“A New Citizenship”

Michael Sandel speaks on on market triumphalism. His criticisms are solid, especially the marketization of things not traditionally bought and sold. But he says “should” and “ought-to” and “better”, a lot. That’s fine, but I’d like to know what basis he’s using. I’ll have to tune to his next 2009 Reith Lecture.

Germans:

“Weirdos who walk to church on Sunday“

Bullying

Middle school boys are bullying weaker boys, calling them “gay” or “fag”, sometimes hounding them to the point of murder and suicide. They don’t really think their victim is homosexual, just weak or effeminate. Judith Warner at the New York Times rightly condemns this, blames the parents, and misunderstands the problem.

“This generation of parents tends to talk a good game about gender, at least in public. Practicing what we preach, in anxious times in particular, is another thing… We should do something to get this insanity under control.” — Dude, You’ve Got Problems

Show and tell

They talk a good game in public? They say what Ms. Warner expects good people to say, that both boys and girls can do anything girls want to. They preach one wrong, and practice a different wrong. The bullying and name-calling she rightly condemns is the result of years of ‘enlightened’ social and educational policy. I wonder what change she would recommend. Workshops on gender diversity? Inclusive readers in Kindergarten? After-school sitcoms about capable domineering women married to incompetent wimps?

Nobody shows these boys how be men. They’re told in one way and shown in another that men are effeminate, or they’re jerks; that good boys act like girls. They know that’s wrong, but they don’t know what’s right instead. These are the children of mankind, just like Scrooge’s Ignorance and Want.

Carthago delenda est

Chesterton’s writing is dense, and tightly linked to the rest of Chesterton’s writing. Unless it’s one of his aphorisms, taking an excerpt is difficult. Have I preserved the sense? Read The Everlasting Man and see.

“…the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel … were at one in what they hated. It is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and western enemies…

“The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. … [They] believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved … a certain attitude towards children. This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome.”

Are we on a slippery slope?

Well, we aren’t at the top…

“Up to 40,000 people in Utah live in polygamous families and it is a way of life that they insist is based on religious belief.
…
‘I’m not being soft on them,’ [Utah's attorney general] said. ‘But I don’t have the resources to throw them all in jail. I hope they now work through the process of changing the law if they disagree with it.’ ” — Quest to legalise polygamy in Utah

It’s 2009. There’s no basis in secular law for forbidding any number of consenting adults from doing anything at all.

Except smoke tobacco, of course. That’s just nasty.

Hear the lamentation of the women

“From Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer on up through Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, feminist literature has been a remarkably consistent and uninterrupted cacophony of grievance, recrimination, and sexual discontent…

“Consider just what we have been told by the endless books on the topic over the years. If feminists married and had children, they lamented it. If they failed to marry or have children, they lamented that, too. If they worked outside the home and also tended their children, they complained about how hard that was. If they worked outside the home and didn’t tend their children, they excoriated anyone who thought they should. And running through all this literature is a more or less constant invective about the unreliability and disrespect of men.

“The signature metaphors of feminism say everything we need to know about how happy liberation has been making these women…” — The Vindication of Humanae Vitae

Need to think about this

(aptly enough)

There’s something important here, but I don’t know exactly what:

“I think if it were up to monks, we’d all write like this:

All spaces, no letters. Total disengagement from the here and now.” — Real time is realtime

There are supposed to be several blank lines between the two quoted above. I haven’t been able to get WordPress to produce that, which also illustrates Carr’s point.

Find the off switch

or at least the mute button

…the only alternative is to understand everything that’s going on, and then neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and frustrate them as much as you can. I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. — Marshall McLuhan

That’s final

Actors’ Union Rejects “Final” Offer. Well, I’m glad that’s over. It will be interesting to see what new business models the studios develop, and what jobs the former actors take.

Idiot box

Numbing; stupifying; disorienting; what’s the word I’m looking for?

• From Acedia and Me, by Kathleen Norris:
  

  Advertisements direct our attention to automobiles; medications to combat high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, and insomnia; the Red Cross; a new household cleanser. When the “news” returns, there are appalling segues, such as one I witnessed recently, the screen going from “Child Sex Offender Search” to “Gas Prices Rise.” It all comes at us on the same level, and an innocent from another would might assume that we consider these matters to be of equal value and importance. We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as out eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen.

• From Anathem, by Neal Stephenson:
  

  …there were speelies all over the place. They were mounted to the ceiling, angled down toward the tables. All of them ran the same feed in lockstep. At the moment we walked in the door, this showed a house burning down at night. It was surrounded by emergency workers. A close-up showed a woman leaning out of an upper-story window that was vomiting black smoke. She had a towel wrapped around her face. She dropped a baby. I kept watching to see what happened next, but instead the speely cycled back and showed the baby drop two more times in slow motion. Then that scene vanished and was replaced by images of a ball player making a clever play. But then it showed the same ball player breaking his leg later in the game. This too was repeated several times in slow motion so that you could see the leg bending at the site of the break. By the time we reached out table, the speelies were showing an extraordinarily beautiful man in expensive clothes being arrested by police.

I know – the word I’m looking for is “news.”