A mirror made of wood. No, really. Watch the video. // An impressive collection of navel lint. // African frog with “Wolverine” claws. // Fish acoustics. // The 56K modem emulator. // Musical furnishings. (h/t, Coudal,) // Vintage Bang & Olufsen. // Botanical gardens, Medellín, Colombia. More. // Bicarb: clears drains, detects cancer. (h/t, AC1.) // “Medieval waste studies” – an exciting new arm of academic enquiry. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // The Medieval Sourcebook. // Early visual entertainments. The anorthoscope, the choreutoscope and other phantasmagorias. (h/t, Drawn!) // Build your own Galactus, parts 1 & 2. Not actual size. // Bird’s nest, enlarged somewhat. // The biggest self-portrait on Earth, drawn using GPS. // The International Space Station, seen from 360km below. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Good news about bad guys. // Terry Glavin on the politics of opposition. // Theodore Dalrymple on multicultural Britain. // Do women really get paid less than men? // Impressive bank vaults. // View any website as a graph. // The UfoCap. // Designer gasmasks. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Xiao-Peng Jiang and the Chinese Orchestra of Shanghai Conservatory. 

Zack Snyder’s forthcoming film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen is, by any measure, a long shot. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic book yarn remains one of the most densely plotted and satisfying examples of the form. The book is artful in its telling, at times ingenious, and rewards repeated reading. And this, for Synder, is part of the problem. The pleasures of Watchmen are very much about how the story is told, i.e., as a comic. The plot often hinges on tiny visual details; graffiti, partly-obscured adverts, a pocketful of sugar cubes – all of which become significant as the story unfolds. Skipping back and forth through the pages and revisiting these details is hard to avoid, and indeed is intended. How this might translate to film isn’t clear.

Moore described the book as “unfilmable,” not least because of its narrative structure, with flashbacks, supplementary “research” and a comic-within-a-comic that serves to counterpoint events. In an interview with Amazon, Moore recounted his reaction to Terry Gilliam’s abortive 1989 attempt to turn “the War and Peace of graphic novels” into a film: “I had to tell [Gilliam] that I didn’t think it was filmable. I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which there are, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that literature and cinema couldn’t.” In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, David Hughes quotes Gibbons making much the same point: “With a comic book the reader can back-track; you can reach page twenty and say, ‘Hey, that’s what that was all about on page three,’ and then nip back and have a look. We wanted to take advantage of that difference… We wanted to make a comic book that read as a straightforward story, but gradually you became aware that it had a symmetrical structure.” 

Those unfamiliar with the comic’s plot can find a summary here. Essentially, Watchmen is a detective story set in an alternative 1980s in which Woodward and Bernstein were assassinated and Nixon is still president. The comic’s twelve chapters mark a countdown to armageddon as one by one a group of retired and questionable heroes are eliminated and the world teeters on the brink of thermonuclear war. Investigating the death of a former masked colleague, a disheveled vigilante named Rorschach uncovers a plot of unspeakable proportions and uncertain intent. The looming showdown of military superpowers could in theory be prevented by the one character with super-powers of his own, the casually miraculous Dr Manhattan. Freakishly disembodied by a laboratory mishap, Manhattan is, quite literally, a self-resurrected man. All but omnipotent, this blue transfigured being is assumed to be America’s deliverance and the ultimate deterrent. However, the doctor’s godlike perceptions are proving incompatible with human imperatives: “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”

While advocating voting based on skin pigment, Ron Rosenbaum champions the phenomenon of liberal guilt:

Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it’s shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America’s virtues, we have to concede – and feel guilty about – America’s sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue…

Goodness, a moral crescendo is upon us. Someone fetch a towel. It’s heartening to know that there are among us some whose moral insights are so keen they entitle those so endowed to dictate how the rest of us should – must – feel.

Guilt is good, people!

Well, that rather depends on what a person is feeling guilty about, or pretending to feel guilty about.

The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers.

Actually, while individuals described as sociopaths are generally unrestrained by empathy, some have been known to be moved by quite improbable, often ludicrous, things. Simulating feelings purely for effect is another common marker of sociopathy, and it’s possibly worth noting that such people also tend to be grandiose, narcissistic and insufferably self-righteous. 

Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have – in the case of America’s history of racism – historical awareness… Critics of Obama supporters who use the phrase “guilty liberal” or “liberal guilt” in a condescending, above-it-all manner suggest there’s something weak about feeling guilt.

There is a non sequitur here, one that’s repeated several times. An awareness of history – say, regarding slavery – doesn’t in itself necessitate feelings of any particular kind. It isn’t clear, to me, why a person should feel profoundly responsible for the actions of complete strangers who lived centuries earlier. Unless, of course, one subscribes to notions of some collective, genealogical guilt, with its infinite regress and connotations of collective punishment.

