Elsewhere (201)
Robert Tracinski on socialist Venezuela and the imaginings of John Lennon:
Before you judge Venezuela’s looters, consider what you would do if your children were starving. So much for “no hunger.” What about the “brotherhood of man”? Not only is looting soaring in Venezuela, but so are all forms of crime. It has gotten so far out of control that mobs of vigilantes are burning people alive in the streets over petty thefts. It turns out then when people are starving, there’s not a lot of brotherhood. Instead, they fight like dogs over a bone.
Mick Hartley quotes Nick Cohen on Venezuela’s leftist cheerleaders:
Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination.” What more could a breathless Western punter ask for? Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. […] The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.
Theodore Dalrymple on charity and welfare:
Charity given as of right, for that is what the welfare state does, favours the undeserving more than the deserving, in so far as the undeserving have a capacity and even talent for generating more neediness than the deserving. (They also tend to be more vocal in their demands.) The welfare state in fact dissolves the very notion of desert, because there is no requirement that a beneficiary prove he deserves what he is legally entitled to. And where what is given is given as of right, not only will a recipient feel no gratitude for it, but it must be given without compassion — that is, without regard to any individual’s actual situation. In the welfare state, the notion of a specially deserving case is prohibited, for it implies a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.
And Katherine Timpf on sartorial innovation in the name of “social justice”:
The New Hanover County School System in North Carolina has proposed a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them.
Snug jeans and leggings would only be permissible if a looser secondary garment, say, a long shirt or dress, “covers the posterior in its entirety.” Freddie Mercury and Sir Mix-A-Lot could not be reached for comment.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Then and now.
This is wonderfully appropriate to the Katherine Timpf piece
a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them
This sort of reasoning gives me an uncomfortable feeling.
Imagine being someone who is so stupid that they can to twist logic into knots like that. They could basically justify anything that occurred to them. And that is largely the point.
Just to spell things out in tedious detail: as we know, no one is forcing large ladies to make style choices that don’t suit them (or to stop eating pizzas)
In a way, they are being removed from responsibility from their choices. There is also a considerable element of envy (of more svelte women) involved. Add in the customary mix of entitlement of victim groups and people from 200 years in the future might be able to understand the weirdness of our times..
Does the Guardian not realise just how much respect it would garner by simply saying, “We got it so so wrong, we should look at our principles about these things”?.
“Fifteen year old French girls.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for your boy…”
Fred the Fourth
I probably should have been more clear that the fifteen year-old females he’d be interacting with would be Irish as we live in Dublin. Only he could decide if they lived up to French girls.
..of course, the correct response for Tom’s son, assuming some desperation there, is one of those Europe On Two Pounds A Day deals.
Fred the Fourth
He’s both frugal and imaginative so if he really wanted to do it I’m certain he’d find a way.
…re the comment on the Austrian election, I just heard it reported that van der Bellen had won. Do you suppose this means that zombie’s speculation about stealing the mail-in votes came true?
Fred the Fourth
I honestly don’t know what to think. At this stage of my life I’m so jaded I don’t trust anyone anymore. The recent Ben Rhodes\Obama Foreign Policy scandal shows the media is simply not an objective observer, at least for anyone with any remaining doubts. I don’t want to get fitted for a tinfoil hat just yet but let’s say the result of that election smells funny and I’m not entirely certain it was on the up and up. I should also make it quite clear that I wasn’t pulling for Herr Hofer. I’ve not researched either candidate’s positions but a quick perusal indicates neither of them was an ideal choice.
Please tell me I’m not the only person who hates John Lennon’s grizzly dirge Imagine?
Dr Cromarty
To jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, no, you’re not alone. In fact, I’m sure you could fill Wembley and quite few other stadia with people who loathe that depressing, nihilistic, dreck.
In a way, they are being removed from responsibility from their choices.
Not “in a way”: in every way.
Divesting oneself of all responsibility is the raisin tray of 3rd-wave feminism.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
raisin tray
🙂
My French is impeccable.
Ness pah?
Re: the Lennon thing. I saw a 1968 interview with him and Victor Spinetti (who was doing a stage play adaptation of his books), and the interviewer asked Lennon what a “Brummerstriver” was (a term used in one of his poems). And Lennon answered that a Brummerstriver was a downtrodden worker who had to go to a job he doesn’t like, every day, such a s steel works. Warming to his subject, he then enthused that people didn’t *have* to go and do things they didn’t want to do, that they didn’t *have* to work at the local steel works.
I then watched a 1969 documentary called “Man Of The Decade”, which was basically a camera crew following him and Yoko going about the place. And there he was, in the back of his Rolls Royce, which was crafted from British steel that all those Brummerstrivers didn’t *have* to forge. He was chauffeured by a driver that didn’t really *have* to drive a car for a living. (Imagine: pulling up on the side of the M!, and the chauffeur saying “You’re right John, sod this job, I’m off. Bye bye”).
And we were treated to footage of John magnanimously giving free LPs to visiting journalists that the record plant workers didn’t *have* to pack and stack. And john and Yoko checking into a hotel a night time where the night clerk didn’t really *have* to work there to check them in. And then being given breakfast in bed the next morning by room service staff that isn’t really *have* to bother serving them. And on and on.
I’m a big Beatles fan, but over the years I’ve grown more lukewarm to Lennon”s views and politics. And a lot of the issues that he championed turned out to be wrong (e.g.: Hanratty, Michael X).
Come and keep your comrade warm
I’m back in the U.S.S.R.
Hey you don’t know how lucky you are boys
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Heh. Lucky. OTOH, Taxman and if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. Seems like they got dumber as they got older. Bit of a Dorian Gray thing perhaps.
“At this stage of my life I’m so jaded I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
Progressives’ Mission Accomplished?
“USSR” is actually a McCartney composition. I never knew what the hell it was about, but according to a quote in Wikipedia it was intended as a kind of Beach Boys parody, as well as a call out to Beatles fans in the Soviet realm.
This discussion of John Lennon’s, shall we say, economic idiocy combined with industrial-strength hypocrisy reminds me of a comment a hedge fund manager once made at a free-market conference I attended, along the lines of “I don’t care what the monkey thinks as he turns the crank of the organ.”
Something to keep in mind as we partake of the arts. I’m sure pretty much every opera singer (ok, so I enjoy opera. Sue me) has political opinions that are diametrically opposed to mine. I still like to hear them sing, though.
Of course there is the fact that a large part of the population puts way too much store in the opinions of performing monkeys that just happen to have a skill that has allowed them to become famous. Don’t know if we can fix that. Probably not.
“Of course there is the fact that a large part of the population puts way too much store in the opinions of performing monkeys that just happen to have a skill that has allowed them to become famous.”
Not sure that’s true. The likes of Bono, Chris Martin, Saint Bob et al tend to preach to the choir. I suspect ordinary people are either oblivious to artist’s views or else like them despite their views. David Bowie’s popularity didn’t vary as he flitted from socialism to fascism and back again. The subjects named above excepted, I imagine most stars tailor their pronouncements to ensure maximum coverage.
I suspect ordinary people are either oblivious to artist’s views or else like them despite their views.
I don’t think very many people pay attention to lyrics. Especially anything outside of the chorus. It both amuses and disturbs me how virtually every Forth of July the PA systems at picnics and fireworks shows are blasting Springsteen’s Born in the USA (marginal) or The Guess Who’s American Woman (flat out anti-American).