3/6/10 Links
A tribe of black Jews has been discovered.
A Jewish actress has discovered that she loves black men.
My page on why black people are so loud has moved up to second on Google.
Russia proves once again that it’s culturally different than the West.
Time reports on the German homeschooling family granted asylum in the US.
Auster names his litmus test for those on the right. You’ll never guess what it is.
Slate culture writer Troy Patterson dislikes Jay Leno for taking Conan’s job. The market has spoken. Is Leno supposed to disappoint millions of viewers for the feelings of the talk show host who failed in his place and a few Swipples? In an older blog post at Slate some feminist writes
Now [Leno is] an edgeless, middling host who plays to an imaginary concept of polite, family humor, when the truth is that even polite, family humor has gotten sharper and edgier over the years. Again, I point to my Midwestern grandmother, a lover of all Apatow movies—you know, the ones in which words and phrases like “dick,” “pussy,” and “Prepare to suck the cock of karma!” are thrown around more than “amen” in a Southern Baptist church. Our tastes have changed. The concept of polite humor is dying. And we’re pissed off that network TV won’t relinquish the old guard and please us, the American audience.
The American audience has spoken and they want Leno. This reminds me of those socialists who talk about companies pushing their products on us when people really demand X, which they don’t actually buy.
I was inspired to check out FrumForum by recent events. On the front page I found a call
to teach global warming in schools and a link to an article demanding a purge of the anti-war right. Apparently, it’s important that America be on guard against cutting its number of nukes. FF seems to have its own litmus test for conservatives too. Update: FrumForum’s latest conservative issue: women in combat.
An old story: North Korea will feed its population by breeding giant rabbits. Among Swipples, rabbit is gaining popularity.
Here’s a video from Time on the Tea Party. I can’t figure out whether it’s supposed to be friendly or mocking, until the end when you see people cheering for Sarah Palin. Ending with that is supposed to scare the viewer. Not a single non-white there. What will it take to make this an explicitly white movement? Perhaps a few years of open hatred for the elites and getting comfortable being an all white crowd rallying against the establishment.
A judge in Texas arbitrarily rules that the death penalty is unconstitutional. I bet the good people of that state won’t stand for it.
Blacks walk over a dying man to order chicken.
David Brooks talks about the similarities between the Tea Party and the New Left.
There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.
But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left…
But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it…
But the Tea Partiers are closer to the New Left. They don’t seek to form a counter-establishment because they don’t believe in establishments or in authority structures. They believe in the spontaneous uprising of participatory democracy. They believe in mass action and the politics of barricades, not in structure and organization. As one activist put it recently on a Tea Party blog: “We reject the idea that the Tea Party Movement is ‘led’ by anyone other than the millions of average citizens who make it up.”
For this reason, both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.
What Brooks leaves out is that the New Left succeeded. They didn’t need a political party because their views on race and sexuality became embedded in the culture. If the same thing happens with the Tea Party, we can consider ourselves very lucky.
