The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about Communist totalitarianism… Continue reading Getting Orwell Wrong
Month: August 2005
Pretty People Behaving Stupidly
I’ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we’ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I’ve learned that romance fans use an acronym… Continue reading Pretty People Behaving Stupidly
Katrina and the Kos
About twelve hours ago I toyed with the idea of writing a satire in which the Bush-haters blame W. for the magnitude of the disaster bearing down on New Orleans. I discarded the idea on the grounds that it’s (a) not funny, and (b) not believable enough. I mean, who could really imagine that theory… Continue reading Katrina and the Kos
People Getting Brighter, Culture Getting Dimmer
In response to my previous post noting that the Flynn effect turns out to be a mirage, at least two respondents have suggested that average IQ has actually been falling, and have pointed to the alleged dumbing-down of politics and popular culture in the last fifty years. I think both those respondents and the psychometricians… Continue reading People Getting Brighter, Culture Getting Dimmer
Out like Flynn
Renowned pychometrician Charles Murray has given us, in The Inequality Taboo, a concise summary of the most current science on group differences in IQ and other measures of capability. Most of it is not surprising to anybody who has been following the actual science rather than press accounts severely distorted by the demands of political… Continue reading Out like Flynn
Blame The Audience
In Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle, a writer for the New York Times explores the theory that movie attendance is tanking because the quality of all too many mega-hyped “major movies” has plunged into the crapper. Well, no shit, Sherlock — what was your first clue? Pearl Harbor? Alexander? Mission Impossible II? What’s really news… Continue reading Blame The Audience
Libertarian realism
I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face reality and support war. Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and… Continue reading Libertarian realism
The “Bush Lied” lie
Today’s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch does an excellent job of demolishing the “Bush lied, people died!” canard so popular among the anti-war left — Greg Djerejian echoes my own conclusions when he writes: “But if you dig into the weeds of the investigations that have taken place — one must judiciously conclude that he… Continue reading The “Bush Lied” lie