“Barbie”: another movie I don’t plan to see
Pity. The ads made me think that it might be something like the movie “Enchanted,” which I enjoyed. The latter was a charming film about a character from a fairy tale who’s transported to the real world and has to function there. It was made in 2007, which seems like a century ago in some ways.
“Barbie” is also about a pretend character living in a fantasy world – in this case, the doll Barbie – transported into the real world for a while. But the ads lied. It’s rather short on the charm, to say the least:
The plot of the movie is that Kens are second-class citizens in Barblieland. but then they see in the “real world” that there’s a thing called “the patriarchy,” where men are on top (and routinely sexually assault women), so they make Barbieland into a patriarchy.
The plot then becomes all about returning the Kens back to their rightful place, on the bottom of society.
The plot isn’t about making men and women equal — it’s about fixing society so that women are on top, as they should be, and men are slaves again.
And this is the Feminist view of the ideal state of the world.
Let’s not limit this to modern feminism. It’s the case with the leftist viewpoint in general, and/or postmodernism. If there is no truth except that we belong to identity groups and the only thing that matters is power, the only solution is to be a member of the group in power. Turning the tables is fair game, and in fact it’s the only game.
A nasty and reductionist point of view. But that’s the way it’s been playing out in many areas these days, as the Gramscian march keeps charging forward.
Sagan on changing one’s mind
The other day, commenter “AesopFan” offered the following quotes from astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
…
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.”
…
“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know, that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again […] I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
I’ve seen these things play out prominently in my life, so the quotes really got my attention.
For example, I recently had a conversation that demonstrated the first two, and it’s certainly not the first time. The form such conversations take is that the person states an opinion that is based on some things that I have found to be untrue, but also tells me that I shouldn’t offer any rebuttal. Sometimes the person says there is nothing that would act to change that person’s mind. In the recent conversation, when I tried to say that perhaps what I would add would actually make that person feel better about things, or at least understand what the other side thinks and believes and why, the response was that I don’t understand that person’s feelings.
Depressing.
For Sagan’s third quote, I couldn’t help but think how outdated it was. Nowadays, I don’t think it often happens that scientists change their minds, at least not in any field that has become politicized – and a great deal of science has become more politicized. And of course, I (and others) have changed my mind in politics – or at least, my political designation, although not really my basic principles. That change was based in large part on evidence and arguments by conservatives such as Thomas Sowell.
And surely people change their minds regarding religion quite often – there are converts, for example, or people who come back to the fold of their original religion, or people who lose their faith. But Sagan is correct, I think, in indicating it doesn’t usually happen as a result of someone presenting a good argument about religion.
Devon Archer’s impending testimony on Joe Biden
For many years Joe Biden has claimed that he never spoke to Hunter about his business dealings. That was never especially believable, and there were even photos of Joe with some of the people with whom Hunter did business. The MSM didn’t care to look into the matter, of course.
Now that the GOP-controlled House is looking into the matter, the MSM is still showing a lack of interest in what would be a Watergate-squared type story if only the perps were Republicans:
The Democrat hacktivist media had their priorities last week, and it seems that the shock hit The Sound of Freedom was more important to them than a host of other news . . . like the whistleblower hearings that blew the lid off the Biden family corruption and influence peddling.
Now reports are that Hunter Biden’s previous business partner Devon Archer will be testifying to the House on the subject of Joe Biden’s involvement while he was still VP:
Hunter Biden put then-VP dad Joe on the phone with business associates at least 2 dozen times, ex-partner Devon Archer to testify https://t.co/HPo9m9JCTE pic.twitter.com/DBCD9XlnbE
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) July 24, 2023
Also:
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said, “We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone.”
If Archer’s testimony turns out as predicted, I still don’t think it will matter, except to the right and some smattering of Independents paying attention. Democrats will not pay attention, or if they do they will not care, or if they care they will say that Trump (or whichever random Republican manages to be nominated in 2024) is worse.
