Vox Popoli

Stanley Kurtz presents a fascinating exercise in illogic:

I just saw The Da Vinci Code. Point one: Michael Novak’s review is dead on.
Point two: This movie is a salutary kick in the teeth for conservatives. There’s no gainsaying the fact that the Narnia movie was a big deal. Having conceded that, the fact remains that when it comes to exercising influence on the fundamental levers of American culture, conservatives remain in a pathetically weakened position.

I may not be a professor of “symbology,” but I have taught at Harvard and studied religious symbolism. So I feel in a particularly strong position to reveal the entirely unsecret conspiracy against patriotism, tradition, and religion hiding in plain sight on our movie and television screens, in our universities, and on the pages of the mainstream press. Conservatives have forgotten just how precarious our position is. One cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make. It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power. But lose our foothold in government, and conservatives are up a creek. The other side controls the levers of cultural power in this country, and we are the enemy in their eyes (and on their screens).

Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious. If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does. Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness. The deep cultural dimension of our political battles makes an ordinary transfer of political power far more consequential than it was in the days when America had a bipartisan foreign policy and a broad cultural consensus. We can dream about forcing Republicans to the right and then riding back into power two years later, but one big loss could easily turn conservatives back into a marginal cultural force for some time.

You would think with those very impressive credentials in quasi-semiotics Mr. Kurtz would recognize that the Republicans he pitches as the last great hope for conservatives are every bit as sold out to the very forces of darkness he sees behind the Da Vinci Code as their Democratic counterparts.

Two uniforms, one team.

I am beginning to think that this administration’s open betrayal of Americans is going to cause some of these NROniks to require therapy, if not medication. You can see the cognitive dissonance tearing at their minds in nearly every half-baked defense of their “conservative” party.

It may require a morbid sense of humor, but I think I’m going to quite enjoy November. Remember when all those pragmatic pundits and self-proclaimed strategists said that the Republicans had to govern to the Left in order to stay popular, continue to win elections and retain power?

That was awesome!

Seriously, how hard is it for these genuiuses to grasp the obvious? Reagan wins landslide victories. The conservative Contract With America takes Congress. Naturally, and supposedly in order to stay in power, the Republican politicians tack left and now find themselves on the verge of another long stint in the political wilderness. If Karl Rove is a political genius, then he must be Democrat.

So, vote Republican or else Tom Hanks will make more movies!

From the SF Chronicle:

The current migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States is one of the largest diasporas in modern history, experts say.

Roughly 10 percent of Mexico’s population of about 107 million is now living in the United States, estimates show. About 15 percent of Mexico’s labor force is working in the United States. One in every 7 Mexican workers migrates to the United States.

That’s not immigration, that’s a migration. And if you believe that the USA is going to maintain its Christian, Anglo-Saxon political culture, or even the trappings of it that currently survive, you would do well to read up on the way in which other migrations have altered the cultures of their final destinations.

I find it bizarre that so few people yet recognize that this migration is intended to remove the vestiges of sovereign power from the American people. Even if one takes our political system at face value, it should be obvious that every immigrant granted citizenship represents the watering-down of every native citizen’s vote.

Perhaps by the time you are ruled by an unelected American Commission appointed by the legislatures of the USA, Mexico and Canada, you will understand. I won’t say that by then it will be too late, though, because it already is.

Nor will things stop with Mexico. The proposed merger between the New York Stock Exchange and Euronext will lay the groundwork for a global currency down the road. One market to rule them all, one currency to bind them, ein Geld, ein Welt, ein Reich.

L’Emmerdeuer tunes in:

I was listening to a random radio station today while working, the Michael Medved talk show came on. I didn’t know he had a talk show. 30% of the time he was promoting stocks to buy, and now’s the time to buy gold! Today! But he had some guest discussing something about Nazis and the DV Code moview, and he made a snide remark about how WND has a columnist who actually promotes using Nazi extermination techniques on the “immigrants”.

And actually, when travelling in Europe, I quite recommend using the Nazi extermination technique sometimes known as a “train”. Those appallingly cunning Neos not only sell tickets for the “Nazi extermination techniques” to unsuspecting tourists wanting to go from point A to point B, they even wear uniforms!

Michael Medved is just another peddler of faux outrage. He wouldn’t know a Nazi if one was tattooing a number on his ass. I don’t know if he favors the “Stasi extermination technique” known as a border fence or not, but if he does, we shall obviously have to lambast him for being an East German Communist lover.

