Plants are all the rage. Nothing brightens up a debate like potted plants scattered among the audience. The best rundown I have yet seen of the audience plants in the CNN debate is at pcexposed. I count three definite and one possible plant at this point. Read the post, then ask yourself what we can do to counter the corrupt and arrogant elites who are cynically manipulating and undermining the polity of our country.
h/t: Ace
Update: All sorts are piling on. Remember Rathergate? This is beginning to smell like that. Dan Riehl has a update with more links. This could be fun, especially if it makes it into the MSM. Rathergate never really did, amazingly enough, but this time even some Democrats might be interested in uncovering the scam. Especially if it turns out that some of them weren't in on it. And yes, our favorite corrupt senator, Harry Reid, seems to have played a part in setting up this disgusting charade.
Showing posts with label Decline and Fall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Decline and Fall. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Tuesday Movie Review: M*A*S*H
Posted by Alistair.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Friday the American Film Institute (AFI) released a new list of the 100 best American movies as decided by 1,500 people in and around the film business. This list remained relatively faithful to the original list that the AFI released 10 years ago. Toy Story replaced Fantasia and the epic Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring replaced the even more epic Dr. Zhivago, but changes were the exception and not the rule. For the most part, movies that were deemed list-worthy last time made their way onto the new list. Among these was Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H, which was rated America’s 52nd best film on the original list but slipped to 58th best on this new list. High praise is not uncommon for this film, which won an Oscar for best screenplay upon its release, spawned a hit TV series, and is frequently cited by critics and movie goers as one of the best movies ever made.
As best as I can guess, the case for M*A*S*H goes something like the following: men are drafted into a war they don’t want to fight, a pointless war that reinforces the corrupt ideals and hypocritical morals that have turned their society ugly. Instead of following the system’s rules, these men behave like heroes—deconstructing the system from within. With Dadaist fervor they challenge everything their commanding officers insist on. If a “good” soldier should believe in Christ, then Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke will belittle the religious, replace the Bible with pornography, and generally disrupt the tyranny of religion. If a “good” American should be sexless and monogamous, then these boys will be anything but that. And if the American’s highest calling is football, well then, this lot of anti-heroes will beat the blonde, corn-fed bastard at his own game. Oh yes, there is also a plethora of jokes and breasts. It’s like Animal House with a message. Or a hysterical version of Catch-22.
Except that everything about this movie is wrong. Its jokes are largely unfunny and dated. It is spiteful of women, especially those like Nurse Houlihan who are good at their jobs and unattracted to the film’s male leads. These women must suffer brutal and unfunny sexual humiliation at every turn. This film exhibits everything that is wrong with 60s idealism while retaining nothing about it that’s right. There were, nearly all will grant, many things wrong with the morality of America in the 1950s. A lot of this involved distrust and hatred for blacks, gays, and women. M*A*S*H, with a misanthrope’s limited vision, wishes to topple the wrongs of the past. Its solution is that of a moron: since some thoughts in the past have turned out to be less than ideal we must do away with all the ideas held in the past. In the past people treated each other with respect. Not in Altman’s utopia. Everything has been redone, and all moral standards have been adjusted to serve the film’s protagonists (all except a belittling distrust and hatred of blacks, gays, and women).
The characters, having been sexually stifled in the droll atmosphere of America, let loose in the steamy, exotic Korean jungle. The sexual revolution arrives and love is free. As long as it is given freely by the film’s shallow, two-dimensional women. If it is not…well, every revolution demands sacrifice, and Nurse Houlihan pays the price to the entire camp. First when she dares to have sex with a Christian man (the nerve!) and later when the men want to determine whether she is a natural blonde. In the first instance her sex is broadcast on the radio, while in the second the entire camp gathers while the heroes expose her as she showers. Unlike the lovable idiots of Animal House, who fail again and again to score with the opposite sex, the jeering idiots of M*A*S*H, who use sexual humiliation as a weapon, have always turned my blood cold. If it was Altman’s goal to celebrate and capture the mentality that leads to rape, then I believe he succeeded.
