
Permalink

Original Article: Millennials strike back: No, were
not just whiny babies!
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 4:27 PM
@RebeccaBe Well, you're a Depression generation. Their point is
to have their youthfulness so sundered of them, that even when
they're out they're still mending their own clothes and going to
dollar stores while their children reject their hardness and invent
the equivalent of good times and rock and roll.

There's consolations, though. For one, people who are bruised
enough in life come to see all this abuse as a sign of their virtue --
something they're lucky to have, for it clearly pointing out that
they couldn't possibly be spoiled.

And secondly, I doubt that they'll be picked on for long. It's too
easy to imagine militants arising amongst them that successfully
scare baby boomers away from uttering another thing, like
Weimer-spoiled parents realizing that their humourless,
Depression-depressed/mentally ill kids, have been steeled into this
new thing, Hitler Youth, who see in their own parents everything
that has ruined their beloved country. And also by their ability to
do things that show such an awesome, scary disregard for
themselves, that boomers pull back wondering what the hell they
have on their hands, 'cause there's no way they could do THAT!
Permalink

Original Article: The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: Jackson leaves Tolkien behind
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 3:49 PM
@Amity In these situations, he's thinking more of producing a
specific feeling in the viewer than what the character was
previously capable of. Hobbits in "Return" have to fret ever
picking up a sword, when in "Fellowship" you know you
remember them hacking away at a dozen of goblins, and as well of
course leaping onto and stabbing a troll. But hell, the moment now
cries for forgetting all that so that we meld in with the hobbits and
fret our own ability to draw a sword, so that's where Jackson
blithely takes us. (Same thing happened in "Hobbit," with Jackson
idiotically -- yes, I'm sorry, I'm still going to have to go with that --
idiotically having Bilbo parry ten sword swipes the very first time
he wields his sword, then talking completely straight to Thorin
about how he's clearly not much of anything other than someone
who still more than anything likes his home and books. Sorry, you
do that the first time you ever pick up a sword, you're a pint-sized
Conan in the making. You might talk about thieving being the least
of what you might do, but not that you're still laughable as a
warrior.

Specific to what you brought up, the instance I hated most was
when that Rohan leader is about to have his head chopped off by
the scout worg in "Two Towers." Here he has to be wetting his
pants so that the worg's smarminess is particularly effective,
chilling, and we fret what might happen to all the others when the
scout's main troop arrives. And you noticed at this point that it was
the ugly leader who got it, with the more traditionally handsome
one getting to stay alive.

Pause.

You know, there's still a lot to hate about Jackson.
Permalink

Original Article: The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug: Jackson leaves Tolkien behind
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2013 2:31 AM
Horuss It isn't as though anyone can argue that Jackson's
bastardization of this classic work is an improvement. Nobody
even tries to make that argument.

This is tough to determine. I found no film reviewer did so, but I've
certainly seen how some teens and young-twenties reacted to the
film (i.e. gobsmackingly powerfully), and I'm not so certain. I've
met a number who reacted to this film as if they were a generation
before just having seen Star Wars -- it blew their minds. I had to
acknowledge that.

I found it manipulative, trying to get specific reactions out of us
(which LOTR was too, but it bothered me especially this time),
though it did an excellent job of showing Bibo's love for home,
which makes his possible departure later on, and his "squaring it"
with Thorin, effective, involving scenes. But Jackson belongs to a
cohort of a kind of amiable directors like Ron Howard and Rob
Reimer that you have to check yourself before you call them
middling or something. It could well be we have a bias for
imagining genius a kind of way, and right now it doesn't generally
involve easy-going people of good temper. There's still admirable
leadership, I think, in his belief in 48, for instance.
Permalink

Original Article: Millennials strike back: No, were
not just whiny babies!
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 5:37 PM
DMichael You're clearly a loving guy, but it sounds a bit like you
gave birth to activity machines. If they didn't prove so successful,
so evidently "adult" in the traditional sense (there's another one
arising amongst those not like your daughters--and that's from
already at their mid 20s to have experienced a lifetime of stress and
uncertainty and humiliation and disappointment, and still be
standing), if they were like these "freeters" mentioned in the
article, and nothing to brag about, what would you feel about
them?

They wouldn't cast such a good glow back at you. I wonder if your
daughters sensed this need in you.
Permalink

Original Article: Millennials strike back: No, were
not just whiny babies!
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 4:34 PM
DMichael Emporium I agree, it'd be terrible. Every time I
screamed at them for being spoiled brats, the effect would be
completely diffused by my having made known that this is just
daddy's being taken over by a demon parent alter in his own head,
screaming at his own "bad" self it more likely means, that is,
"Completely ignore me. You're actually doing the right thing, kid.
Good on ya."
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: Millennials strike back: No, were
not just whiny babies!
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 4:15 PM
Cultures can hate, genuinely hate, their kids. I think the reason we
think this is impossible is because we're not sophisticated enough
to appreciate how evolution could possibly allow for it, and
because we all need to believe that however difficult, there always
exists some way to get our parents' love.
But love as an adaptive trait started off very imperfectly. It was
genius when before it was just reptiles and other things all eating
one another. But "love" still at first was a lot of using children for
selfish purposes, and abandoning them pretty much for the first
fruit tree, once their beguiling eyes so glued to "you" stopped
enchanting. Our earliest ancestors were barely loved. They got
enough to learn how to replicate what little their parents knew, but
nowhere near enough to brave taking on anything new. They
basically spent their lives fiddling with the damage their awful
upbringings brought them, the heavy price of what being a species
receptive to love had earned them. Put some of us in the situation
they were in, given the love the better loved of us have had, and
even if we knew no more than what they knew we'd in six months
innovate what'd take them 40 000 years to do. Tribes going
nowhere for thousands of years have found the opposite of the
human ideal. They're afraid to try the new thing, for it meaning the
rest of the tribe instantly packing up and leaving their cold asses
alone in the barrens.
This is the thing. Cultures that show steady growth are cultures that
have known love beyond what others have. Growth means not just
satisfying parents' unmet needs, but tending to how your own life
might be made better. If this is tried with immature parents, you
get abandoned for daring as much, which is the source for all
subsequent fears of apocalypse and death, and impossible to breach
again. But even in fairly well loved peoples, which includes the
innovative Japanese, growth eventually makes them feel like
they're due for massive punishment. They've been guilty.
So what happens after the allowance the massive sacrifice of lives
and potential the Depression and WW2 enabled was experienced
as finally spent through all the 60s true utopia and 70s relaxed sex
and disco, is begin once again to see youth and growth as sinful
and evil. We create a world which does brutal things to our kids,
who we see as deserving their fate simply for desiring the same
things a generation before had claimed -- desiring their own say on
the world. We hate our kids. We project our own "sins" into them,
and sacrifice them to an increasingly terrible world. And for doing
this, we feel less guilty. It's awful, but true.
What kids who've been hated do, what millennials do, is never get
to the point their more evolved baby boomer parents were at, and
be able to see an increasingly prosperous world as something we
all deserve and should just enjoy. They're back in a sense to the
primates, who've been sat on and chewed at so much for their
barest hesitant explorations, that their brain sees red when they see
any instance of guiltless self-pleasure. The "improved" Leonard
Lawrence from Full Metal Jacket, after all the abuse and beatings.
So they're going to be bombed out like the Depression youth were.
So broken they'd have it no other way. They'll look to their starved
bodies and know, like anorexics delight in knowing, that no awful
beast could see them as anything any further good chunk of meat
could be gotten from. And they'd know from their starved selves
that they've sacrificed all growth, sacrificed their generations turn,
and surely for this and for dying in some subsequent WW
battlefield probably dont it look like in China, have earned
acceptance and love.

