For newcomers, three items from the archives:  

Feel the Racial Healing. 

The Guardian’s Aisha Mirza bemoans the “psychic burden” of living among white people, which is worse than being mugged.

The more I think about it, the more this may exemplify a near-perfect Guardian article, the ideal to which all other Guardian columnists should aspire. It’s haughty and obnoxious, is ignorant of relevant subject matter, is frequently question-begging, and its imagined piety is premised on a rather obvious double standard. Specifically, Ms Mirza’s belief that people who leave London do so, secretly, because they don’t feel comfortable living among people with skin of a darker hue, which is racist and therefore bad, and her own simultaneous preference not to live among people whose skin is paler than hers, which is somehow not racist at all, and is in fact aired as the last word in righteousness.

Aesthetes, Take Heed. 

Brace yourselves for some taxpayer-funded cultural improvement.

Those with a taste for even more daring and challenging work may prefer the theatrical stylings of Mr Ivo Dimchev, a “radical performer” acclaimed for his “gripping sensitivity” and whose performance piece I-ON “explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects, before showing us “how to make contact with something that has no function.” Readers are advised that the aforementioned contact-making, which was performed as part of the 2011 Vienna International Dance Festival and is shown below, inevitably includes vigorous self-pleasure with what appears to be a wig.

Strange Construal. 

In which socialists misremember a 1970s sitcom.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions. And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

Ashe Schow on attempts to exacerbate campus “rape” hysteria: 

One of the best tactics so-called researchers have used to conclude that fully one-fifth of college women will be sexually assaulted is to vastly expand the definition of what [rape] is… Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown dissects the [Rutgers University survey], noting the definition of “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” included everything from “remarks about physical appearance” and “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient” to “threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behaviour, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” There’s an ocean of difference between someone saying you look good today and someone physically pinning you down against your will. To include both under the category of “sexual assault” is just ludicrous, and certainly not a serious way of studying the issue.

These, though, are the standards of Rutgers’ School of Social Work.

And via Ace, Timothy Sandefur tracks the wildly changing politics of Star Trek: 

At no point in the show’s history had Kirk or his colleagues treated the Klingons unjustly, whereas audiences for decades have watched the Klingons torment and subjugate the galaxy’s peaceful races. In “Errand of Mercy,” they attempt genocide to enslave the Organians. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” they try to poison a planet’s entire food supply… Yet never does the Klingon leader, Gorkon, or any of his people, acknowledge — let alone apologise for — such injustices. Quite the contrary; his daughter tells a galactic conference, “We are a proud race. We are here because we intend to go on being proud.” Within the context of the original Star Trek, such pride is morally insane. Yet in service to Spock’s mission of elevating peace over right, the film [Undiscovered Country] portrays the Klingons not as thugs, but as misunderstood casualties of human bigotry. Kirk and his crew, says Gorkon’s daughter at the Enterprise banquet, represent a “homo sapiens-only club,” devoted to such chauvinistic values as “inalienable human rights.” “Why, the very name,” she quips, “is racist.”

The incoherent utopianism of many Trek episodes – “the pernicious ideal,” as dicentra called it – has been discussed here before, many times, along with the authoritarian types who imagine a similarly ‘progressive’ tomorrow. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Or, Socialists Watch TV, Hallucinate Wildly.

Lifted from an old comments thread about fretful eco-piety, some thoughts on the 70s sitcom The Good Life and its message as construed by a Guardian reader and another fellow leftist. Specifically, its role as some kind of moral lodestone for the modern anti-capitalist:

Listen to Tom on one of his speeches to see how far ahead they were… Whilst the funny bit is watching Tom and Barbara struggle, they are treated the most sympathetically, and usually prevail in the end. Nothing better illustrates how little progress we have really made in nearly 40 years towards a more sustainable society.

Sentiments repeated in this indignant comment following a Spectator article on the same programme:

First of all, the heroes of The Good Life are Tom and Barbara – a couple who have given up the rat race and acquisitiveness to live off the land. Quite the opposite of Thatcherism and more in-line with the green movement than any other ideology… Margo’s petty-bourgeois [sic] conservatism and social climbing usually lead her into ending up looking ridiculous… And that’s precisely the kind of idea that The Good Life was clearly proposing a sustainable and non-greedy alternative to.

Readers familiar with said sitcom may find these claims a little odd, as Tom and Barbara’s experiment in “self-sufficiency” wasn’t particularly self-sufficient. They don’t prevail in the end, not on their own terms or in accord with their stated principles, and their inability to do so is the primary source of story lines.

Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ phone, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle. The Goods’ highly selective rejection of bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits – a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions.

And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

Kevin Williamson pokes through the mental wreckage of writer and actress Lena Dunham:  

Lena Dunham is fond of lists. Here is a list of things in Lena Dunham’s life that do not strike Lena Dunham as being unusual: growing up in a $6.25 million Tribeca apartment; attending a selection of elite private schools; renting a home in Hollywood Hills well before having anything quite resembling a job and complaining that the home is insufficiently “chic”; the habitual education of the men in her family at Andover; the services of a string of foreign nannies; being referred to a homework therapist when she refused to do her homework and being referred to a relationship therapist when she fought with her mother; constant visits to homeopathic doctors, and visits to child psychologists three times a week; having a summer home on a lake in Connecticut, and complaining about it; writing a “voice of her generation” memoir in which ordinary life events among members of her generation, such as making student-loan payments or worrying about the rent or health insurance, never come up; making casual trips to Malibu; her grandparents’ having taken seven-week trips to Europe during her mother’s childhood; spending a summer at a camp at which the costs can total almost as much as the median American family’s annual rent; being histrionically miserable at said camp and demanding to be brought home early; demanding to be sent back to the same expensive camp the next year.

That’s the first paragraph. From there on in he’s less forgiving. 

It’s been a while since we’ve had a classic Guardian sentence. Thank goodness, then, for Tracy Van Slyke, who can conjure elaborate grievance from a cartoon about sentient trains: 

For the record, all the “villains” on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I’d like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it’s not hard to make the leap into race territory.

You see, that “leap into race territory” isn’t hard to make because dirtier cartoon train engines producing darker cartoon smoke obviously constitutes a “message about race.” When she’s not explaining the devilish racial subtext of animated puffer trains, Ms Van Slyke “writes about the intersection of social justice and pop culture.”  

Via Tom Foster in the comments here.