So, Hetracil was just an ingenious thought experiment, but it turns out that authorities in the United Arab Emirates are serious about trying to chemically “cure” homosexuality. A group of men arrested at a gay wedding ceremony (apparently frowned on in the UAE) will be subject to “treatment,” including injections of male hormones. Color me dubious: I can think of a couple clubs that would put to rest the notion that a paucity of testosterone is the culprit here.
—posted by Julian
This little Christmas anecdote made me laugh. An old high school friend from England emailed me about it today:
One of my nephews, Dominic, was in a Nativity Play. In the scene where Mary and Joseph arrive at the Inn, Mary asks the Innkeeper, played by a lad of seven, if he has any room. “Yes”, he says. “Mary, you can come in, but Joseph, you can fuck off”.
In the stunned silence that followed, it transpired that the Innkeeper had played Joseph himself the previous year and had taken his ‘demotion’ very much to heart.
Priceless.
– posted by Andrew.
Must reading from Iraq the Model. I concur with the Mickster that Omar is far more informative than anything I can find in the Western media. Of course: this is opaque stuff. Who’s bluffing, who’s dealing, who’s killing: to outsiders, these nuances are almost impossible to understand, let alone follow on a daily basis. Which is why the utopian idea that we really could transform Iraq is slowly yielding to the meliorist notion that we can help guide it haphazardly, and dangerously, forward.
– posted by Andrew.
It’s been one of the themes of this blog that the Republican party has ceased to be, in most respects, a conservative party. For this, I have been accused of moving left, being hostile to faith, or simply fueled by hatred of the president. I beg to differ. Jeffrey Hart’s latest contribution to the debate is an excellent one. This paragraph nails it:
Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative. But this party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of “Republicanism.” The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture. It is an example of Machiavelli’s observation that institutions can retain the same outward name and aspect while transforming their substance entirely.
The alliance between conservatism, as it was once understood, and the historically Democratic American South is, in my view, a brilliant maneuver for gaining political power, but something that has mortally wounded the tradition of limited government, individual rights, balanced budgets, political prudence and religious moderation that were once hallmarks of conservatism. But I should get back to writing my book, which does its best to make a somewhat similar case for the Republican party’s replacement of conservative constitutional balance with a fundamentalist, financially leveraged, unchecked and forever expanding executive power. Hart’s rather beautiful summary of conservatism,
“a philosophy always open to experience and judging by experience within given conditions–the experience pleasurable or, more often, painful, but utopia always a distant and destructive mirage,”
is as eloquent a damning of the current Republican hegemony as any I know of.
– posted by Andrew
This is, like the Malkin, a new award that succeeds an old one. I used to call these awards Sontag Awards, for moral equivalence in the war on terror. But Sontag died, and it’s no fun to ridicule a dead person. Michael Moore, however, is very much alive, and his combination of spirited mendacity and loathing of Western freedom (except when it makes him a zillionaire), is as popular as ever. The award goes to those who best represent anti-Americanism, equation of the West with terrorists, fanatical Bush-hatred, and rhetoric that makes even Huffington Post readers raise their eyebrows.
And so the nominees for 2005 are …
MOORE AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2005: “Gary Kamiya writes, ‘In a just world, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings would be standing before a Senate committee investigating their catastrophic failures, and Packer’s book would be Exhibit A.’ No. In a just world, these people would be taken out and shot.” – author, Jane Smiley, helping us better understand, several decades later, why so many Western lefties were once fans of Joseph Stalin.
MOORE AWARD SECOND RUNNER-UP 2005: “George Bush’s second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.” – Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald.
MOORE AWARD RUNNER UP 2005: “So while children are drowning and others are floating around, dead in the water, the wannabe Yale cowboy struts around the set of his faux town hall meetings, has a bit of cake with John McCain, and takes in some fresh air in Colorado.
Congress? Anyone?
Dick? Where is Dick? Anyone?
Condi? Rummy? Any other Iran-Contra Folks?
Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Hello?
So where does that leave us, the citizens of this raped, pillaged, terrorized, demoralized, freedom loving nation?
Floating face down, eyes affixed on a once great New Orleans!” – Larisa Alexandrovna, on HuffPuff.
MOORE AWARD WINNER 2005: “As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break.” – University of Colorado professor, Ward Churchill.
– posted by Andrew.
It’s been a down year for the movies, at the box office and otherwise, and there’s a certain desperate cheeriness to the Times‘ critics “best of the year” roundups. “Was this a good year for the movies or what?” Manohla Dargis asks, after reeling off about forty of her favorites, and then adds that “while industry reporters have been busy filing doom-and-gloom analyses . . . a lot of filmgoers have been enjoying an exceptional year of movies.”
Well, it depends on what you mean by “a lot.” Of her forty faves, only two – Batman Begins, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t very good, either, and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin – could be reasonably classified as “big hits,” i.e. movies that made upwards of a hundred million dollars. Two others – Wallace and Gromit and Red Eye, neither one a flick for the ages – broke fifty million; In Her Shoes and the overrated A History of Violence each broke thirty million (barely); and most of the rest didn’t even gross ten million. (There’s still time for Munich and Brokeback Mountain, though unlike Frank Rich I wouldn’t bet on the latter’s mass appeal . . .)