At the finish, a la sort of "This is the End," some Valkryie angel
will scoop them up and cart them off the battlefield, to join a
welcoming angelic hoard.
Permalink

Original Article: I fell in love with a Salon
commenter
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 4:59 AM
Aunt Messy Emporium Woland I wasn't thinking of you as one of
the one's deferring. You're too solid for that.
Permalink

Original Article: I fell in love with a Salon
commenter
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2013 4:43 AM
Aunt Messy Woland Oh please. MEW was performing, using the
fact of the large number of trolls so her brain would only
understand it as justified, and not as her joining her liberal peers
who want comment sections to contain the stank of humankind
while they gossip endlessly with their peers on twitter, delighted in
feeling a class apart.

It shows some kind of level of disassociated thought, that liberals
(note: this might not necessarily be MEW) who studied all kinds of
post-colonial and marxist thought in university, knowing that the
enemy is hegemony, that power is maintained by de-legitimizing
the venues of those without power, all jumped on so without
hesitation to this "comment sections are where trolls live"
bandwagon.

We saw what happened after that. It became a matter of still
counting yourself part of the polite crowd, to keep away. And I've
seen many who stuck end up deferring more to the employed
writers, like they're their lieutenants employed on the field. And as
a reward, sometimes getting acknowledgment on the authors
twitter feeds. Awful stuff.
Permalink

Original Article: We are deluding ourselves: The
apocalypse is coming and technology cant save us
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 7:33 PM
Whats so frustrating about all of this is that there are very
real solutions still available, though theyre certain to be
massively painful and, potentially, economically catastrophic.
Yet such is the price of our decades (centuries?) -long
campaign to maintain our collective self-delusion a delusion
about humanitys limited influence on our global climate, and
a delusion that global capitalism can eternally expand on a
planet of finite resources.

This attitude was prevalent during the Depression, where people
felt they were doing the suffering owed to it by their previous 20s
lavishness. Whether or not there needs to be a MASSIVE self-
correction, it's probably true that we'll want it to require that; force
it to.

And as to the impossibility that enough people couldn't be
motivated, we may not need to point out how change could come
about as just un upgrade, as a previous poster interestingly
suggested. All we need is to collectively click into some archetype
way of imagining our world, where after years and years of
disregard, something precious is finally now at very great risk of
disappearing altogether. This'll work, and'll probably be a huge
part of the number of jobs suddenly found for people over the next
few years, while we turn nationalistic and traditional and united,
under command of a crusading president.

And as to why we didn't make this "turn" before, it has to do with
psychodrama. Our becoming virtuous and self-sacrificing again,
requires our going through the lengthy motions of showing
ourselves self-centred, individualistic and spoiled, even with
people around constantly pointing out what we were doing to our
fragile earth.

It's all one already determined play. Makes one want to just go to
sleep for a decade, and wake up when there might be occurring
something genuinely unwritten.
Permalink

Original Article: Why Elizabeth Warren baffles
pundits: Economic populism isnt just a campaign
slogan
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 4:56 PM
agrippina minor Did you see Frozen? Hugely popular; Corliss
even put it on his top ten list. Warm sister dethawing her icicle
older sister, is on our minds.

I don't think there's a lot of room for presidents to do other that
what we want them to, however much I'm always inclined to make
an exception for Carter. Sometimes the greatest way they may
actually lead us, is in not being completely natural when we expect
them all of a sudden to change personalities to suit our current
mood.

Hillary could become a populist crusader again, but it'd be in this,
this --fuck you for making me twist myself all around again -- that
she's show the spirit we could actually learn from.
Permalink

Original Article: Why Elizabeth Warren baffles
pundits: Economic populism isnt just a campaign
slogan
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 4:13 PM
The photo makes the issue the angry mommy that scares us vs. the
warm mommy who'll love us. I don't know what Hillary was
planning to do when she turned populist in 2008, but what was key
was that she was allowing some cohesion between her and the
populace. Turned out we weren't yet in the mood for that, but
rather for a president that was always a bit cool and aloof,
distanced -- even if this was seen as necessary so to not just be a
plaything for our urges.

It may be that feeling of fusion -- embrace between president and
people -- that we're chasing down more than anything. She looks
cold as granite here, but this could still be Hillary.
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Original Article: American mens hidden crisis: They
need more friends!
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 2:19 AM
Anyone who wants to criticize British chilliness always looks to
some place like rural Greece or Italy to show what men ought to be
like. They say all their touching just shows how much more open
and honest they are.

The rest of the chilly world kinds of just nods at this, because it
seems like you're just nodding acknowledgment at people who
haven't realized the world leader status that comes out of stoic
Northern anality and restraint -- the self-compliment it provides, is
the only reason they temporarily accede to the argument that some
other people in the world don't just possess a different culture, but
an ideal one.

But if you mention further that this intimacy extends to children in
their parents' bed, that the children will sleep with their parents
near into adulthood, and that this too is of course not sexual but a
wonderful thing, they're going to retreat before they risk hearing
any further they LIKE thinking of the South in a particular way,
and this would have them calling "crock" on the whole thing.
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Original Article: Millennial, hardworking, homeless
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 1:46 AM
QandQ You're a very decent person.