As is so often the case, parody can’t keep up with the absurdities of the real thing:

1. Men hate me when they rape. I am lucky enough not to have been raped (yet), but I still feel that hate….

2. Men hate me when they use porn. They hate me when they come to my sisters being abused and raped. They hate me when they reduce me to two hands and three holes. They hate me when they use porn as a manual for sex, when they equate my worth to my ability to act like a porn star….

3. Men hate me when they type ‘rape virgens’ into google, or ‘cut breasts fuck’, or ‘three men brutally rape woman’. (Check out the sitemeter posts over at the Den if you really need more evidence).

4. Men hate me when they harrass women in clubs, on the streets, in the park, in bars, on the beach, at the bus stop….

5. Men hate me when they buy lads mags and calculate how much their girlfriend costs per fuck.

6. Men hate me when they ask their girlfriends to get a boob job to spice up their sex life.

7. Men hate me when they make malicious, sexist jokes. Men hate me when they laugh at malicious, sexist jokes. You think I don’t know that you really mean it?

8. Men hate me when they question women’s right to equal pay / to have an abortion / to have sex without getting pregnant / to do anything that they have the right to do.

9. Men hate me when they buy women’s bodies.

10. Men hate me when they sell women’s bodies.

11. Men hate me when they pay money to control women in a strip club.

12. Men hate me when they write and profit from lyrics like this (Grab your titties for BIG)

13. Men hate me when they laugh at an anti-rape protest.

14. Men hate me when they attempt to justify/ deny /defend any of the above.

She left off number 15. Men hate me when they laugh at me for being such a self-centered, myopic little moron. I particularly enjoyed number eight, asserting that questioning any woman’s legal action is equivalent to hating her. I marvel that anyone can read this and still believe that granting women the right to vote was anything but a complete and predictable disaster.

I think I’m going to join Emily’s List. The USA is doomed anyhow, so just for kicks, let’s see what would happen with a female President and a 100 percent female Senate and House of Representatives. My guess is that the tattered remnants of our civilization would be conquered by the militarily fearsome Grenada-Cuban alliance within eighteen months.

Third Wave feminism is the gift that keeps on giving. The First Wave was tragedy and the Second Wave was farce, the Third Wave is unconscious self-parody. Feministing describes it best:

Young, middle-class, college-educated white women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on our own behalf on issues that affect our lives and futures because we’re so horribly and obviously oppressed. Feministing.org provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, whine about our unending victimization, and (best of all) COMPLAIN CEASELESSLY!

Captain Ed defends Miz Malkin:

What people who engage in these kind of tactics — on either the right or the left, it’s all the same — is that the attacks reveal themselves as haters, not the object of their scorn. If they dislike what Michelle says, then they should counter her arguments with their own, or contradictory facts. Pareene shows what happens when the critics have neither. They engage in ad-hominem attacks designed to humiliate their opponents and to either get them to respond in kind or to withdraw from the debate althogether. It’s a cowardly tactic besides being immature and (in this case) misogynistic.

I disagree with the good Captain here for multiple reasons and the number of the reasons shall be three. There shall not be five reasons, neither shall there be two, except in that I proceedeth on to three.

1. The vast majority human beings are incapable of rational argument. The normal person rationalizes an emtional position, he does not think the matter through, reach a logical conclusion and then patiently examine the conceptual steps from start to finish. One has merely to look at how many people couldn’t resist hurling the Nazi label last week despite the fact that the accusation made no sense whatsoever on multiple levels. Since most people have no idea how to go about either methodically constructing or criticizing an argument, why be surprised when they don’t?

2. Me So Michelle is currently the foremost example of a media whore and she deserves to be treated like one. If the woman would engage in substantive discussion, which she repeatedly and reliably refuses to do – I know the Captain is well aware of this, considering how she ducked me on his own radio show – then she would have grounds for complaining about being treated unfairly. But since she won’t do so, she deserves the treatment she gets. What incentive is there for anyone to provide her with counterarguments? Why should anyone bother taking the time to do research and assemble facts that prove her wrong? Her response will be the same as if one simply calls her a stupid Asian skank and has done with it.

Hey, I’m still willing to have a factual, refereed and insult-free debate on the military necessity for WWII-era Japanese internment with her. Is she? And if not, then she and her defenders should simply admit that she has no interest in substantive criticism and stop whining about the ad hominum attacks.

3. Name-calling is loads of fun. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t do it. No doubt RAW would insist that we are merely indulging our inner primate and playing out virtual dominance games through metaphorical feces-flinging, but regardless, name-calling is a fundamental and time-honored form of human interaction. There are places for civilized and refined behavior, but save the cucumber sandwiches for the tea parties. The Internet is more akin to a vast sewage system than a Victorian social network anyway, so whether you run a little treatment plant or dump more than your fair share of filth in to the pipes – and why does The Reaper’s Hairball spring insensibly to mind here? – you might as well adjust to the stench and learn to tune it out.

