Sadly, No!

The good folks at the American Prospect Online were kind enough to publish this article written by myself and the good Dr. Roy Edroso. It’s about right-wing criticism of the arts, and it’s pretty amusing, if I do say so myself. Excerpt:

Libertas, the blog sponsored by the right-wing Liberty Film Festival, makes a mission of finding the political talking points in loud summer blockbusters. “The films politics are decidedly pro-American, pro-military, and even *gasp* pro-freedom,” says one review at Libertas. “[The director’s] affection for the American military is obvious in every scene they’re in. They are uniformly portrayed as heroic, extremely competent, selfless, and even kind to Arab children. The theme of the film is spoken out loud more than once: No sacrifice, no victory.” Which film is he talking about? Why, the robot smash-’em-up Transformers, of course. Of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Libertas reported, “The bottom line is that Harry’s readying his troops for war here. The word ‘war’ is even used. They’re going to fight evil even if the Democ– er … Ministry of Magic won’t.” At Libertas, every popcorn clash of Good and Evil has some relevance to the War on Terror, whether the combatants use guns, magic wands, or overgrown Hasbro dolls.

Read the whole thing, and be sure to give us lotsa traffic and/or positive feedback. Thanks, kids 🙂

UPDATE: To the cruel and nasty person in the comments who compared our piece to Camille Paglia’s latest insanity, all I have to say is puh-leaze, homey. You will not find any sentences such as this one in our piece:

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s.

And that’s not the worst of it:

We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” or “Persona”? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film “Star Wars” epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

Does Paglia honestly think that “Attack of the Clones” belongs in the same breath as “The Godfather” and “The Seventh Seal.” Egad, I is frightened.

UPDATE UPDATE: I can has fixed teh link.

Above: Cock-up leaves YRNC with a shorter staff

“I will essentially be the mouthpiece and effective leader for the tens of thousands of Young Republicans, 18 to 40, across the country,” said Murphy

At the time, few realized that he meant literally.

L0lllerzzzz!!!!1!

Gavin adds: These flames of contention make such a pretty light!

I have discovered a major profundity:

1. Blog post excoriates Michael Ignatieff for turning against the Iraq War and allegedly holding an anti-Israel bias.

2. Declares Ignatieff’s opinion irrelevant, because “Ignatieff is CANADIAN so why should his views matter is beyond me.”

3. Same blog post approvingly cites David Frum.

4. Blog’s perhaps overly-optimistic title is “American Thinker”.

It looks like this, my friends.

I picture Michelle Malkin sitting at her laptop for weeks on end typing “All work and no play makes Scott Thomas Beauchamp a traitor” over and over and over over and over and over over and over and over over and over and over over and over and over over and over and over over and over and over…

…and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Meanwhile the following happened in Iraq today:

–Pentagon admits 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq
–Iraq leadership in disarray as ministers quit Cabinet
–Suicide bombing kills 28 — 19 children — in Iraq
–Iraq power system ‘near collapse’
–Roadside Bombs Kill 4 US Troops in Iraq

And so on. And so forth.

I know these people don’t give a damn that their little imperial pet project has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, has given rise to a new generation of terrorists, and has made the Middle East vastly less stable. As I’ve said before, they simply do not have souls.

Obama’s Threat to Attack Pakistan Raises Red Flags in Germany

Above: Ulf Gartzke, Deutschbag

• The warmongering Barack Obama will alienate America’s allies.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Previously in conservatism’s generational struggle to end American warmongering:

• Bill Clinton is squandering our troops in an 800-million-dollar Somalia quagmire.

• Bill Clinton’s Haiti catastrophe is a rudderless quag-disaster.

• Bill Clinton’s Kosovo quagmire is a super drug-tainted terror-spawning disastrophe.

Thanks for giving me this gift, Mr. Bailey. I will cherish it until the Singularity arrives:

Would you give up your immortality to ensure the success of a posthuman world? Answering hard questions at the World Transhumanist conference

Ronald Bailey | July 27, 2007

The title alone is worth its weight in LOLs. I wonder what sort of valiant task a brave, self-sacrificing transhumanist would have to perform to ensure the survival of posthumanity. Destroying all of Michael Moore’s cookie dough-stained horcruxes, perhaps? Throwing the One Ring into the bottom of Al Gore’s super-heated swimming pool?

Amazingly, there’s more:

On Wednesday at Transvision 2007, Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence guru who heads up MIT’s Media Lab, puckishly suggested we could solve any population problem by uploading the minds of 10 billion people and running them on a computer that occupies a few cubic meters and costs only a few hundred dollars to run.