Society does want people to work crappy jobs, and it also wants
subsequently to spit on them. The reason for this, is that it enables
people to replay how they were treated as children, when they did
servile work and we're barely rewarded and even reprimanded for
it, but from the perpetrator's "point of view."

Something's drawing people to revisit childhood experiences they
don't want to revisit, and this is the "solution."

Also, this isn't just punishment going on, but revenge. The
mothers that are being villified are our own mothers -- displaced --
who we can now without guilt righteously crucify for what they
inflicted on us. And the children, who's fate could end up being
beyond-belief awful -- they're our own childhood selves, displaced
as well. God we hate them too for being vulnerable and needy --
surely, our brains concluded when we were young, what was
responsible for our parents' abandonment and mistreatment of us,
because it's how we felt most of the time.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2013 1:05 AM
gkrevvv I agree with a lot of this. Only, I don't think you can be
religious and also have had an ideal childhood, unless perhaps it's
one that was popular in the 60s, where everything -- regardless of
the origins of the source -- got "twisted" into something simply
inspiring. Hippies looking for sources outside of consumer culture
-- primitivism. That sort of thing.

We all know a lot of very leftist Christians, a lot of liberal sects,
which are democratic in formation and where women and
homosexuals are "priests." And these bunch are magnificent, and
inspiring. But you go from them to the actual text of the bible, and
you just know that at some point their well-raised kids will no
longer identify as Christians. There still has to be some belief in
their parents that they were once bad kids, to find the idea of sin
meaningful; some masochism. Eventually as their lines continue to
improve on the amount of love they can offer their kids,
Christianity is out.
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Original Article: American mens hidden crisis: They
need more friends!
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 3:32 AM
Frank Knarf if you explore this, remember that the autist who
fears intimacy/strong affect would prefer it end up being all about
"wiring."
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Original Article: American mens hidden crisis: They
need more friends!
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 3:21 AM
MysteryPrincess Women who are denied love, who are oppressed
by patriarchy (by which I actually mean not only men, but rather
more importantly their own mothers, who learned their girls on
wicked self-hate), turn into . fabulously loving mothers! It is the
one thing God did to show true divine in the human: you can put
women in a loveless, emotionally depriving environment, and
when she has kids there's still no way she'll use them as anti-
depressants that have them thereafter fear intimacy, scold their
boys as if they're themselves the husbands who deprived them, for
God put them all magically beyond the human and
understandable.

Given God's putting the only non-explainable in them, what they
do out of this loveless environment is actually only eventually find
further strength in sisterhood! And further, upon liberation, to tell
it straight to men that if there is some other explanation completely
beyond evolutionary-explanation excuse, it's their inverse, that
some devil made it that men, the shits, really are all in their deep
nature bastards, and they'll make women their slaves, find social
structures that instruct on it, just for the dick-waggering phallic joy
of it, unless women keep their persistence in puncturing them
down.
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Original Article: Inside Llewyn Davis: America at
its ugliest
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 2:29 AM
susan sunflower I seem to remember they still got out of their
Depression slums into a new house, though. The reserves mother
saved might not get the noise, but I sure as hell bet it registered
wonderfully with the audience. They got out.
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Original Article: Inside Llewyn Davis: America at
its ugliest
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 2:27 AM
We're in a Depression. It might be worthwhile when discussing
America to reference it during the '30s and '40s. That is, while for
awhile it was all "a star is born," it eventually became making
heroes out of those in the dustbowl -- the forgotten. At that point, if
you wanted to find a hero in America, it was in those who'd had an
apocalypse deposited upon them, and yet were still persisting --
that's all; persisting.

They hadn't done much, didn't know much, and weren't about to
accomplish anything -- other than procuring even sadder kids. But
in their poverty-stricken faces America found souls to sustain
them.
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Original Article: American mens hidden crisis: They
need more friends!
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 1:47 AM
halb Men at war are part of some righteous cause and are getting
prepared to die heroically for their nation, or kill people less
worthy than they are (which historically includes an awful lot of
innocents). It may not be fear and stress that does it -- or only --
but rather a union born out of being similarly enfranchised.
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Original Article: American mens hidden crisis: They
need more friends!
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 1:29 AM
Why, though, is there such a pervasive fear of being feminine?
There's no logic to it all, even as the sad thing, schizophrenia, is
actually a "solution," given impossible double-bind parental
requirements, a la R.D. Laing?

Guys are afraid of being rendered feminine, because in their pasts
their lonely, depressed, patriarchy-abused mothers, overwhelmed
them in their needs, and made them feel female-poisoned.
Thereafter they both cherish anything that allows them to be close
without being publicly caused of being girly, like staying home
sick, and otherwise go nowhere near "intimacy," which reminds
them too much of the other stuff that went along with it -- being a
plaything; incest.

But you're right of course. Right now guys are losing out terribly
compared to girls, who are allowed the intimacy guys aren't, and
gain the human growth and satisfaction that comes with it. I hope a
lot more of us become like Dean Ornish, and I mostly appreciate
this article.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 1:01 AM
checkitout The truth about whether homo sapiens does or does not
engage in this kind of rejection, may depend on what homo sapiens
can dare admit. Does anyone expect Science just to show up and
establish how many of us may have been used and abused? If the
news is bad, we'll look to them, and then to our parents, and
regardless if hereto we'd been liberal progressives parading
Science as the greatest thing, Science would be in for a bit of a
beat-up, as we champion our offended moms.

Most people who've been rejected by their parents experience this
as apocalyptic, the very worst thing in the world. So hard an
impact is it, that thereafter they do everything they can to stop
themselves from doing whatever their brains conclude they must
have done to have "earned" it (which very much includes things
like just being vulnerable and dependent). They don't conclude that
it was just their bad luck they had assholes for parents, and that
they in fact did nothing wrong, because life pretty much becomes
about trying to somehow get back into the good books, which
means mommy could not have been more right -- how selfish we
must have been!

Going to war to kill representatives of your past guilty selves,
makes you feel like you're championing mommy and spent of your
sins. Which is so good a solution that we go back to it every
chance we get.

Thanks for your encouragement.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2013 12:37 AM
gzuckier I wonder if we'll ever be at the point where we once
again can understand evolution as producing things which work,
but not always brilliantly. I seem to remember Stephen Jay Gould
talking about pandas and their actually, truly ridiculous "thumbs" -
- an improvised one from some arm bone, since the real thing was
just impossible given how the panda had developed -- and also
about the human backbone, which was okay, but still not at this
point all that great.