I don’t mean to suggest that a movie only counts as “good” if it passes a certain box-office threshold. And it was an excellent year for small-budget, small-grossing movies: I haven’t seen some of the holiday releases yet, but my provisional top ten would include Grizzly Man, Junebug, The Squid and the Whale and Capote, none of which were ever likely to attract a mass audience. But even so, it doesn’t speak well of the American film industry that nearly all the finest movies of the year – at least if you believe the Times critics – were art-house gems and foreign films, while most of the industry’s hits were sequels and remakes, riding built-in audiences to compensate for their mediocrity. This is true every year, to a certain extent, but 2005 seemed to particularly lack for a slate of really good films that aimed at, and found, a mass audience. Time and again, a movie would seem poised to hit that sweet spot, only to be exposed as a dud. Kingdom of Heaven could have been the next Gladiator; instead it was the next Alexander. Syriana aimed to do for the oil business what Traffic did for the drug trade – but it didn’t. Narnia found an audience, but it was no Lord of the Rings. And so on. (Nor, glancing over the year’s films, do I see many modest hits – or modest disappointments – that are likely candidates to become classics on DVD or cable, like Braveheart or L.A. Confidential or The Shawshank Redemption.)
Still, there is one bit of good news for movie-watchers – the Slate Movie Club, the highlight of the year for highly amateurish cinephiles like myself, has just kicked off. (Though alas, without the crazy/wonderful presence of Armond White . . .)
– posted by Ross
Matt Yglesias responds to a Washington Post op-ed on how public schools fail gifted kids with the understandable but, I think, misguided thought that public schooling “should try to do well for the hardest to teach kids, included ones coming from difficult backgrounds and ones who simply for whatever reason have a hard time with school,” and not worry excessively about “the easiest cases,” which is to say, the gifted kids.
First, I want to echo some of Matt’s commenters in questioning whether those gifted kids really are the “easiest” to teach, especially given that they too may come from “difficult backgrounds.” As the Post article observes:
Nor do test scores indicate whether these students are being sufficiently challenged to maintain their academic interest, an issue of particular concern in high school. Shockingly, studies establish that up to 20 percent of high school dropouts are gifted.
And it’s at least possible that even on a strict egalitarian basis, there’s an argument for “taking the most talented as far as they can go.” Pushing a gifted potential-dropout to realize her full potential is, of course, a benefit to that student. But it’s also a benefit to the rest of us—the worst off included. I’m just guessing about the numbers here, but I’ll hazard that the per-pupil cost of some kind of program to keep those gifted kids engaged and stimulated is, at worst, no greater than that of remedial programs for their counterparts at the other end of the curve. And the payoff for that is, at least potentially, not missing out on the next Jonas Salk or Steve Jobs or… well, pick your favorite modern genius. Granted, some of them will go on to socially useless functions like, say, political magazine writer—but on the whole I’d hazard it’s a good investment over the long term even for the kids who don’t directly benefit from those programs, at least along some margin. I don’t know what that makes the optimal balance of remedial vs. gifted spending, but I think it means you can’t just do a crude maximin and suppose that equity demands not dropping a nickel on gifted programs until you can’t buy a jot more improvement on the low end.
—posted by Julian
Writing in The New York Times, Alvaro Vargas Llosa argues that the election of Bolivian demagogue Evo Morales is less worrisome than it might seem. He seems awfully sanguine—especially given that the case for optimism is tied to the U.S. responding in some quasi-sane fashion if the growing of coca is decriminalized—but there are a number of sound points.
—posted by Julian
This award is a relatively new one – reflecting the uniquely batty voice of Michelle Malkin, defender of Japanese internment in the Second World War, and far and away the break-out star of the hard right blogosphere in the past year. The award is for hyperbolic, divisive, mean-spirited, far-right boilerplate, of the kind Malkin produces on an almost hourly basis. The award has largely supplanted the old Derbyshire Award, named after NRO’s resident bigot and curmudgeon, John Derbyshire. Compared to Malkin, he’s a voice of calm reason. (He will be awarded his own prize later this week, so fear not.) Anwyay, drum roll, please, for the finalists ….
DISBARRED BUT WORTH A CITATION: “Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole,” – a headline on an Ann Coulter column at Townhall.com, January 6, 2005. (Coulter is disbarred from the contest, because others have got to have a chance.)
MALKIN AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2005 : “The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War.” – Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker. And they call me excitable.
MALKIN AWARD RUNNER-UP 2005: “It’s time to ask, bluntly, whether self-government can work for people not operating within a Judeo-Christian worldview.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily.
MALKIN AWARD WINNER 2005: “[B]lood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark “Deep Throat” Felt’s] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.” – Ben Stein, American Spectator.
Tomorrow, the equivalent from the nutty left: the Moore Award nominees!
– posted by Andrew.
For the three of you not yet sick of the NSA eavesdropping issue, I’ve got a piece over at Reason today.
—posted by Julian
The Dish 