Arts & Letters

Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride

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Megan McArdle is upset by something that Roy Edroso, a writer for The Village Voice, has said about her. He called her a “libstick libertarian”, which she feels is a misogynistic statement.

Well, it is a sexist comment! Considering that Mr. Edroso let it slip in an article where he rates ten Conservative blogs as to their Stupid to Evil ratio, Megan seems to be most incensed that he would be considering her femininity as a factor. What would being female have to do with being either stupid or evil?

She has a point, but that isn’t what I want to discuss. What puzzles me is how Mr. Edroso could have missed including The Chicago Boyz in his list!

Aren’t we Evil enough? We certainly try! I’m a gun-toting self defense instructor, and I even teach violent crime survivors how to shoot their disadvantaged attackers without charging them anything. To a New York liberal writing for a Leftist propaganda rag, that should put me somewhere above Joe McCarthy and just a little lower than Pol Pot. I mean, c’mon!

And stupid? I have bathtubs full of stupid at home, just in case a Village Voice columnist comes on by and wants to borrow a gallon or two. There are a few thousand rounds of ammunition in my living room alone, and I keep the guns used in the self defense class in my basement. According to those discredited studies the anti-gun lobby keeps quoting, I should have accidentally shot myself and every member of my family a few dozen times over by now. The fact that I haven’t shot anyone yet can probably be taken by a Liberal as proof that I am so stupid that I can’t even screw up right! If, that is, they can get over the fact that I am so stupid that I own guns in the first place.

And let us not forget my fellow Chicago Boyz! I doubt that any of them will be able to rise to the lofty heights of both Stupidity and Evility that I have achieved, but they all have their own geniuses in these areas. I figure that our combined talents creates a giant black hole that sucks all Goodness and Smartiness out of just about anyone unfortunate enough to glance at the title bar.

So the next time Mr. Edroso is compiling his little list, he should first stop on by and see what’s cookin’ with The Boyz.

Mamet & Human Nature

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2nd Update:   (If anyone’s reading this far down).   Tom Stoppard on ’68.  

 The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”

Update:  Henniger on Mamet’s essay (WSJ  video).  

Original post:   David Mamet

began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

He describes his conversion in the Village Voice. His picture of Bush still has elements of BDS, but he has begun to examine his experience and finds the best keys to understanding it seem to lie on the right. As some (some critical) commentors note, his work indicated he might be moving that way. (Certainly a television series about the professional & home life of a special forces unit might indicate that.) And certainly a playwright worth his salt might be interested in how character actually acts – an inadequacy that some of the more ideological playwrights of our time demonstrate rather nicely. But it was life that had forced him to look again at his beliefs.

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Fun Fact

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If you submit electronic files (e.g., digital photographs) on a CD to the US Copyright Office as part of a copyright application, the Copyright Office stores your CD but does not transfer the files on it to its computers or other durable media. There is also no way to resubmit or otherwise replace electronic files stored in the Copyright Office archives if the magnetic or optical media you submitted them on deteriorate.

This appears to mean that the registrations for many copyrighted photographs will become legally indefensible if/when the CDs on which the images were submitted deteriorate. The person with whom I spoke at the Copyright Office suggested submitting photographic prints or contact sheets rather than CDs. This suggestion would have been good advice until recently, but it’s impractical for people who copyright large numbers of digital photos.

I have no idea if the deteriorating-media issue will become a significant problem. Maybe not: the odds that any particular image file submitted in a copyright application will be needed to defend a copyright are low. Happily, the Copyright Office is testing a system that allows copyright registrants to upload image files over the Internet, and this new system should eliminate the CD issue for people who use it. But the many files that have been and will be submitted on CDs and DVDs are still vulnerable.

The Anti-Brian Lambs

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At WSJ we see what a free market of ideas is – and what it isn’t. There, too, Strassel describes an elitist (sentimental, self-righteous) press which quickly bought the argument of yet another politician that he (and he alone) is “for the people” (“for the children” and “for the poor” are of course versions of this); that this populist argument leads inexorably to power-grabbing hubris should be clear by now. Self-righteousness is a dangerous drug because it so easily quiets not just others’ doubts but our own. Spitzer is an argument, of course, for checks and balances applied by a free press. But we might also remember that any call to our baser instinct to covet another’s success should be suspect.

Update:        Gay Patriot    suggests  three offices often  obviously  motivated by something other than justice:   Spitzer,  Nifong and Ronnie Earle, who began earliest and remains in office.   That may say something about Austin and I’m not sure it is good.  

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It Is Literature Nonetheless

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The Chicago Boyz like to discuss the books we read. Usually these are tomes that concern History-with-a-capital-Aitch or Literature-with-a-capital-Ell. I thought I’d do something different.

io9 is a group blog where sci-fi geeks discuss their obsession. One of the recent posts that I found interesting was entitled The Twenty Science Fiction Novels That Will Change Your Life.

These sort of “Best Of…” lists are always ultimately unsatisfying, since the author will always deviate from your own tastes sooner or later. In this case, I agreed with the list of books that had been printed prior to the mid-1990s, and then pretty much disagreed with every choice that had been printed afterwards. Even so, it was astonishing that the author of the post and I would agree even that much.

One example of divergent sensibilities is the endorsement of Cryptonomicon (2000) by Neal Stephenson. This is a rich and multilayered book, certainly a worthy addition to anyone’s collection of science fiction, but it isn’t what I would have picked. Instead I would have gone with Snow Crash (1992).

Why is that? Because Cryptonomicon concerns itself with cryptography, data havens, international finance, and the genealogy of a very strange family. The book was interesting enough, but I really don’t concern myself with any of those subjects in my everyday life. It is rare that something happens to remind me of the tome.

Snow Crash, on the other hand, dealt with massive multiplayer online entertainments, music, physical security, sword fighting, and the eternal love and loyalty of a stray dog that is shown some kindness. These are things that I do spend time on during my daily grind.

Your mileage will almost certainly vary from mine, of course.

In closing, I would like to say that the science fiction I started to read as a young child has certainly increased my appreciation for being alive in this amazing time and place. Advances in technology and culture that have appeared in my own lifetime are readily apparent due to my constant exposure to speculative fiction, and I have embraced them with a great deal of delight instead of bemoaning how things change.

My car still can’t fly, though. Someone needs to fix that.