The requirement for marriage licenses in the U.S. has been justified on the basis that the state has an overriding right, on behalf of all citizens and in the interests of the larger social welfare, to protect them from disease or improper/illegal marriages; to keep accurate state records; or even to ensure that marriage partners have had adequate time to think carefully before marrying.
In Germany, the Green Party exercises a huge amount of power—and coercion. Their policies sound suspiciously like the energy policy "initiatives" incessantly promoted by the current American political establishment. And their willingness to ignore the scientific, economic, liberty, and aesthetic objections to green mandates are endemic here as well.
Reglazing the broken windows of our popular culture — the argument from character. by Warren Moore I was discussing argumentation with my frosh this morning, and while most of the class was devoted to Stephen Toulmin’s elements of argument, we spent a little time talking about the Aristotelian idea that ethos — the appeal based on the character of the speaker — is typically formed during the rhetorical act itself. In simpler terms, this is why one should avoid spelling/grammar errors on one’s resume, for example — it diminishes the applicant’s ethos. Likewise, decisions regarding tone and diction impact a speaker’s ethical standing, and thus his rhetorical effectiveness. (Indeed, even my use of his in the preceding sentence marks me to some audiences as an old frump, and possibly sexist in the bargain, even if it’s happening under the radar.) For an example of this, consider the career of Charles Rocket, or more recently, Michael Richards. But of course, this sort of diminution of ethos can only operate when there are standards or taboos (depending on one’s perspective). This brings us to a recent article by Myron Magnet at City Journal. Magnet reviews the recent kerfuffle between the mayor of
The long-running TV soap opera All My Children concludes today. I won’t be watching, having never been an aficionado of soap operas, but I don’t look down on them, and I think that the cultural loss is real. Although the show may return on the Web, which would be a good thing for its followers, of course, odds are that it will be of lower production quality and more difficult for its audience to find. As I say, I think there’s much good in soap operas even though they’re not a preferred form of entertainment for me. Here’s what I wrote a couple of months ago about the subject, for Pajamas Media: In Defense of Soap Operas Even lowbrow drama may have a more human voice than highbrow reality TV. May 7, 2011 – 12:00 am – by S. T. Karnick I’m no devotee of soap operas, and I never have been, but I’m rather saddened to hear that ABC has canceled two of its remaining three daytime dramas, All My Children and One Life to Live. Only General Hospital survived this latest purge, and it seems only a matter of time before it too is jettisoned. The other networks
A jury in Florida didn’t think Bryan Santana was worth $9 million, as his parents figured, but half that much: On September 9, a West Palm Beach jury awarded parents Rodolfo Santana and Ana Mejia $4.5 million because they did not get accurate information from Dr. Marie Morel and OB/GYN Specialists of the Palm Beaches. Their son Bryan Santana, now age 3, was born disabled. He has no arms and only one leg. The argument made by his parents was that if the clinic had told them their son was so disabled, they would have aborted him. And since they didn’t get a chance to terminate Bryan in the womb, and obviously they can’t legally do it now, they wanted millions of dollars. — Paul Cooper Apparently, being imperfect justifies abortion in many people’s eyes: In the UK there are limits on when you can abort a baby unless that baby has severe disabilities. The UK law does not define those disabilities but allows abortion up until the moment of birth if the child is disabled. Why? Obviously the message is that a child with disabilities has less value or reason to live. . . . . In America, 90%
— and some people aren’t at all happy about it: Australia is to remove the birth of Jesus as a reference point for dates in school history books. Under the new politically correct curriculum, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, yesterday condemned the move as an ‘intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.’ He described the phrase ‘common era’ as ‘meaningless,’ and compared it to using ‘festive season’ instead of Christmas. The changes, introduced by the government, were supposed to be pushed through next year, but have been delayed by the row. The terms CE and BCE have been popularised in academic and scientific publications. One of Australia’s political party leaders, Christopher Pyne, also registered his objections: ‘Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,’ he said. ‘Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people,’