What bothers me most about this movie is how much it fails. It would not have been terribly difficult to make us dislike a haughty religious man or a prudish uptight woman. Lord knows, both kinds of people have committed grave sins and done some horrible things. But that's not what M*A*S*H does. Robert Duvall’s character is deemed evil because he tries to teach a Korean kid who hangs out on the base about the Bible. Now, forcing your own religion on another is a pretty heinous albeit common thing, but Duvall doesn’t do this. He plays the scene with a bumbling compassion, a loser merely failing to impart what he himself loves. In another scene, Duvall yells at a nurse for selecting the wrong instrument while a patient dies. This is the closest we come to seeing his supposedly monstrous character. But the audience sees no such thing, we see rather a dedicated doctor lashing out in frustration. Duvall is guilty of cheating on his wife with Nurse Houlihan, as all the camp’s personnel are guilty of infidelity. When Hawkeye points this out to him, and disrespects Nurse Houlihan with insensitive words, he is attacked. It is the one moment in the movie at which I felt like cheering. After the fight, Duvall is dragged off to an insane asylum, and Altman has his petty victory over his own character. Those deemed sane by our normal standards have revealed their true stripes, only they haven’t really because the script is not good enough to show us how this could happen. It can barely even conjure up words of disdain for the class Duvall is supposed to represent.
Just as the film fails to make its villains unsympathetic, it utterly neglects to present its characters as likable. We are told, by the heroes themselves, that they are dedicated hard working surgeons who will stand up for everything that’s right. This moral dedication is exhibited in the operating room, in the form of making jokes while being up to the elbows in blood. No amount of blood or carnage can take the spring out of their step, or out of their libidos for that matter, as the men continue to flirt and sexually harass the nurses even at the grimmest moments of their patients' lives. There is a single moment in which the heroes act nobly. They insist on performing surgery on an ill local woman despite the chagrin of their commanding officer. Unfortunately they go on to spoil their good deed seconds later, by drugging the officer in question, stripping him naked, placing him amongst Korean whores, and blackmailing him with the photos.
The film finally loses faith in all of its own preaching and decides to limp out with a twenty minute slapstick football game. Nurse Houlihan dresses as a dirty, stupid cheerleader and acts the part. M*A*S*H lacks the strength of its own convictions. Its bad guys aren’t bad; its good guys aren’t good. It pretends to be a film about war, but is too confused to put a coherent message across or even support its own characters and ideas in the end. Some of the jokes are funny and it puts forth a good case for not putting people in the army who do not want to be there and don’t know what they are doing. Perhaps it took bravery to make an anti-war movie at the time (though even this is doubtful, as this movie came out after much of the peace movement had already happened and it lacked the chutzpah to actually talk about Vietnam itself). Other than that it fails catastrophically. Its script is weak, its story nonexistent, and although the acting is good, most of it contradicts what the script itself is attempting to tell us about the characters. It is, perhaps, the most overrated movie in existence. It is utterly undeserving of its praise by AFI or anyone else.
Robert Altman is a talented director who destroys all of his projects with his petty and contemptible loathing of other people. All of the characters in his films are brilliant exemplars of all that is rotten in the human spirit, but he has no clue as to what about the human spirit might be redeemable. For this reason M*A*S*H makes a lousy Animal House. And an even worse Catch-22.
Update: Picture of Loretta Swit replaced with one of Sally Kellerman. Thanks to JD Watson for pointing out this mistake.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Friday the American Film Institute (AFI) released a new list of the 100 best American movies as decided by 1,500 people in and around the film business. This list remained relatively faithful to the original list that the AFI released 10 years ago. Toy Story replaced Fantasia and the epic Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring replaced the even more epic Dr. Zhivago, but changes were the exception and not the rule. For the most part, movies that were deemed list-worthy last time made their way onto the new list. Among these was Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H, which was rated America’s 52nd best film on the original list but slipped to 58th best on this new list. High praise is not uncommon for this film, which won an Oscar for best screenplay upon its release, spawned a hit TV series, and is frequently cited by critics and movie goers as one of the best movies ever made.
