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Academia Art Film History Politics Postmodernism Reheated

Reheated

January 10, 2009 1 Comment

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.














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Ephemera History

Inflatables of Yore

December 30, 2008 1 Comment

A selection of vintage balloons from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades.


Macy_croc Macy_Felix Macy_turkey   


More. And. 














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Ephemera Film History Toys

Atomica!

December 17, 2008 15 Comments

A collection of vintage slide rules for calculating the effects of nuclear weapons. 


Nuclear_slide_rule_8 Nuclear_slide_rule Nuclear_slide_rule_2 Nuclear_slide_rule_6 Nuclear_slide_rule_5 Nuclear_slide_rule_4


Also, assorted film posters.  


Dig_that_uranium Atomic_man Canadian_Mounties_versus_Atomic_Invaders   


Film of the atomic cannon test, May 25, 1953. A single 280mm shell was fired seven miles, yielding a 15 kiloton explosion.





And a gallery of toys with an atomic theme.


Uranium_Rush  Atomic_energy_lab


(h/t, Coudal)














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History Politics

Unrequited Love

December 12, 2008 11 Comments

A while ago, I posted some extracts from Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s article on Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his Message to the Tricontinental: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine”… In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: “It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony…”

With the above in mind, readers may be interested in Ted Balaker’s short film on the suckers who fellate this “social justice” icon.


“Rock and roll as well as jazz was what they called ‘imperialist music’… He hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?” Paquito D’Rivera.

Related: Harry’s Place versus defiant fellators, the chic of concentration camps.


(h/t, Daimnation!) 














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History Politics Psychodrama

Resentful Beings

December 6, 2008 13 Comments

Theodore Dalrymple ponders terrorism, its apologists, and those most readily drawn to it:

Although I am not an historian, it has long seemed to me that some acquaintance with the history of Nineteenth Century Russia is absolutely crucial to understanding the modern world, for it was there that the various forms of modern revolutionary terrorism, and politics as the pursuit of an ideological end, first developed. And the first terrorists were certainly not downtrodden peasants brainwashed by religious or other leaders: they were either aristocrats suffering angst at their own privilege in the midst of poverty, or members of the newly-emerged middle classes, angry that their education had not resulted in the influence in society to which they thought themselves entitled by virtue of their intelligence, idealism and knowledge.


This pattern has been repeated over and over again. Latin America is a very good example. Castro was the spoilt son of a self-made millionaire who had a personal grudge against society because he was illegitimate and sometimes humiliated for it; in other words, he was both highly privileged, with a sense of entitlement, and deeply resentful, always a dreadful combination. Ernesto Guevara was of partially aristocratic descent, whose upbringing was that of a bohemian bourgeois, who was too egotistical and lacking in compassion for individual human beings to accept the humdrum discipline of medical practice.


The leaders of the guerrilla movement in Guatemala (a country, oddly, with many parallels to Nineteenth Century Russia) were of bourgeois and educated origin; one of them was the son of a Nobel-prize winner, not exactly a true social representative of the population. The leader and founder of Sendero Luminoso of Peru, a movement of the Pol Pot tendency (and Pol Pot himself, of course, studied in Paris), was a professor of philosophy, and his followers were the first educated generation of the peasantry, not the peasants themselves. Peasants are capable of uprisings, no doubt, even very bloody ones, but they do not elaborate ideologies or undergo training for attacks on distant targets.

The rest.














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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.