Liberal Progressivism is evidently an infectious “meme” throughout Anglophone culture. In the wake of the rioting in Great Britain last month (often perpetrated by “children” raised by the welfare state), Melanie Phillips offers her diagnosis of the etiology of this “meme” and a prognosis for how to deal with it: The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by Left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism. These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children); and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’. And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense. From this side of The Pond, what Phillips says sounds awfully
How does one explain the efflorescence of the vampire in popular culture? David Solway has an idea: One can’t help but notice the growing prevalence of the vampire archetype in contemporary fiction and film, corresponding to the popular fascination with the Titanic story. The vampire and the Titanic constitute cultural paradigms, aspects of the subliminal awareness of deep social currents, suppressed forces, and nocturnal apprehensions expressed as aesthetic configurations. It used to be “sympathy for the devil.” Now it’s sympathy for cognizable evil: The premonition that something is awfully wrong haunts the imagination, although much of the time we cannot isolate precisely what it is that lurks in the shadows of our doubts and misgivings. Terrorism and a revived Islam, for example, clearly stalk the collective psyche. According to ancient lore, the vampire must first be invited into the premises he subsequently terrorizes, and this is certainly the case with the Islamic demographic. At the same time, all too many of us refuse to consciously acknowledge the threat and strive instead to prettify the image of Islam as a “religion of peace” — just as the modern vampire tends to be nipped and tucked into a cosmetic semblance of nobility
If it does, you can blame … J. R. R. Tolkien? . . . one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call “West Coast White nationalism” because West Coast White nationalism, a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of a racially defined new order of society, you take one look at them and you think that they’re hippies or you think that they’re liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like Eastern spirituality, and drinking fruit juice, and wearing sandals, and granola, and vegetarianism, and organic food and organic farming, all these sort of things that you think are kind of hippie things. If you look at the roots of a lot of the West Coast hippie culture and also the hippie culture in Europe for that matter, a lot of it goes back to Tolkien. What doesn’t come from the New Left, let’s say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien which is pretty much directly connected with European Traditionalism. — Greg Johnson According to this view, ’60s hippies took Tolkien’s “message of
John Huston’s 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel The Maltese Falcon is, in my opinion , the superior work of art (though the novel is no mean accomplishment itself). The plot centers on the search for an extremely valuable statuette of a falcon, made centuries ago on the island of Malta , with people killing others in order to obtain it. The villains are mostly colorful, sophisticated, and at least superficially upper-class. Indeed, one of the two ways the film, in my opinion, is superior to the novel is that Mary Astor’s portrayal of Brigid O’Shaughnessy is three-dimensional, whereas in the book she is nothing more than a beautiful temptress. The hero, private eye Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart, in his breakthrough role) , is capable, tough, and edgy. I have used the word hero, but he is at best a tarnished one. Though he seems tired, and even sickened, of it by the time the film begins, Spade has been cuckolding his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan). Regarding Archer’s murder, Spade says, “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.… When one of your organization gets killed, it’s … it’s bad for business to
By Shmuel Ben-Gad Spy stories are, at least sometimes, a secular equivalent of ghost stories, tales of mysterious menace. (Note that spies are sometimes referred to as spooks.) Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is unquestionably one of the best writers of spy stories in English. His stories are filled with mystery and menace and are distinguished by an air of realism, sophisticated plots, and polished prose. Ambler’s first tales appeared in the 1930s, and they reflect the tensions of European politics of the time. Ambler was then sympathetic to socialism, which is reflected in his stories of this period. The hero in two of his books, Background to Danger (1937, also published as Uncommon Danger) and Cause for Alarm (1938), is Zaleshoff, a Soviet agent. In an interview in the Times of London, Amber said, “Before the war I was very much an anti-Fascist writer, and after August 1939 and the Nazi-Soviet pact I`d really lost my subject matter. I was of the Thirties, and long after the tears had been wiped away there was still a sense of loss, a loss of belief.” Nonetheless, one of his major themes at this point was non-ideological and even anti-ideological: an ordinary Englishman visiting
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