As best as I can guess, the case for M*A*S*H goes something like the following: men are drafted into a war they don’t want to fight, a pointless war that reinforces the corrupt ideals and hypocritical morals that have turned their society ugly. Instead of following the system’s rules, these men behave like heroes—deconstructing the system from within. With Dadaist fervor they challenge everything their commanding officers insist on. If a “good” soldier should believe in Christ, then Hawkeye, Trapper John, and Duke will belittle the religious, replace the Bible with pornography, and generally disrupt the tyranny of religion. If a “good” American should be sexless and monogamous, then these boys will be anything but that. And if the American’s highest calling is football, well then, this lot of anti-heroes will beat the blonde, corn-fed bastard at his own game. Oh yes, there is also a plethora of jokes and breasts. It’s like Animal House with a message. Or a hysterical version of Catch-22.
Except that everything about this movie is wrong. Its jokes are largely unfunny and dated. It is spiteful of women, especially those like Nurse Houlihan who are good at their jobs and unattracted to the film’s male leads. These women must suffer brutal and unfunny sexual humiliation at every turn. This film exhibits everything that is wrong with 60s idealism while retaining nothing about it that’s right. There were, nearly all will grant, many things wrong with the morality of America in the 1950s. A lot of this involved distrust and hatred for blacks, gays, and women. M*A*S*H, with a misanthrope’s limited vision, wishes to topple the wrongs of the past. Its solution is that of a moron: since some thoughts in the past have turned out to be less than ideal we must do away with all the ideas held in the past. In the past people treated each other with respect. Not in Altman’s utopia. Everything has been redone, and all moral standards have been adjusted to serve the film’s protagonists (all except a belittling distrust and hatred of blacks, gays, and women).
The characters, having been sexually stifled in the droll atmosphere of America, let loose in the steamy, exotic Korean jungle. The sexual revolution arrives and love is free. As long as it is given freely by the film’s shallow, two-dimensional women. If it is not…well, every revolution demands sacrifice, and Nurse Houlihan pays the price to the entire camp. First when she dares to have sex with a Christian man (the nerve!) and later when the men want to determine whether she is a natural blonde. In the first instance her sex is broadcast on the radio, while in the second the entire camp gathers while the heroes expose her as she showers. Unlike the lovable idiots of Animal House, who fail again and again to score with the opposite sex, the jeering idiots of M*A*S*H, who use sexual humiliation as a weapon, have always turned my blood cold. If it was Altman’s goal to celebrate and capture the mentality that leads to rape, then I believe he succeeded.
What bothers me most about this movie is how much it fails. It would not have been terribly difficult to make us dislike a haughty religious man or a prudish uptight woman. Lord knows, both kinds of people have committed grave sins and done some horrible things. But that's not what M*A*S*H does. Robert Duvall’s character is deemed evil because he tries to teach a Korean kid who hangs out on the base about the Bible. Now, forcing your own religion on another is a pretty heinous albeit common thing, but Duvall doesn’t do this. He plays the scene with a bumbling compassion, a loser merely failing to impart what he himself loves. In another scene, Duvall yells at a nurse for selecting the wrong instrument while a patient dies. This is the closest we come to seeing his supposedly monstrous character. But the audience sees no such thing, we see rather a dedicated doctor lashing out in frustration. Duvall is guilty of cheating on his wife with Nurse Houlihan, as all the camp’s personnel are guilty of infidelity. When Hawkeye points this out to him, and disrespects Nurse Houlihan with insensitive words, he is attacked. It is the one moment in the movie at which I felt like cheering. After the fight, Duvall is dragged off to an insane asylum, and Altman has his petty victory over his own character. Those deemed sane by our normal standards have revealed their true stripes, only they haven’t really because the script is not good enough to show us how this could happen. It can barely even conjure up words of disdain for the class Duvall is supposed to represent.
Just as the film fails to make its villains unsympathetic, it utterly neglects to present its characters as likable. We are told, by the heroes themselves, that they are dedicated hard working surgeons who will stand up for everything that’s right. This moral dedication is exhibited in the operating room, in the form of making jokes while being up to the elbows in blood. No amount of blood or carnage can take the spring out of their step, or out of their libidos for that matter, as the men continue to flirt and sexually harass the nurses even at the grimmest moments of their patients' lives. There is a single moment in which the heroes act nobly. They insist on performing surgery on an ill local woman despite the chagrin of their commanding officer. Unfortunately they go on to spoil their good deed seconds later, by drugging the officer in question, stripping him naked, placing him amongst Korean whores, and blackmailing him with the photos.