An excellent idea. My nominees for the process? Warbloggers! Let’s grant Ace, Glenn Reynolds and Confederate Yankee their ultimate wish and upload them into a giant computer! They could spend eternity playing World of Warcraft while examining virtual kernings to reveal wicked MSM LIES about the Iraq war, which by then will be in its 2,354th year. Beam ’em up, Scotty!

Minsky is not shy about speculating on what the future may hold. Once researchers understand how brains work, “we will discover ways to upload our minds into machines.” He predicted that our AI descendants (what AI researcher Hans Moravec called our mind children) will eventually escape from this planet and spread throughout the universe. “If we are the only intelligence in the universe, then we are obligated to ensure that the universe remains meaningful,” said Minsky.

Pity the poor universe! In 5,000 years it will be infested by billions of Glennbot clones!

*Bzt!* Heh! *Bzt!* Indeed! *Bzt!* Heh! *Bzt!* Read the whole thing!

We sat at a table together over lunch and it was amusing to see some of the more Marxist-inclined transhumanists express horror when Minsky explained that he thought that democracy was not such a good idea. Why would anyone want to be governed by a majority of stupid people, he wondered.

What a great guy.

Tell me again, why should I want to live forever in a universe that’s populated by these kinds of transpeople?

To be fair, not all transhumanists are the Randroid wankbots that Bailey describes. But I’ll be darned if they don’t at least make up a very strong majority.

UPDATE: See also Roy.

UPDATE UPDATE: I think this comment says it all:

Bob Kelley said,

August 7, 2007 at 22:10 · Edit

Jeez, I thought that those on the left would be a little more future-oriented. So long, bozos, we’ll dance on your graves!

That’s cool because, as I noted earlier, living forever with people like you would be hell on earth anyway.

Confounded by a glorious uprising of the people, the saboteur Beauchamp has signed a voluntary confession under no influence from his superiors.

Update: Whoopsie!

Is it, is it, is it?

For employees at Clarian Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning.

In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index [BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat] is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they’ll be charged $5 for each standard they don’t meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they’ll be charged another $5 in each check.

Clarian has been making headlines for its aggressive and unusual approach to covering escalating health-care costs. Rather than taking the more common step of giving employees incentives for merely participating in its wellness programs, such as joining a smoking cessation group or using a health coach, Clarian is actually measuring outcomes. And unlike most employers, it is penalizing workers for poor health instead of rewarding them for taking healthy steps.

The most persuasive argument against letting the state run our country’s health care is that nobody enjoys having gubmint bureaucrats regulating our personal choices- i.e., telling us not to smoke, not to drink, to eat healthy, etc. But our employer-based is already heading in this direction to a far greater extent than the gubmint-run health care system in France ever will (the French, despite being skinnier than the average American, are still pretty unhealthy people who smoke all the time and eat a fair amount of fatty garbage).

So that does it, then. There is absolutely no damn reason to not let the government run our health care. Bring on socialized medicine, and faster please!

(Thanks to MCH for the tip.)

Sigh:

A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I’d say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true. (Parenthetic links are to more of my writings.)

[…]

If your head is cryogenically frozen today, you will be alive in 2100.

Your mind is a pattern of activity in your brain. The ability to induce that pattern is encoded primarily in your neurons — in which neurons are of which type, and which neurons are connected together. Freezing a brain today in liquid nitrogen destroys many things, but seems to preserve this type/connection info. By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive. (More here.)

By 2100, the vast majority of “people” will be immortal computers running brain simulations.

Simulated brains are potentially immortal, just as all computer data is. And the ability to cheaply simulate brains will revolutionize labor economics; wages should fall to near the cost of making brain simulators. The population of such “uploads” should expand very rapidly, allowing huge increases in both economic growth rates and inequality. (More here and here.)

Please save me from these people. I do not want to have my head frozen for the next 93 years. I don’t want to become a fracking immortal computer program. Moreover, I do not want to live in a world populated entirely by unfrozen heads downloaded into robot bodies. Just stop it and let me die whenever I want to die, you twisted freaks.

But wait- it gets worse:

If we switched to “futarchy” as a form of government, we would be richer and just as happy.

Under futarchy we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Legislators would define and monitor an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare. The rule then is: if market speculators estimate a policy would increase national welfare, that policy becomes law. Because speculative markets aggregate info well, choices would be based on our best available info about policy consequences.

I can’t wait to see how short sellers affect this particular market:

(Via Max.)