It'd be useful if we gained or re-gained this finesse, because it'd
allow us the ability to note primates and our human predecessors
(who didn't just have religion, but sacrificed people in legions, and
who killed one another [for imagined slights] at vastly more rapid
per capita rate than we do [see Pinker and DeMause]) as onto to
something which works, but not so well that we shouldn't also be
noting how truly shitty they are at this point too.

That is, maybe we have/had religion because some of the flaws
we hadn't yet worked ourselves out of, needed it bad. The more
sane part, the more loved part, maybe didn't know how the
universe came out of nothing, but wasn't about to instantly credit a
superior being for it; and didn't need to relies on fabricated lies to
create societal cohesion. In fact, it may have become to decide it
doesn't matter much at all, and just focused on creating a good
human community with progressive values.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013 5:35 PM
checkitout Beeyl65 You might want to check out how chimps are
raised, before concluding genotype for this genocidal war rage.
Here's a little bit of how that might work:

The primate mother nurses her infant only for the erotic
pleasure it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like the New
Guinea mother, she has difficulty conceiving that her child is
hungry. After the suckling period, primate mothers almost
never give any kind of food to their infants. "Even gorilla
infants have never been seen being given solid food by their
mothers." In fact, primate mothers are often observed to grab
food from their offspring, who must get by on "tolerated
scrounging" of leftovers. Like New Guinea mothers,
chimpanzee mothers are described as losing interest in their
children when off the breast, often rejecting and punishing
them.The result of this severe maternal rejection is that there
is a "weaning crisis" for primates when they abruptly must
learn to find food for themselves, a deadly rejection process
that kills from one-third to three-fourths of them before they
reached adulthood.

Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life of Nations
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013 5:19 PM
Classica American KPinSEA There's love in Christianity, but it's
conditional. You don't have to sacrifice your first born (anymore;
you once did) to maybe please daddy/mommy God, but you've got
to repent all your inherent selfishness -- children are only
conditionally good, because at some point they "selfishly" focus on
themselves rather than never-endingly making up for the love their
parents themselves did not receive .

This is better than finding love by blowing oneself up in a cafe full
of spoiled infidels, but I think in history we're all gradually finding
less corrupt sources from which to draw out precious life-
sustaining love.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013 5:09 PM
KPinSEA A populace that asks "why," will not elect in such a
leader in the first place, and be incapable of finding any charisma
in past previous ones. People don't follow; they elect in "leaders"
(charisma is projected) who'll carry out their needs for punishment
and sacrifice. (If Hitler somehow had a change of heart, and told
Germans to look to themselves rather than demonizing everybody
else, he would have been ignored and a new "Hitler" would have
been elected.) People who aren't at all like this, won't be religious -
- which is about projecting child problems into the adult universe
(how can I made mom and dad finally finally love me?) -- and will
deem war insane.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013 4:35 PM
Religion -- parents in the sky -- comes out of child abuse,
something a democratic people should at least hope to abolish,
even if just by making laws against it, like Sweden has done
spanking.

There are people, including some who call themselves atheists,
who clearly want a war -- punishing the bad and sanctifying the
good (which is pretty much what Religion is). I understand why a
lot of New York liberals would want mostly to stop them, and talk
pluralism, eduction, civil society et al., but it's a gamble too.
They're kind of hoping that this liberal framework can contain and
kind of own some of the rather awful displays of "pluralism"
they're not so stupid not to be able to note, until all cultures round
out into more liberal form, where all the pluralism becomes just
pleasing cultural gestures, rather than displays of each our culture's
barbaric pasts.

This could happen, but liberals are going to have a lot of mojo
behind them to weather breakouts. Otherwise, some of these
groups that liberals have been protecting against bigots, might
aggress more of their own authenticity and decide that their liberal
protectors -- who loved, but without caring enough to actually
understand -- have been belittling and using them.
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Original Article: What Hitchens got wrong:
Abolishing religion wont fix anything
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2013 3:57 PM
It's the damage done in childhood which leads people to project
god parents into the sky who will only love of us if we sacrifice to
and obey them, that is the problem. This has been historically the
norm, thus the prevalence of religion.

Liberal families that react to their children without switching into
their demon-possessed parents (a la the new Carrie film), will
certain feel a spiritual love for the world, but won't worship
anybody. Anybody who tells them that there's a god out there who
knows they're His/Her flawed but loved (how nice) creation, will
be seen as a nutter who's come up with an unfortunate solution to
work out his/her own being insufficiently and only conditionally
loved by his/her parents.

These people are dangerous, for perpetually seeing our collective
as in need of purging, where all our "bad boy/girl selves" can be
sacrificed and punished, leaving "us" as good children before our
parents again, fully worthy of being loved.
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Original Article: Amazon, Applebees and Googles
job-crushing drones and robot armies: Theyre coming
for your job next
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2013 11:32 PM
JayEayEss Emporium Well, I certainly like how you think --
especially your depolluting jobs like "garbage people." Still, you'll
notice how every article here at Salon about millenials is
demonstrating just how they're actually the opposite of how society
wants to see them, as spoiled and self-focused, that is call most
of us spoiled, and we don't so much say, "why yes--but I prefer
life-luxuriator, thank you very much," but rather point out our
multiple wounds and ask how that could possibly be.

I insist that the only way we could live believing we're not required
to have a job, is either fast forward to some subsequent 1960s, or
find some exploiting group we hate so much, we think it only fair
that we luxuriate while they do endless dirt work.
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Original Article: Amazon, Applebees and Googles
job-crushing drones and robot armies: Theyre coming
for your job next
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2013 10:54 PM
JayEayEss Well, maybe try that out in New England, or Portland,
or San Fran ... the rest of America (and maybe all millennials) has
been told by their parents and society how spoiled and selfish they
are so repeatedly, they're going to have difficulty committing to
anything which makes them feel like lazy bums.