Daniel, my adversary in last week’s economics debate, and his wife just lost the baby she was carrying. If you’d like to offer your condolences, you can do so here:

I hope that God will soon grant them another child as well as the fortitude to cope with their grief.

Amer requests a review:

Instead of hotdogs ,how about a comment on the “Da Vinci Code” Movie?

We are all just waiting to hear what you have to say about it.

I’m afraid I have absolutely nothing to say about it, since I have neither read the book nor do I intend to see the move. My own THE WORLD IN SHADOW came out simultaneously with Mr. Brown’s ANGELS & DEMONS from the same publisher; the similarity in titles made me curious enough to have a look and scanning a few pages caused me to laugh and put it down.

My only opinion is that from a marketing view, Mr. Brown is to be congratulated on presenting a more accessible and conventional version of Eco’s excellent FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, which was based on the same historical book about the Knights Templar used by Mr. Brown. Obviously Mr. Brown and Messrs. LaHaye and Jenkins, like Mrs. Rowlings, have figured out what so many other writers have not, namely, what lots of people like to read.

As for the lack of critical acclaim, that doesn’t mean the movie won’t be a blockbuster. Unless Mr. Brown’s writing improved dramatically from ANGELS AND DEMONS I doubt you’ll find many positive literary reviews of the book either. I personally tend to find some level of amusement in the horror of the would-be members of the writing elite at the success of such books, even if I share their disdain for the substance of such shallow and crudely shaped beststellers.

Anyhow, rather than discuss books that everyone else is discussing, I’d rather recommend some better writers. Tanith Lee writes the most beautiful prose out there today, although her stuff is creepy, occultish and darkly disturbing. Paradise, Paradis or Paradys, by any name it is excellent. Chiara Zocchi’s work is deeply emotional, she is able to evoke childhood emotions like no one since Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine, and it’s bordering on criminal that she hasn’t been translated into English yet. Lois McMaster Bujold’s new fantasy series isn’t conceptually groundbreaking, but it’s solid, entertaining and better than anything else that’s out there these days with the exception of the brilliant China Mieville.

If you haven’t read it yet, go out and buy IRON COUNCIL. Of all the writers of my generation, he’s the only one I envy.

ESPN reports a resurgent America:

Watch out, Takeru Kobayashi. Here comes Joey Chestnut.

Chestnut, a 22-year-old civil engineering student at San Jose State, ate 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes Thursday at the Las Vegas qualifier for a spot at the table at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest….

Kobayashi, who flies to Coney Island each year from Japan for the hot dog eating championship held July 4, holds the world record of 53½ hot dogs and buns. He has won the last five contests, but in two of those victories he ate less than 50 hot dogs and buns.

“This could be so critical to our sport,” said George Shea, chair of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, which sanctions more than 100 eating contests, including the Nathan’s event. “It’s never good for the same athlete to win so many years in a row. The Fourth of July has been stolen from Americans because of Kobayashi’s dominance and now America has someone who they can get excited about.”

Clearly a defeat of the intimidating Kobayashi by Chestnut will merely be the first great step in restoring America’s rightful place of primacy on the world stage.

I’m sorry, what’s that you said about bread and, what, circuses? I couldn’t quite hear, I was snarfing down a chili dog and watching ESPN.

WHEN the Senate voted by a stunning 83-16 in favor of a reinforced fence along the Mexico border yesterday, it showed that lawmakers are feeling get-tough winds blowing from the grass roots. Even 2008 presidential prospects like Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) voted for the 370-mile fence, and several Democrats who first voted no switched nervously to yes.

I’m not in the least bit surprised that the Senate – and the American people – should completely reject my position stated earlier this week. (I mean my actual one against the border fence, not the mass murder of the insufficiently Aryan imputed by the illiterate critics.)

The significant thing is that Hillary did precisely what I predicted several months ago and voted for the fence, thus adroitly positioning herself to the “right” of the Republican hierarchy. This is exactly what she needs to do to guarantee her victory in 2008 and Dear Jorge is playing his role to perfection by alienating the Republican base.

Two uniforms, one team. That’s all you need to understand to grok the game.

And sure, it may look obvious now, but I seem to recall more than a few skeptics when I first explained the scenario back in the summer of 2004.

I wonder if Americans will see that fence quite so favorably by the time the sixth year of the Lizard Queen’s reign of terror rolls around?