The film finally loses faith in all of its own preaching and decides to limp out with a twenty minute slapstick football game. Nurse Houlihan dresses as a dirty, stupid cheerleader and acts the part. M*A*S*H lacks the strength of its own convictions. Its bad guys aren’t bad; its good guys aren’t good. It pretends to be a film about war, but is too confused to put a coherent message across or even support its own characters and ideas in the end. Some of the jokes are funny and it puts forth a good case for not putting people in the army who do not want to be there and don’t know what they are doing. Perhaps it took bravery to make an anti-war movie at the time (though even this is doubtful, as this movie came out after much of the peace movement had already happened and it lacked the chutzpah to actually talk about Vietnam itself). Other than that it fails catastrophically. Its script is weak, its story nonexistent, and although the acting is good, most of it contradicts what the script itself is attempting to tell us about the characters. It is, perhaps, the most overrated movie in existence. It is utterly undeserving of its praise by AFI or anyone else.
Robert Altman is a talented director who destroys all of his projects with his petty and contemptible loathing of other people. All of the characters in his films are brilliant exemplars of all that is rotten in the human spirit, but he has no clue as to what about the human spirit might be redeemable. For this reason M*A*S*H makes a lousy Animal House. And an even worse Catch-22.
Update: Picture of Loretta Swit replaced with one of Sally Kellerman. Thanks to JD Watson for pointing out this mistake.
Monday, June 25, 2007
The Road to Serfdom
Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master.
—Sallust
Barry Ritholz has a rant. Barry Ritholz believes that oil is "a matter of National Security". Consequently, Barry Ritholz believes it is not only the prerogative, rather the very duty, of the Federal Government to crack down on oil usage in the United States. The government must pass laws—and quickly!—which mandate all of the following:
- Subsidies for Oil and Ethanol need to be replaced with subsidies for Solar;
- CAFE standards need to be raised;
- Expedited processing for Nuclear Power plant permits should be issued.
Barry's thinking seems to be that whenever there is an emergency, it is imperative for the Federal Government to solve it immediately, by draconian measures if necessary.
It occurs to me that there are two standard mechanisms by which our liberties are gradually removed, one for each party. Either they must be removed in the name of National Security or they must be removed in the name of Doing Good (aka Helping Poor People, Ending Poverty, Stopping Global Warming, Serving Gaia, etc.). It has famously been stated that "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels", but I would submit that it is holier-than-thou do-gooderism which is the last refuge of mountebanks.
Reading further in Barry's rant, we discover that
I own a V8 (automatic), a straight 6 (6 speed), and a 4 cylinder (5 speed) -- so I am the last person to preach we all need to shift to Vespas and biofuels. But it's pretty apparent to even a gas hog like me that we need to do something other than send billions of dollars to terrorist nations each and every single month.
Why then, Barry, don't you do it? What, praytell, restrains you?
So, let us analyze this. In order to be spared the considerable pain of having to give up his V8 and replace it with a bicycle, or to sell off one or more of his cars, Barry demands that CAFE standards be raised abstractly, so that lots of other people are forced by the (evil) car companies into having more expensive cars with higher-mileage.
Is there not something utterly peculiar here? Is there not something rotten in the State of America? Is this the rational action of an adult free man, or the whine of a would-be child who wants to be taken care of by the nanny-state? I submit that this is not the American Way. I submit that our forefathers would have died of shame before demanding laws to protect themselves against their own actions from far-away Washington. A nation which consciously chooses sheepdom should scarcely be surprised to find that it is no longer free.
I call on you, Barry, to step up and be a free man after all. Sell your car. Do it for your country. Do it for Global Warming. We'll all be glad you did.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Science Media Studies
Britain continues it's decline into socialist stupidity, where slogans and propaganda replace thought and knowledge. The latest victim: physics.
Note this bit, "Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins." That is precisely why I went into science and mathematics in high school, it was a concious decision because I was empowered, I could compete with the teachers. In the humanities it was always a matter of opinion, and teachers often have silly opinions. Now the humanities seem to have won in England. So the scribes will have their permanent positions while the peasants labor to support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed. It is progress that any of the pharaonic priesthoods would have appreciated.