This particular critic of liberal guilt would argue that such claims and protestations aren’t “weak” as such, insofar as they require a great deal of effort to maintain. (For instance, saying “we have to… feel guilty about America’s sins” – followed by the words “a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue” – isn’t an easy thing to do while keeping a straight face. Though the effort isn’t necessarily deserving of applause.) What irks isn’t feebleness, but incoherence and dishonesty. To publicly rend one’s garments over some vicarious, borrowed sin is not to affirm conscience or poignant human feeling, but to parody those things and to indulge in emotional pantomime and moral masturbation. Rather like this:

But was slavery not immoral? Was not the century of institutionalised racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of “flawed values” that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they’re no longer legally institutionalised?

Again, note the car crash of non sequitur. I’ll paraphrase for clarity:

Slavery was immoral. It was abolished. Therefore we must still feel guilt, or pretend to – all of us, indefinitely and forever. And those who don’t pretend to feel this way are abolishing history.

Assertions of this kind are, very often, for the benefit of a sympathetic audience and thus, ultimately, for the benefit of the performer. As I’ve argued before, saying, very loudly, “it’s all my fault” is only a notch and a half away from saying “it’s all about me.” Rosenbaum goes on to claim,

People who lack guilt also lack humility.

Well, people who affect guilt and presume to tell others that they too should pretend such things are, in my experience, the really arrogant sons-of-bitches. That’s my objection to the nasty little vanity called “liberal guilt”.

Avoid feeling guilty; make a donation.

A while ago, I quoted an essay by Professor Zygmunt Bauman – a prolific, if unconvincing, advocate of socialism – and noted his readiness to make rather questionable statements. Among them, his belief that a leftist worldview follows from two assumptions:

The first assumption is that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual members against individual misfortune. And the second is that, just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members.

These, Bauman claims, are, or should be, the “constant and non-negotiable assumptions” of the left. But one of them at least has an obvious flaw. The components of a bridge do not, I’m assured, have volition. Bricks, cables and metal beams do not make choices that determine their strength and functionality. Human beings do make choices that very often, quite dramatically, determine their prospects and quality of life. Bauman’s essay frequently assumes a kind of self-evident righteousness, the details of which are never quite explained, leading to a tone that is not so much analytical as tribal and pious: 

The left wants a humane society, one that strives for justice for all its members. The left defines a just society as one that is aware that it is not-yet-sufficiently-just, that is haunted by this awareness and thereby spurred into action.

Bauman is happy to insist that his assumptions are “the basis for a self-assertive left,” and that they “set the left on a perpetual collision course with the realities of the human condition under the rule of capitalism.” Not a perpetual collision with the human condition per se, of course – such a thing couldn’t possibly be entertained – but with the human condition “under the rule of capitalism” – also referred to as the “global capitalist order” – one which entails “wastefulness and immorality, manifested in social injustice.” These are bold claims, and fairly typical, yet Bauman – hailed as “one of Europe’s most influential sociologists” – seems to feel no obligation to substantiate them with particulars. These things are, apparently, simply understood. Despite a rush to claim the badge of “social justice” – a term that remains oddly undefined – the professor doesn’t explain in any detail what kind of action he would have us spurred towards. And given the role of individual judgment in how a person’s life plays out, questions of moral action do necessarily follow. Lots of them. I raised a few of the more obvious ones before, but I think some of them bear repeating:

Why is a society to be measured by how the least able fare, seemingly irrespective of why that situation arises and persists? How are people to be insulated from, and compensated for, what are often consequences of their own choices and priorities? How much control is to be exerted and how many freedoms curtailed – including the freedoms of those suffering misfortune? On what basis does Professor Bauman imagine he has a right to ensure that society’s members optimise the quality of their lives, insofar as they’re able? How, exactly, will this feat be achieved, and by whom?

If some individuals fail to make the approved decisions in the approved sequence and with sufficient foresight, will those choices be made by others, and if necessary enforced? Will individuals be compensated for all of their own shortcomings, dispositions and misjudgments, or just some of them? Who is Bauman to determine what constitutes an acceptable qualitative outcome? And how far would he go to ensure those outcomes are arrived at, regardless of the cost to others who may not share his view?

CDs, microwaved. // Bacon mints. // Tea in hot water. // Bulb garden. // Shadow bulbs. // Illuminated cities, seen from above.  (h/t, Coudal.) // Snapshots of Soviet Russia. // Poland’s Buttonarium. // Embroidered felt typewriter. // The Mobile Museum of Gem Sweaters. Sweaters, with gems. // Piercing necklace. // Interiors by H.R. Giger. Château St. Germain, Gruyères, Switzerland. // Crime scene PanoScan. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Remote control flying penis. // The moral compass of Michael Moore. // Science, unsettled. // Nixon meets Elvis. // Comedy clogs. // Classic games, rewritten. // World’s largest colour LED display, powered by the Sun. // Sony’s Rolly mp3 player. Pointless, but charming. // Robot beat combo. // Margate’s mechanical elephant. (h/t, Things.) // Some fetching Japanese scooters. // The Shadow of Fu Manchu. (1940) // And, via The Thin Man, a real taste of the Orient.