Watergate mattered for two reasons. The first was that the press hyped the story because it allowed them to make themselves out to be heroes as well as because Nixon was a Republican – and one they especially disliked. The second is that many Republicans were outraged at what Nixon had done and abandoned him, indicating to him that they would vote to impeach and convict him.
In later years, it occurred to me that if Nixon had been a Democrat, Watergate would have been a small footnote. The press would not have hyped it and the Democrats would not have abandoned one of their own for something as piffling as principle.
Open thread 7/24/23
You can’t keep a good song down:
Desperation, love, cars, and song
[NOTE: I wrote about the “Fast Car” brouhaha involving the Luke Combs cover version two days ago. That sparked further thoughts – thus, this post.]
The strength of the song “Fast Car” is due in no small part to its lyrics’ powerful evocation of hope, desperation, and despair. Sometimes things just don’t work out, even for those who are doing their best to do what’s right. Sometimes the deck really does seem stacked against them – and that’s true whether the song is sung by a black woman back in 1988 or a country-type white guy in 2023.
Some of the lyrics:
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we’ll make something
Me, myself, I got nothing to prove
You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
By the song’s end, the singer seems trapped, although of course we don’t know the ultimate trajectory of her life. There’s also this lyric:
So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder…
In America in particular, the car isn’t just a form of transportation. It’s often seen as a way to express oneself, especially for the young, and a means of escape to freedom. Speed is part of this, as is lovemaking – or at least it was back then. The very first kisses, the very first touches, and the very first sex often happened to teenagers in a car.
My second boyfriend, whom I met when I was seventeen, came from a place that was more like the world about which country singer Luke Combs might be singing – rural, depressed, mostly white. It was a world in which the young men all had guns and hunted with them, and they had fast cars or fast motorcycles. At nineteen years of age, my boyfriend had a lot of friends who were already lying in quiet graves, the victims mostly of those fast cars plus alcohol. And the survivors like my boyfriend were already living lives of not-so-quiet desperation.
I had met this boyfriend freshman year at college, and as you might imagine we were a bit of an odd couple. He had somewhat of a Steve McQueen vibe, was smart but troubled, and had earned a scholarship to the far-off college where we’d met. But he didn’t last long there – it was a foreign world to him – and he dropped out just a few months after starting.
He went back to that small town where he’d grown up, and as far as I know he never left. I visited him there briefly a few months after his return home; he’d bought a motorcycle, and we went riding on it. Fast, with my arms wrapped around his waist.
That boyfriend died a long time ago. I know because now and then I’d Google his name, and the only mark he seemed to have made was when he died, because the first sign I ever found of him in all those years was his obituary. It was two sentences long. There didn’t seem to be a family; no wife and children. There was no mention of accomplishments. I don’t know what happened and will never know. But I don’t think it was a happy story.
“Fast Car” makes me think of him.
It also makes me think of another set of lyrics from another great song: Dire Straits’ “Telegraph Road.” It’s a lengthy song that tells some of the story of America’s history. It’s set in Detroit and came out in 1982, a few years before “Fast Car.” Here are the lyrics I’m talking about:
Well, I’d sooner forget, but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But just believe in me, baby, and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
‘Cause I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again
From all of these signs saying, “Sorry, but we’re closed”
All the way
Down the Telegraph Road
And to put these words I’ve been writing about to the music that goes with them, here’s Tracy Chapman herself singing the original “Fast Car.” She’s got such an evocative voice with that fast vibrato and resonant timbre:
This is Luke Combs’ version, very faithful to the original:
And here’s Mark Knopfler the great, singing about roads, cars, love, and despair in Detroit along Telegraph Road – or anywhere (the part I discussed starts around 7:42, but the whole song is wonderful):
COVID lab leak coverups, then and now
The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.
As these [COVID lab leak discussion] documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it.
I think I stopped completely trusting scientific authorities quite some time ago, and probably you did, too. And by “quite some time ago” I mean way before COVID.