The trick will be to make some other group seem so vile, that they
deserve to be subjected to the demeaning and dehumanizing while
they themselves laxy daisy ... a la slavers with their slaves. And
I'm not sure that robots will, as a group, satisfy this purpose. We'll
need more Maximillians, at any rate.
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Original Article: Amazon, Applebees and Googles
job-crushing drones and robot armies: Theyre coming
for your job next
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2013 10:19 PM
I think the reason it's so hard to see this as developing into
anything but a nightmare scenario is that it's so hard right now to
imagine Americans believing themselves owed a lotus land living,
where if jobs don't need to be done--great! let's just distribute the
resources and spend our time realizing our spiritual potential!
What's life about, anyway?
It's easier to imagine if we imagine America taking a more Rightist
direction, where suddenly one's "purity" as an American becomes
more important than the particular nature of your training. If
America gets in one of its moods where it decides it's been
manipulated by outsiders for decades and decades, so that those
truly "most American," most embodying of the American spirit,
have been robbed of everything, and conclude that its future
virility, its ability to defend itself, depends on shoring these most
true Americans back up, it could find itself back in a situation
where it becomes rather easy to find gigantic projects that give
most Americans a living wage paycheque.
Even if bridge repair ends up something robots do better and
cheaper, and so too roads, Americans might find/decide that
training in the Gymnasium all day long does enough for enhancing
American virility that that's just as much to be funded. Soldier pay.
Was the New Deal completely different from Germany in the '30s?
Be sure, if it was Lotus land in spirit, it would have gone nowhere.

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Published comments
Original Article: Pick of the week: The Coens
odyssey to 1961 Greenwich Village
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2013 9:43 PM
But Llewyn also strikes me as a character whos been
teleported backward from the 21st century, an irony-burdened
hipster who has great difficulty adjusting to the sincerity and
upbeat attitude of the Camelot era.

