Memetic Success

Bwahahaha! My sinister master plan for world domination is working. Straight from the pages of the highest-quality general-news magazine in English, check this out! The money ‘graf is the last one: Moreover, the ease with which the internet spreads wrong-headedness–to say nothing of lies and slander–is offset by the ease with which it spreads insights… Continue reading Memetic Success

Published
Categorized as Culture

Islam Is At War With Us

I’ve been warning since 2002 that the West really is in a war to defend civilization against Islamic barbarians, and had better face up to that fact before the consequences of whitewashing Islam as a “religion of peace” get worse. Comes now Fjordman, a blogger from Norway who tells us that Moslem immigrants to Sweden… Continue reading Islam Is At War With Us

The End of Faith

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is a well-executed polemic of a kind that, in retrospect, has been curiously absent in the West over the last fifty years. Not since I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian in the early 1970s have I seen an attack on organized religion as clear, uncompromising,… Continue reading The End of Faith

Hotness in Hollywood

I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my beloved wife Cathy, here’s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in Hollywood — some movies that at least partly sold me with sex, and how they did it.

When Hollywood Gets It Right

My last two posts (If Hollywood Were Really Brave and Out of the Frame) have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap while congratulating itself on its bravery. I’ll make it a triptych by examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.

Published
Categorized as Culture

Out of the Frame

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, comes today’s report on the status of the film industry. The most hyped movie of 2005 was a depressing, pokey flick about gay sheepherders. The Oscar nominations were otherwise dominated by one movie that flogged us all for our… Continue reading Out of the Frame

Published
Categorized as Culture

If Hollywood Were Really Brave

The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of George Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap and acts) celebrating Hollywood’s bravery for being willing to make movies like Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. Conservative commentators have already pointed out how hollow and laughable… Continue reading If Hollywood Were Really Brave

Against Suicidalism from Down Under

Keith Windschuttle gets it. In The Adversary Culture he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about recently. Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the disease. I wonder if he’s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or… Continue reading Against Suicidalism from Down Under

Gramscian damage

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois. We don’t… Continue reading Gramscian damage

The Cheesecake Factory Must Die

Warning: I am about to vent. If splenetic ranting is not your thing, back outta here now, for I am seriously pissed off.

Published
Categorized as Culture

The War Against Humorlessness

From Iowahawk: WICCANS DECRY ‘WAR AGAINST SOLSTICE’ Wiccan Coven Association President Ozrius Ravenclaw announced today that his group would continue a formal economic boycott against several major US retailers “until they cease their relentless and cowardly attack on the Solstice.” Retailers affected by the boycott include Target, WalMart, Dollar General, Mills Fleet Farm, Victoria’s Secret,… Continue reading The War Against Humorlessness

Published
Categorized as Culture

Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia

Since writing the essay C.S. Lewis is morally incoherent I have finished rereading the entire Narnia series. I could go on at length about how the writing deteriorates as Lewis’s imaginative impulse is more and more smothered by the clanking and wheezing of his allegory machine, but Adam Gopnik makes the point better than I… Continue reading Thoughts on the Prisoner of Narnia

Published
Categorized as Culture

Utter IDiots

Leon H. at RedState writes in Intelligent Design (The Debate Isn’t Helping): In other words, my feeling about Krauthammer, Derbyshire, et al is basically this: if you wish to denigrate ID and insult its proponents, go find an ID discussion board (they are legion) and do so there – don’t use the pages of NR… Continue reading Utter IDiots

Published
Categorized as Culture

King Kong is a gigantic mess

My wife Catherine has written an excellent review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which we saw just last night. I concur with it; the movie is a meandering, flabby, over-long, self-indulgent mess that will be deeply disappointing to many of the fans Jackson attracted with the Rings movies. I hope it bombs, and he learns… Continue reading King Kong is a gigantic mess

Published
Categorized as Culture

Anti-fashion

Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in The Paradox of Not Caring: “claiming to not care about the clothes, to not be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes worn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those worn by one who dresses with the purpose.” He’s… Continue reading Anti-fashion

Published
Categorized as Culture

2wenty minutes of goo

Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got — no, I won’t say “assaulted”, I’ll say “oozed on” by the infomercials Regal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called “The 2wenty” that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive and fails miserably on all four counts.… Continue reading 2wenty minutes of goo

Published
Categorized as Culture

The Ice Harvest

In 1997 I was delighted by Grosse Point Blank, John Cusack’s masterpiece about a hitman who finds himself (in both senses of the phrase) at his high-school reunion. I loved that movie for its action, its dark comedy, and a script that never stopped being wickedly intelligent for even a second. I’ve been waiting nearly… Continue reading The Ice Harvest

Published
Categorized as Culture

Suicidalism

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy… Continue reading Suicidalism

Eric writes about the shoes

Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to Manolo’s Essay Contest. The constraints — low word count, a subject that really doesn’t interest me much — appealed to me. I figured if I could produce something interesting under those circumstances, it would be an accomplishment. Here it is. You be… Continue reading Eric writes about the shoes

Published
Categorized as Culture