But in another sense Taibbi is correct about the effect of COVID on my sense of trust, because if I really try to remember my attitude at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, I probably thought that the authorities would be at least a little more honest and forthcoming than they ended up being. However, quite early on I realized something was very amiss, and that there was a lot of panic-stoking going on, both by scientists, journalists, and government officials. It was pretty easy to see just by crunching the illness and death numbers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship – remember that? I do, because I wrote about it at length. I also reflected on those early musings in this post.
And so, because these things were relatively easy to see if a person actually looked at what was happening, I figured some sort of deception plus/or stupidity was going on in a lot of the reporting on COVID.
And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of the subject I could find on this blog is from April of 2020, which is pretty early. Here’s what I wrote back then:
You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.
But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.
Then I quoted this piece by Jonathan Turley:
When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.
Turley is not a research biologist, nor am I. But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political. One didn’t have to be a scientist to see that – plus, there were other scientists who said that the virus had a structure that made it likely it was the result of bioengineering.
So if reporters were fooled it was because they wanted to be, or were simply stupid, or both. Or perhaps not so many were actually fooled.
But back to the more recent revelations about what was going on among some scientists towards the beginning:
The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”
The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?
The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.”…
The scientists were responding to “higher-ups.” Although the identities of these “higher-ups” remain to be further investigated, the new documents and Congressional interviews suggest that the “higher ups” may be Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome trust, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, government agencies, and/or the intelligence community.
I haven’t read the source material of the original communications among the scientists, but you can find links to the fuller materials here.
Not really so weird
From commenter “AesopFan” on the thread about the two versions of the song “Fast Car”:
It is profoundly weird that people who claim to be standing up for gays and lesbians are actually the ones erasing the history and achievements of homosexual people.”
It does indeed seem weird, but it’s really not. It’s completely logical and is actually required for leftist activism on certain topics today. It the argument on the left is that bigotry has kept a certain group or groups down in a certain field, and that such bigotry continues to the present day, the existence of earlier achievements by too many members of that group undermines the argument. Oh, one or two might be allowed as stellar examples of success against all odds. But if there are more than those one or two, the whole edifice of the argument begins to collapse.
That phenomenon is also the impetus for the proliferation of fake hate crimes in the last decade or so, although that has a many-decades-long history as well (see Tawana Brawley, for example). Real persecution and real hate crimes – which of course have actually existed and were more numerous historically – don’t need manufacturing.
But the narrative of continuing systemic oppression requires a steady diet of hatred directed at the victim group. If there isn’t enough evidence of that hatred, the evidence must be faked.
Open thread 7/22/23
What Biden corruption? The IRS whistleblowers, the Democrats, the press, and Trump
Biden good, Trump bad. That’s all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
So many things have been emerging from the House hearings on the whistleblowers, plus some news on Trump, that I’m just going to do a roundup.
(1) Margot Cleveland discusses the Democrat narratives that attempt to discredit and/or minimize and/or distract from the testimony of the IRS whistleblowers on Biden corruption and FBI and DOJ protection of the Bidens.
(2) Miranda Devine covers the story in the NY Post.
(3) From Jonathan Turley, entitled “‘So Called’ Journalism: NBC Calls the Two Respected IRS Veterans ‘So Called Whistleblowers’”
(4) Here’s Megyn Kelly’s interview with the whistleblowers:
(5) Donald Trump’s Florida trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024. That’s after many of the primaries but not all of them. By that time, Trump may already have the nomination sewn up.
Let’s look behind the headlines about those terrible 83 Republicans who voted against the amendment to rehire pilots fired over refusal to get COVID vaccines
I’ve often seen it around the blogosphere – the old “uniparty” label for the GOP members of Congress. Here’s a typical treatment of today’s version of the old story (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes”):
83 Republican congressmen joined nearly every Democrat in Congress to defeat an amendment that would allow airlines to re-hire any pilots that they let go because of the vaccine mandates.
With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?
Of course, Democrats are awful. But nearly 100 Republicans also opposed this measure. 83 Republicans are STILL pro-vax mandate.