Upbeat and sincere is Matt Damon most of the time. I wonder if
the Coens' best 60s was actually his character in "True Grit",
someone seen now only as a nincompoop?
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 4:41 PM
Ehmbe There's a tonne of prep behind any major endeavour -- we
can all relate to this. And sure you'd expect some who've been fully
immersed to perhaps have lost the taste for it, so they can barely be
bothered with it when its ready for show. But I personally think
there's some performance behind this ostensibly "just sane"
response ... makes them sound so much more gritty, more load-
bearing, less fey, like the novelists I've heard say that they've had
fun, and this isn't it.
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 3:56 PM
rdnaso Emporium If that were true about movies, by now it
wouldn't be a surprise to learn they don't watch their own ... in fact
we'd be surprised if they did. I think many creators know that it
sounds sort of masculine to always be onto the next work, and
feminine, to admit watching the whole film with an audience is a
rewarding experience. They toss things off as soon as possible and
don't look back; while we, their dependents, indulge. Masculine to
our feminine.
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 4:55 AM
@Graham Clark My art is different from theirs, but they are
amazing. Still, they withhold, and it's meant to draw ... but
frustrate. And just as your everyday average Magna Carta human
being -- with a nifty, remote, admittedly "you-denying"
pseudonym -- who'd prefer none of us had too much a taste for
heights and angels (that was the real 60s, after all), I'm for sure
going to point that out.
Andrew's piece had it that if it were left to one (the younger), we'd
be warranted to mob at and burn them -- did you catch that?
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 4:36 AM
Graham Clark Graham, do you cling to the authorized, so to make
fun of those below? I'm always willing to re-fresh my take, but I
seem to remember that was the fit you unfortunately found you
belonged to.
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 3:46 AM
Graham Clark They don't watch their own movies, but they know
that by saying that that they're going to seem as if they dump
everything they've done without a need to look back ... this draws
us to envy and awe them (they're very psychologically
sophisticated people). I think part of them likes to pretend they've
garnered paradise (or at least, enlightenment), but won't from
within their cloaks, show it to us. Someone ought to chastise them
for their limiting tendency to withhold, and me, Emporium, just
did my limited bit.
Also, I enjoy their movies. They're different from me; can show
me things about people that'd learn and excite me a lot; but they're
not all that remote from me, good sir.
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Original Article: Joel and Ethan Coen: My God, we
dont watch our own movies!
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013 3:07 AM
"Don't watch our own movies"
I hate that answer; it's designed to make them seem remote from
us, as if we're rabidly chasing down appetites they're removed
from. There's no way they haven't replayed the experience of
making the movies --key scenes, reverberating portrayals -- many
times , even as they go about their next projects. Piecemeal, over
time, they've seen them as much as any of us ... I, personally,
would have made this clear. Join the rest of us, Coens, and
particular yourself from there. It'd be more interesting.
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Original Article: Are we in for a season of Jennifer
Lawrence haters?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013 11:48 PM
fogdood According to David Thomson, "extraordinary sexy
generosity":
She has her Oscar. Shes very rich. She has reputation and
respectability. But all of those are now things she might lose. And
you feel that dread tightening its grip on the extraordinary sexy
generosity without which she would be an unknown still (Salon,
Dec 6 2001).
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Original Article: Are we in for a season of Jennifer
Lawrence haters?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013 11:16 PM
@badandymk3 If you were describing someone out of a different
industry (publishing?), I wonder if it would have mattered as
much. That is, I'm wondering if we're demoting the occupation of
actress so that it's no longer a vehicle whereby even if they start off
"showing their boobs," with an oscar nod they can take it another
direction.
It may be we want actresses to more and more be "us," always
people knowing they're to be put up or taken down, never just
asserting their will and getting there -- i.e. studio era
actresses/starlets.
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Original Article: Are we in for a season of Jennifer
Lawrence haters?
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013 7:31 PM
Well, was there any "transferring" being done in your own article
on Gwyneth?
Both of these actresses -- Lawrence and Hathaway-- are simply
that -- actresses, while Gwyneth ranges wherever. Did you want to
make her seem a clown polite society should just take humour at
but otherwise ignore, owing to her willingness to defy and range?
You called her a queen, someone the commons can't relate to, but I
think you went after her because hers is actually the undaunted
everyman who hasn't quite agreed to space.
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Original Article: GOP debunked on food stamps:
Everything they say about SNAP is wrong
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013 6:38 PM
The only fact relevant to Republicans, is that when they were
young their caretakers punished them for their neediness and
vulnerability. Later in life they fuse with them, and together go
after vulnerable groups they can now see only as rotten and
spoiled.
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Original Article: Gwyneth Paltrow and her trainer
make a tone-deaf lifestyle series
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013 12:15 AM
Charlotte V. I don't know how many of us want to get stuck in the
muck of reality. Maybe we'll just latch on to her sheen, and let her
glide us from one interest to another. The Depression culture went
for light movies that offered lavish escape, and probably didn't
want to know how trivial their interests were, how much more
grounded other truly serious works were. Movement, movement,
movement, from one entertainment to the next, until we're finally
free. Dancing, in the Dark.
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Original Article: Rude airline passenger Diane in
7A was a hoax
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 11:50 PM
Benthead Emporium Vail Beach Her "Britons" is excellent. She
also explained in that one why latter-half 18th experienced this
aristocratic consolidation. Unlike someone like Wolcott, who sees
such things as about the elite figuring out finally how to master
people, she sees it as something most common people wanted ...
something about it helping make growth seem less scary, more
girded. This was brave of her: how many these days would say our
own surrection of an intractable elite is something the plebs at
some level want? None, but there is where the explanation lies.
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Original Article: Rude airline passenger Diane in
7A was a hoax
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 10:44 PM
Vail Beach Emporium The second part is that we're living in a
time when growth has to be restricted and repressed. Every century
has them, with Linda Colley talking about how in the latter half of
the18th-century the aristocracy consolidated itself, how moving
into their ranks became more difficult, and how there became that
much more many tells to see if someone possessed an aristocratic
"polite vision." The result was that the educated pastor couldn't
pass, for the aristocrat could see multiple levels where he was
limited to foreground--the result, really two different species of
people, a la Jane Austin's vision. In the 19th, you had really
Romantic growth until the end of the 1850s, where as James
Wolcott says, "gentility rolled in and laid out the doilies." And
now, with Wolcott again pointing out how, compared to the
"spread-eagle" 70s, "the meritocracy has fully sunk its Vulcan
death-grip on journalism, the culture." And also Richard Brody,
explaining how "Gravity" shows how liberals prefer a complacent,
self-congradulatory world view, where anything really
wild/different/aberrant gets filtered out. People are to trained into
decency.
So though we're all talking this ninety nine vs. one percent split,
what we at least as much have is a split between those with an
intrinsic "polite" vision, and those not trained since birth into it
("Berkeley", Ohio Workshop, New Yorker, twitter but never post
in comment sections). Liberals like Daniel and his friends are very
much okay with that, because however much they would wish
them better wages and health care, they really don't want them too
much part of their picture--gross! And they're the now. However,
on the horizon, are these other left voices that keep on wanting to
associate with the working class, create some kind of folk union
with them, and are suspicious of those of their ostensible peers
who are forever harking at all the prejudiced attitudes.
I'm guessing we're going to hear a lot more from these kind of
leftists, and the age of minority promotion and suspicion of the
mass, will be turfed--in favour of collective nationalism. This
won't be better.
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Original Article: Rude airline passenger Diane in
7A was a hoax
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 10:11 PM
Vail Beach Emporium Thanksgiving has us thinking family. If we
had a mom we could barely just deal with, the drew us to
frustration, rage, we often end up displacing these qualities so that
they apply to someone else -- in this case, this fictional maternal
lady that Gale dreamed up, whose crime is to obscenely presume
upon the "little people". That way our rage gets vented at our
moms for presuming upon and humiliating us when we were
young, but elsewhere, and we can be good sons and daughters in
the company of our wonderful, self-sacrificing moms again.
That's the first part anyway.
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Original Article: Rude airline passenger Diane in
7A was a hoax
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 7:55 PM
The question is, Daniel, who do you displace your mother's worst
aspects onto in order to keep her pristine? My whole sense of you
is as someone who wants to see most of society clamped down,
with a genteel overclass benefiting from everybody else's
frozenness (i.e. Frazier). This is mom at the center of court, with a
bunch of effete "kids" making sure no one ever shows a true mirror
to her, by applying a thousand different strictures to make
everyone feel that anything off the cuff might be deadly to them.
They'll just learn to smile nervously, and shut down--better for
making that much more territory available for genteel play!
Noam Chomsky just had an article here at Salon where he said
liberals were partly to blame for a broken working class, for evil ...
something about them applying rules that would rightly infuriate
and frustrate working class communities while just being amenable
good play for themselves. This was pretty close to Chris Hedges'
view of liberals over the last 30 years as well--whom he accuses as
actually hating everybody not their own, and for purposes of class
definition, foisting the importance of manners, of "boutique
issues", so, so that those who with ease navigate all the complex
particularities regarding race, gender + just seem evolutionarily
superior to all the clumsy dumbtards out there who with dismaying
ease ruin any good effort they might put out there with any of a
number of outrageous remarks and gestures.
Just thought I'd point out that there is another Left out there, and
they're essentially calling you guys treason ... ultimately for worse,
however hard it is right now to spot.
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Original Article: Joan Rivers troubling pattern of
lashing out at other women
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2013 3:56 AM
If I was intent on mastering the wild west with puritanism, I'd hire
Daniel as my chief lieutenant. We could eventually teach Jessie
James/Alec Baldwin to do his bit as a good sport; and when he
dribbled up some chastised version of his former self, I could count
on Daniel turning to everyone and saying, "See how much better
this is!"
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Original Article: Ending anonymity wont kill trolls
SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2013 8:45 AM
Kerianfree Re: Mary Elizabeth Williams even admits that she no
longer reads the Comments section. That's pathetic, because that
proves there's a problem that needs addressing.
No, what it proves, is that MEW is self-dramatizing; a virtuous
princess, after long hard suffering finally finding the strength to
surmount her afflictors.
If the net wars against the anonymous, it's just because in our
collective insanity we want a period where we don't hear from the
99%, except when they're throwing bombs and burning down the
fast-food restaurants they work for. We want a short period where
the intelligentsia succours itself on the fact that the streets seem
spare to them, for the rest of the universe temporarily being
tightened-in to impossible, self-wounding, despair.
Shortly afterwards, we of course want a period where ... well, at
some later date, I'll tell you what we want. But as a preview, it'll be
like it was in 1930s Germany, where the average citizen became so
great, all the intelligentsia did was praise them for partaking of the
volk--that is, the inverse of what we've got now.
Enjoy it MEW; this isn't going to last long ... however much the
sequel is actually that much worse.
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Original Article: Dear Internet Tough Guys: Cut it
out
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2013 3:20 AM
Can anyone else imagine Alex Parene in favor of the gentry? He
apparently is that, though. The gentry were of terrific manners,
always downscaling their abilities, and the first to favor yours. And
they owned a populace of poor-mannered boors, craftsmen, who
might make the discovery no one else could, but not without
braggadocio, which made whatever they offered, however truly
valuable, not something that would ever put them first of class. At
best they did terrific work, but there's no questioning that you're to
be the one ordaining.
I hope, Alex, that you end up taking a fall, and see what a good
spell in the gutters does to you. You'll end up there, because you
still far too much show you actually want ours to be a better world-
-and boy will the world spell you a lesson for that! When you're
king of your sandbox, as long as you're still being brave, I'll still
listen to you, even if you would have me comport with your legion
of plastic soldiers before I listen to your King's Speech.
Permalink

Original Article: My year of modesty
WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 2013 5:26 AM
mamalicious Emporium Thank you.
Permalink

Original Article: My year of modesty
TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2013 11:33 PM
Why can't I like my own comment? I like it.
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Original Article: My year of modesty
TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2013 9:11 PM
I think there is something modest, submissive, about writing a
book from a viewpoint that is superficially sophisticated/advanced.
If you're dumping on beauty culture and going muslim garb,
sophisticates will appreciate your discrediting, your mockery, of
mid-American striving, AND ALSO that your solution has got
major holes in it: as everyone here points out, how freeing is it to
emulate muslim female taste, even if it is dipping your feet in the
thrill-garnering pond of The Great American Villainy, snicker
snicker?
You end up looking sort of oofish, but with the right heart; and I
think thereby exemplifying yourself as someone those who'd
freeze they and their own peers' place in society would want to cart
up a notch: here rests a terrific second (or maybe third) tier, that's
recognized it's ready to humble itself immediately, if those in the
first ever found themselves brassed off by any further ambitions on
their part.
This whole thing is just one of a whole bunch filling up a now
available ecological niche. There is some room left for those who'd
further snigger at the American pleb.
Permalink

Original Article: My year of modesty
TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2013 8:52 PM
Semprini Emporium For your wit alone, I grant you a pass.

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Original Article: My year of modesty
TUESDAY, JULY 2, 2013 6:07 AM
test
Permalink

Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 6:27 PM
Jane11 I'd be very pleased if someone became a shoer or a
carpenter, so long as they went at it like a hippie would. This is not
what is under discussion, however; to our massive discredit, we're
liking the idea of a nation of hardworking dullards, so individually
indistinct you can sum them up as a type.
Permalink

Published comments
Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 6:10 PM
bobkat This is nonsense. As people like Updike and Thomas
Moore have encouraged us to realize, there is poetry in everything
in life. This is what I want people to be exposed to, and why I
generally would like people to proximate the ivy league education,
given that hippie communalism as an option has apparently died.
What you're shunting a good portion of people into, is not some
poetic close encounter with material life, but to trade schools and
trade think. A lot of us apparently want to be able to view our
current populace the same way the 1930s came to romantically
view theirs: as a land of proletariats; hard workers whose lot
generally goes unappreciated, but who have worlds of heart.
This was romance of the fact that what they had willed their
populace into, was actually a world of deprival, who were
admirable really for shorning themselves of much claim in life,
after their just being all feeling capable of being one of the risers
who might taste Gatsby glory or flapper arrogance.
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Original Article: Lena Dunhams $24,000 sofa
confession
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 4:45 PM
It's too much if she isn't spending much time in her living room. If
it's rather her all, and this couch represents her better than any
other would, something is blocking her from a happier life other
than budget concerns.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 4:31 PM
jazzmandel No, We hate our children, but we're incapable of
(fully) acknowledging it, so we farm it out to "they."
The problem with some well-raised people is that they actually are
not the "we" -- if it were up to them, students would probably get a
free education and start off adult life like they should, with
absolute promise -- but can't work themselves to believe that the
rest of their peers could be so vile. It would make them seem
aristocratic -- the enemy -- who always view the people as base,
when they're so concerned to be love-the-people democrats.
So they rage at powerful exploiters -- take the suspiciously readily
available way, along with maybe a slight bit of shame -- and force
themselves to believe everyone else is good but without time and
educational resources needed to free themselves and have the state
they really want.
They do so, even though IT IS STILL within the own resources to
appreciate that society-writ-large is perhaps just a perpetuation of
the aggregate of gross dysfunctional family experiences where
parents still call their children bad greedy self-centered shits, if
someone pushed them to it.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 3:45 PM
MaxPower2010 I am an evil spirit, and I am glad to see you
encourage more people to become mediocre hum-drum. "Her lack
of debt is driving her career path": Oh this is delightful stuff, to
someone who feared that '60s communalism would mean everyone
maybe one day developing into refined, great souls.
Please, please, tell more people what all state colleges did for you.
And about the suckers who paid big bucks for a fancy-schmancy
college, that's just gloss on exactly the same educational
experience.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 3:31 PM
Yminale Emporium If they are left off the table, that would leave
us with Americans who hate their children a bit less than do their
more regressed counterparts.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 3:25 PM
treming930 Emporium Your version of a professor sounds pretty
good, but maybe not the best, treming930.
It is possible to me that any professor that has at the back of her
mind some kind of utilitarian goal, can actually hamper what all
goes on in the classroom. So yes, the professor who loves and
respects her students but spends all her time in creating a great
involving conversation about a literary work, without a single
thought about how all this might help them engage public life,
might be the best thing to do what all you'd hope they'd do.
The others might be shaping their students into an image -- as I've
suggested, possibly a sort of classical one associated with
academia -- unintentionally narrowing them, rather than doing
what is needed so they can blossom where they may, and take us
all forward.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 3:11 PM
DragonStandard Emporium treming930 Do you imagine 1960s
hippies striving to become good citizens? Not a chance, for all
their flowers in their hair, chilling out, and giving peace a chance.
Can you imagine Donald Sutherland's English professor trying to
make his students more able citizens? Not a chance; he's hoping
they'll come to see there's a romance to life that many of these
people haven't yet known, which they'll only get if they stop all
this striving nonsense and just let it be.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 3:02 PM
fergus ARealNewYorker Re: when frat boys in raccoon coats who
attended Ivy League schools
I know this is meant to be derisive, but it sounds so much like
youth romance I couldn't help but want to welcome it into our
current culture.
I think our take on the '20s might be different, but I do understand
that in the '30s, the rich eventually were allowed to explore
freedoms and tastes disallowed everyone else -- according to
Morris Dickstein, they were allowed/encouraged to be "wacky".
Maybe what we'll be left with in this upcoming period, is a
dispiriting freeze on social climbing, but something to watch
amidst the Ivys, who may get to move past being grade-slaves to
live as if in Lotus/Candyland. I'll have more fun watching what
they'll be allowed to get to, than I can get from mending socks or
watching another Termintator reboot.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 2:44 PM
Where in this article do you explore how it could be that a nation
could hate its kids? Yes, the evidence you site shows that this must
be the case. Now please get to the business of helping us
understand why the majority of American parents actually wish
their kids so much ill.
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Original Article: We must hate our children
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 2:38 PM
treming930 Re: But since the creation of land grant universities in
the 19th-century (and arguably long before that), there's been an
understanding that higher education is meant to help a person
develop skills that will make them a more able citizen, not just
those that will allow them to fit better into a certain slot of our
nation's economic machine.
Terrifyingly sober. I wouldn't study Shakespeare from any prof
who was hoping to make her students into more able citizenry.
This has such a classical, republican -- masculine -- feel, as if
nothing about the feminine/feminizing 1960s ever really did
infiltrate academia.
Maybe they did just hide well into their Great Books programs,
and waited the whole period out?
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Original Article: Thanks for nothing, college!
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 5:09 AM
@Cyndi K. I am an evil spirit. And I like your post ... particularly
the "my parents generation was the last generation that had a lot of
opportunity with not a ton of competition" bit. I want people to be
like they were in the 1930s, sounding not at all like they just did in
the roaring '20s, and completely ignorant that ahead would lie a
'60s gen that would come -- from my evil perspective -- scarily
closer to making all life about being communal and spiritually
deep, seem a doable thing.
I like this idea that this fiction of ours -- "global competition" --
can only come across to contemporary dumbtards as something
outside themselves and beyond their control. Hope they don't
realize the thriving economies in the '30s -- like Germany, which
was the first to come out of the Depression -- made all that
evaporate in an instant, however much this example would show
just how much darker things could become.
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Original Article: Thanks for nothing, college!
MONDAY, JULY 1, 2013 4:27 AM
If I was an evil spirit presiding over this age, wanting desperately
to gift a generation an era so deprived, subsequent ones could only
shake their heads at it, saying it was stunted, I wouldn't necessarily
be too disappointed if this 1% vs. 99% thing went up in smoke and
somehow things balanced up again ... so long as the following still
applied.
Has the sense that life should be about cultivating our poetic
encounter with life, gone pretty much out the window? Do even
this age's progressives make the good life something you cultivate
after you've finished your day's work, as if the furthest human
being you could become is once again the bourgeois, practicing his
amateur pursuits after having finished his shift at the bank?
Do these same progressives, if they went rabid drunk, daring all
gods in practice of some Herculaic hubris, make it seem as if
saying COLLEGE is a chance to get to know yourself, is a
possibility so gross the universe might collapse upon hearing it,
however its rightness? As if the possibility that one's whole life
might be about the same, something so foreign only some alien
species who thinks in eight dimensions, might put it forward?
In short, if even the progressives, the most emotionally advanced,
are chastising life's possibilities with utilitarianism (eg. "Educated
citizenry serve a nation best!"), I could handle that ...
If I were an evil spirit.
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Original Article: Thanks for nothing, college!
SUNDAY, JUNE 30, 2013 4:08 PM
Re: If we want to fix higher education, a number of relevant policy
goals need to be demanded by Millennials and their advocates,
and they need to be more realistic than the debt forgiveness the
Occupy Wall St. crowd demanded.
My guess is that is precisely BECAUSE it is realistic, plausible,
that we get this strangely modulated stance after the whole article
previous is arguing that we've got an economy so CRUEL, you can
have a college degree and actually feel lucky to have a minimum
wage service job: there's a whole class of other people who don't
qualify, after all. You're not quite comfortable going THAT way,
so you suddenly try and temper that, what?, group of 76 million
millenials down to be realistic about what they can accomplish.
I'm not sure how much of a friend to millenials this writer is. The
idyllic view that the liberal arts has intrinsic value, is snickered at
in a terrifying way -- as if its primary crime is to be an optimistic,
sunny point of view, before a crowd of increasingly despondent
assholes. I don't want students under debt, but I do want them to
view life as PRIMARILY about self-exploration and enrichment --
and of course coming together in harmony -- not about duly
making sure you can compete in the world economy or what not. If
this is what this author's "realistic" is about, it's for sure built on an
impulse that's not to be trusted.


