This is pleasing, in a low-key kind of way.

Filmed in Tokyo in 1998 by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean.

(h/t, Coudal) 

Further to Guy Dammann’s regard for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Darleen has unearthed another display of unspeakably radical selflessness over at Feministing:  

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’. But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction? My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression.

Sorry, I should have warned you; there’s quite a bit of boilerplate.

Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

Families with children are selfish, see, and squanderers, and prone to consumerism. I hope you’re taking notes.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it.  

But of course. Again, note the approving nod to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the ultimate goal of which is “phasing out the human race.” Until that glorious scenario is achieved, VHEMT strives for a world in which the human population is, ahem, “less dense.”

For newcomers, three items from the archives:

Art Bollocks Revisited 

Artspeak and political lockstep.

“The more sceptical among us might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.”

Lefties Revisited 

In which we follow a bizarrely inept attempt to launch a radical left wing tabloid. Dogma prevails, hilarity ensues. From Vanessa Engle’s documentary series, Lefties.

“I was interested in free speech… I was a Communist.”

The Greater Good (2) 

Arabella Weir passes among the proles, hoping to be noticed.

“Here we see crystallised one of socialism’s moral inversions. By Weir’s thinking, even if you had a grim and frustrating experience at a state comprehensive you should still want to inflict that same experience on your children. Ideally by sending them to a really disreputable school with plenty of rough council estate kids and people for whom English is, at best, a second language. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Ms Weir regards children, even her own, not as ends in themselves, but as instruments for the advancement of an egalitarian worldview. That, or as playthings of her own vanity. Which may well add up to much the same thing.”

Feel free to rummage in the greatest hits.

In case of emergency, chocolate pills. // Not-so-angelic sea angel. // Origami kraken. // Onion goggles. // “It’s full of stars.” // The cover art of Scientific American. (h/t, Things) // More art of the title sequence. (h/t, Matthew) // Endings of note. // A compendium of less-than-special effects. // An animated history of the internet. // Auditorium, a game. // Armchair from hell. // Stylish travel bag/doghouse. // Vintage upscale compass. // Triple-axis spirit level. // Impressive tool chest. // Scientist action figures. // London without people. // Vincent Price is The Last Man on Earth. (1964) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Pal Joey.

Further to this, Anna thinks you may enjoy the Japanese Watchmen trailer.

Are we excited yet?

Does art progress? Theodore Dalrymple has his doubts: 

One often hears of ‘cutting-edge’ art; indeed, the much older term, avant garde, is of the same ilk. This suggests that there is progress in the arts, as there is in science, and that what comes after must, in some sense, be better than what came before. Art has some kind of destination, with later artists further along the road to it than earlier.

In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin’s were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.

Art teachers and critics use the false analogy with science in order to deny the importance of tradition in artistic production. They do not realise that science is entirely dependent on tradition for its progress. It is not just that most competent scientists know a lot about the history of their subject, but that the very problems that they set about solving, their entire mental worlds, are inherited by them. No scientist has to discover everything anew for himself: no mind, however great, is expected to begin again from zero. Tradition is the precondition of progress, not its antithesis or enemy.

The comparison of art with science isn’t entirely convincing. One could argue, at least notionally, that the destination of science – its conclusion, as it were – would be a complete explanation of the entire physical universe, including the people in it who happen to ponder such things. It’s a pretty fanciful idea, perhaps, but a comprehensible one. But what would an analogous artistic destination be – a work of such staggering beauty that those who see it burst into tears and die contentedly?

Assorted entries from the Harbin Snow Sculpture Art Fair, China. 

More. Related: Gianni Schiumarini’s sand sculptures. (h/t, Coudal) 

Some people have strange priorities. There are those, for instance, who say:

There is something inherently paternalistic in rescuing someone. There’s no avoiding this. And this is especially pernicious in the context where someone has been methodically and institutionally disempowered – ‘saving’ them, though well-intentioned, may change many circumstances but it unfortunately continues the pattern of disempowerment.

Given the discussion from which the above is taken concerns the Taliban’s threats to murder girls who go to school, fretting about the “inherent paternalism” of rescue seems a tad… self-indulgent.

The commenter goes on to say,

I happen to care a great deal about the oppression of women, in Afghanistan and everywhere else in the world.

However,

It is not our job, as westerners – as outsiders – to specifically fight to improve the lot of Afghan women.

Well, one might argue against military intervention on an economic or tactical basis, or on grounds of pragmatism and self-interest. One might, for instance, argue that not every injustice can be engaged and it’s best to choose one’s battles. The ability to intervene is finite and conditional, and there are almost always other demands on whatever resources are available. But that isn’t the argument here. Instead, we have something much more elevated:

Ultimately, an oppressed group must empower themselves. But it is our job, and everyone’s job, to fight injustice and to oppose those barriers which prevent Afghan women from empowering themselves. We can fight sexism in Afghanistan without placing ourselves into a paternalistic position – but only if we are aware of the distinction I am discussing.

Ah, yes. The “paternalistic position” must be avoided at all costs.

Title sequences of note. // Vanishing Ganymede. // “An explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.” // “Liposuction doctor used fat from patients to power his car.” // Audi pedal car. // Concept bus. // Add bacon to any website. // A year in 40 seconds. // Live surveillance screensaver. // Microscopy gallery. // X-rayed MacBook. // Underwhelming computer ads. // Libraries with allure. (h/t, Stephen Hicks) // Princess Leia lookalikes. And how to make your very own slave girl bikini. (h/t, TDK) // Arctic Survival. Just in case. // How many 5-year-olds could you take in a fight? // Reefer Madness. (1938) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s The Flying Lizards. 

In November 2008, Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at IUPUI, was accused of “racial harassment” for reading a book on the KKK. The book in question, Notre Dame Vs the Klan, celebrates a notable defeat of the Klan by students and is available in the university’s own library. Mr Sampson initially regarded the accusation as a minor misunderstanding and, when summoned to the university’s Affirmative Action Office, he assumed the matter would be resolved with little fuss: “I had no trepidation about going there. I brought the book with me. I thought: these are educated people; they will know the difference between somebody that is in the Klan as opposed to somebody who’s trying to educate themselves on what the Klan stands for.”

He was wrong. 

The behaviour of the sensitivity guardians is, as so often, quite illuminating.