The thing that attracts pupils to physics is its precision. Here, at last, is a discipline that gives real answers that apply to the physical world. But that precision is now gone. Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE. Physics is a subject unpolluted by a torrent of malleable words, but now everything must be described in words.
In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.
...
Pupils are taught to poke holes in scientific experiments, to constantly find what is wrong. However, never are the pupils given ways to determine when an experiment is reliable, to know when an experiment yields information about the world that we can trust. This encourages the belief that all quantitative data is unreliable and untrustworthy. Some of my pupils, after a year of the course, have gone from scientifically minded individuals to thinking, “It’s not possible to know anything, so why bother?” Combining distrust of scientific evidence with debates won on style and presentation alone is an unnerving trend that will lead society astray.
Note this bit, "Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins." That is precisely why I went into science and mathematics in high school, it was a concious decision because I was empowered, I could compete with the teachers. In the humanities it was always a matter of opinion, and teachers often have silly opinions. Now the humanities seem to have won in England. So the scribes will have their permanent positions while the peasants labor to support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed. It is progress that any of the pharaonic priesthoods would have appreciated.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Only the Second Level?
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Take the Dante's Inferno Test
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very Low |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Moderate |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Very High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | High |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Moderate |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Moderate |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Moderate |
| Level 7 (Violent) | High |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | High |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Take the Dante's Inferno Test
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Death threats for climate skeptics
Yes, it has come to that.
Not that surprising, really, and no doubt related to this other headline at Drudge, NEW HOLLYWOOD BAD GUYS: ENVIRONMENTAL VILLAINS... DEVELOPING...(no link given).
Every public figure probably receives death threats because the world is full of loonies, and I don't mean Canadian dollars. Even so, it is strange that climate scientists should be receiving such threats. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing; everyone reads about tyrannical regimes and the heroes who resisted, and no doubt most of us like to think we would be among the good guys. I expect 100% of academics think they would be among that hallowed band, and now they have the oportunity to discover if they truly have the moral balls they think they do. Lysenkoism in its modern guise is no joke. Who will support the skeptics? Who will resist the political temptations and their attendent trappings of money and power? We will find out.
Update:
Comments on reactions here. Apparently Durkin wanted to name the show Apocalypse My Arse. Note on Durkin, he was associated with the magazine Living Marxism, so perhaps a Marxist of the classic sort. Durkin responds to these revelations:
Heh. It is worth remembering that Marx was a great proponent of industrialization as an improvement over peasant farming. That is why the USSR and its imitators sold themselves as the way to the industrial future, it just didn't work out all that well. Anyway, you can see that point of view at the end of the show where the Greens are painted as Luddite villains holding back third world development. The Spiked Magazine interview with Durkin is here.
h/t: under the whip in the comment thread at Tim Blair.
Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.
One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.
Not that surprising, really, and no doubt related to this other headline at Drudge, NEW HOLLYWOOD BAD GUYS: ENVIRONMENTAL VILLAINS... DEVELOPING...(no link given).
Every public figure probably receives death threats because the world is full of loonies, and I don't mean Canadian dollars. Even so, it is strange that climate scientists should be receiving such threats. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing; everyone reads about tyrannical regimes and the heroes who resisted, and no doubt most of us like to think we would be among the good guys. I expect 100% of academics think they would be among that hallowed band, and now they have the oportunity to discover if they truly have the moral balls they think they do. Lysenkoism in its modern guise is no joke. Who will support the skeptics? Who will resist the political temptations and their attendent trappings of money and power? We will find out.
Update:
Comments on reactions here. Apparently Durkin wanted to name the show Apocalypse My Arse. Note on Durkin, he was associated with the magazine Living Marxism, so perhaps a Marxist of the classic sort. Durkin responds to these revelations:
‘Shock, horror’, he says. ‘Exposing that a journalist has a Marxist background is like exposing that he wears trousers.’
Heh. It is worth remembering that Marx was a great proponent of industrialization as an improvement over peasant farming. That is why the USSR and its imitators sold themselves as the way to the industrial future, it just didn't work out all that well. Anyway, you can see that point of view at the end of the show where the Greens are painted as Luddite villains holding back third world development. The Spiked Magazine interview with Durkin is here.
h/t: under the whip in the comment thread at Tim Blair.
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