Permalink

Original Article: I hate books
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2013 4:53 AM
By the way, to admit you still prefer the feel and smell of books, is
to count yourself amongst the NEW gentry -- it's not nostalgia,
however much it safely looks like it is. Be sure that every new
aristocrat, is burrowing as deep as they can in grand-grand-grand-
grandfather's culture, even as much as their childhood fluency is
actually all the latest toys.
If you make the mistake of saying you're all ebook, you're marked
as someone who doesn't understand, that you can't say that and
evolve beyond something middling to belong to an aristocracy that
has recently reclaimed its status as only birth-born, something pre-
20th century, and absolutely unavailable to the struggling fools
who'll believe in this period of absolute austerity that if you think
to grow rich, you'll have any chance of getting there.
Permalink

Original Article: I hate books
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2013 4:42 AM
Re: In some cases I just wont be able to separate the memory from
the object, and the object, however heavy, will have to stay.
Think of it as your new kid, born in a strange form ... that is, it
behooves you to FIND a way to love it. Pity if you can't end up
loving something as much as your regular-born, if has the same
heart but was born with a reptile's tongue and webbed feet.
If it proves you can't help but be half-hearted, s/he'll understand,
but maybe still cut herself to get some of the stimulation from full
attention s/he could have got from you.
Permalink

Original Article: Dark-skinned and plus-sized: The
real Rachel Jeantel story
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2013 2:04 AM
How do I skip to page 18 on this new comment section format? If
it means I have to keep uploading new pages, on and on, I'll stick
with the last two, and hope things haven't simply degenerated.
Permalink

Original Article: The Heat: Police misconduct as
feminism
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2013 2:01 AM
Andrew O'Hehir Victoria L. Terry Eagleton's response to -- I think
it was -- Dawkins and Hitchens, struck me as a bit "Catholic,"
though. I thought at the time, here's someone who believes he's
disciplined himself to quietly long-dwell amidst the widsom of
times past, and so has the advantage over geniuses who too much
enjoy crashing the past to create more room for their own
personalities and movements, to be fair to it. And this "stance,"
orientation, I tend to associate with Catholic scholars a lot. They're
always showing the brash upstarts how it actually is if you look at
the records straight.
Permalink

Original Article: Dont tell Marissa Mayer shes
pretty
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 2013 4:35 PM
Well, I hope all this gets straightened out in this land of powerful
people. I hope at the end we have an equal number of well-suited
women and equal number of well-suited men, all taking proper
account of one another.
As to everyone else, we can if you like talk only about your
business acumen, but we'll still be mostly snickering at you.

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