What a clown world we live in.
When people read that, what do they think? The author seems to be saying that (a) the amendment in question that the 83 GOP members opposed merely would allow airlines to rehire the pilots (b) those who voted against the measure support making vaccines compulsory for pilots; and (c) this represents a “clown world” in which people act like idiots and all is pretense, and the notion that Republicans in Congress represent anything much different from Democrats amounts to belief in one of those pretenses.
When I read the story, I thought: that’s a lot of Republicans. I wonder what they gave as their reason. And so I looked it up, and after about a minute I found this explanation [emphasis mine]:
The U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass an amendment to a bill on Thursday morning that would have required airlines to rehire pilots who were fired or forced to resign for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
Oh; that’s interesting. It would have required their rehiring, not just allowed it.
And in fact, the bill itself (not the amendment that was voted down, but the bill) “includes a prohibition on vaccine and mask mandates on airlines.” Also interesting. Nothing appears to keep airlines from hiring the fired pilots back. The bill passed overwhelmingly without that extra amendment.
But most interesting to me was the following – the reasons some GOP members gave for voting against the amendment:
Both Strong and Rogers, when contacted by 1819 News for comment, suggested that the amendment would offer undue authority to the FAA, which is currently under the control of the Biden administration.
“This Amendment proposed to give the Biden FAA new authority to mandate the hiring practice of airlines,” Strong explained. “Given that woke Washington bureaucrats are already trying to push their DEI policies on airlines hiring, I am concerned it is a slippery slope that would be abused.”
“I cannot support any measure that allows Biden’s FAA to meddle in private sector employment decisions,” Rogers said.
Now, you either buy their reasons or don’t buy them. But I think those condemning them should be aware of their explanation. But I don’t see that sort of evenhanded treatment of the background of the issue from pundits around Twitter and the blogosphere. What I see instead is propaganda.
And I see it often from the right as well as constantly from the left. The message is just a different one. And sometimes – actually, quite often – the propaganda message from the right serves to divide the right – which is not to say that there aren’t some Republicans in Congress who really do seem to be Democrats-lite. But they are nowhere near as numerous as they used to be.
So – propaganda to the left of me, propaganda to the right:
I try to be fair and present a fuller version of the story and let the reader decide. Of course, time constraints and knowledge constraints mean that my efforts never come close to actual fullness. But I certainly try not to just give a kneejerk response.
RIP Tony Bennett
He had a long run: 96 years. He kept singing to the end, although he gave up performing in 2021 due to slowly advancing Alzheimer’s.
From his Wiki page, I learned that Bennett was also a lifelong artist. You can see some of his paintings here. Another thing I learned was that Bennett served as an Army infantryman in the European theater during WWII.
His talent showed itself early:
He was the son of grocer John Benedetto and seamstress Anna (Suraci), and was the first member of his family to be born in a hospital. In 1906, John had emigrated from Podargoni, a rural eastern district of the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria. Anna had been born in the U.S. shortly after her parents also emigrated from the Calabria region in 1899…
By age 10 he was already singing, and performed at the opening of the Triborough Bridge, standing next to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia who patted him on the head. Drawing was another early passion of his; he became known as the class caricaturist at P.S. 141 and anticipated a career in commercial art. He began singing for money at age 13, performing as a singing waiter in several Italian restaurants around his native Queens.
Bennett attended New York’s School of Industrial Art where he studied painting and music and would later appreciate their emphasis on proper technique. But he dropped out at age 16 to help support his family. He worked as a copy boy and runner for the Associated Press in Manhattan and in several other low-skilled, low-paying jobs. However, he mostly set his sights on a professional singing career, returning to performing as a singing waiter, playing and winning amateur nights all around the city, and enjoying a successful engagement at a Paramus, New Jersey, nightclub.
Bennett’s career hit a low point during the heyday of the Beatles and other rock or pop groups, but it revived later on and he performed a great deal with new generations of artists.
His signature song, of course: