Canada: Progressive Paradise

The deep blue oceans, the golden fields of prairie wheat, the majestic snow-capped mountain ranges, the public parks and playgrounds littered with used needles. Ah, Canada.

Snark aside, this is an awful situation, just awful. Here's a great speech by a popular Vancouver radio host, a liberal who actually spent a great deal of time and effort helping drug addicts and knows that giving them free needles is not just counterproductive, it is actively, morally wrong. As he puts it, if you knew a downward-spiraling alcoholic, would you give him a helping hand, or a clean shot glass?

Though I personally dispute the statistical claims that HIV infections have only increased in those places where the free needle program has been implemented. Doesn't pass the smell test. I mean, next thing you know, they'll be claiming that rates of HIV infection increase with greater availability of condoms, or something crazy like that. Oh, oops.

Hat tip to Kate at SDA, who has a great idea about how to easily put an end to this program. For, as the gentleman giving the speech also explains, the whole reason these absurd initiatives exist is because government wants to appear to be fighting the problem, but refuses to actually take any sincere human interest in or accountability for the people it claims to want to help. Make the politicians actually accountable for the destruction they cause and, watch out, they'll shut the needle exchange down overnight. Reminds me of my stance on parole, which I swear is totally serious even though nobody believes me: if a parole court judge frees a serious criminal, and the criminal rapes or murders again, the judge should have to serve out the new sentence alongside the criminal. Now, of course, this would have absolutely no change on the system, because we all know that Canadian judges take the dangers posed by criminals very, very seriously, as seriously as if the dangers would be posed to their own family, and would never, ever dream of endangering even one more innocent life by letting a potentially dangerous man free. Nope, not ever. Oh, oops again. But, hey, come on, 12% isn't bad! So things really wouldn't be changed, because the judges certainly would be willing to take those 12% odds with their own lives, wouldn't they?

"My Weekly Date with a Liberal"

This is the absolutely best series over at Big Hollywood, even better than Steven Crowder. Jon David is a brave, brave man.

"Pretentious Stupidity"

What always bugged me the most about the postmodern, deconstructionist drivel I was forced to study in college was not the trademark duo of impenetrable prose and lazy thinking. My frustration was that once you made the effort to get past all that and by sheer force of will figured out the great thinker's point, well, it was obvious. Not wrong, usually, just really obvious. Stupid obvious. Like, "a picture of a tree isn't itself a real tree" obvious, and I'm not even making that one up. That's why their writing is so muddled, because if they came out and said their point clearly, not only would their essays be a great deal shorter, but the reader's inevitable reaction would be, quite simply, "um, duh."
But lord, do they ever think they are clever. They'll come up with books and plays and entire artistic movements based on the earth-shattering observation that, say, actors are actually, you know, acting. As if it never occured to Shakespeare that the guy playing the king in Hamlet wasn't, in reality, his and the nation's sovereign. No, if only the bard had been a tad more clever, he would have had his characters reflecting on their own inescapable characterness, and then of course he would have written himself as a character into all the plays, too, right before throwing out the last few pages of each one, naturally, because endings are just so artificial.
But postmodern thinkers have no talent and no real intelligence, just a smug belief in their own cleverness, a cleverness which is nothing more than pointing out that which has always been obvious to everybody else and which has simply never been remarked upon before precisely because it was so obvious. They remind me more than anything of a ten year old who thinks he's a genius because he's figured out Santa Claus isn't real, then devotes his entire life to spreading the word. Maybe I'm nuts, but I much prefer the kid who plays along with the illusion, because it's fun for his folks and it's a good tradition. You know, the kid who isn't a giant tool.
These postmodernists are so consumed with stating the obvious about the artificiality of art that the actual truth of art, its beauty and its divinity, goes straight over their heads. But enough of my rambling, go here and read "Obstinate Orthodoxy" and have Chesterton explain it all. Very crudely excerpting:

So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament,we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine.[...]But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. [...] The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots. And the man who imagines that artistic revolutions must always affect morals is like a man who should say, "I am so bored with seeing pink roses painted on chocolate-boxes that I refuse to believe that roses grow well in a clay soil." [...] Falling in love remains radiant and mysterious, however threadbare be the thousandth repetition of a rhyme as a valentine or a cracker-motto. To see this fact is to live in a world of facts.To be always thinking of the banality of bad wallpapers and valentines is to live in a world of fictions.

Please excuse me as I anticlimax, because all of this is just a very long preamble for me to say that I really liked this review of Watchmen by Debbie Schlussel. She's getting attacked by "graphic novel" fans for highlighting their special brand of "pretentious stupidity," but I'm loving it. Because she's attacking exactly what I can't stand, this bizarre belief in one's own remarkable cleverness for noticing the obvious. As she puts it, "Guess what? We know there are bad people and that people are everyday people with problems. If you don't know that, and you think a movie like this is necessary to make the point, you're even more warped and stupid than I originally diagnosed." I love this part, too, when she attacks the perverted love for sexual violence against women, which its drooling fans justify in the name of edgy realism and sophisticated art:

You're a bunch of dummies with no moral compass, but liking this stupid comic book which pretends violence and the depraved is "edgy" or "sophisticated," makes you feel smart. [...] Quit your pretentious drivel about this being important because it's a "graphic novel." Memo to the creators of Richie Rich and Archie: You missed your calling. If only you'd called your product a "graphic novel" and added scenes of Archie raping Betty and Veronica and Jughead sawing off Reggie's Arms, you'd be in businesss. Dummies.

What she says goes not just for Watchmen, by the way, but for most of the movie industry ever since the seventies. We're so daring and edgy and sophisticated, we're incapable of making decent movies anymore. Argh. And so I end this post like I've ended so many others, thinking God Bless TCM.

p.s. yes, I did like the "graphic novel" The Dark Knight Returns. It's not hypocrisy, it's sophistication, deal with it.

UPDATE: Related, and very true :

[Our cultural critics'] highest words of praise are adjectives like
“shocking,” “disturbing,” “searing,” and “radical.” They swoon over films like
Towelhead, The Woodsman and The Reader that seek to wrong foot our moral senses
by presenting us with sympathetic child molesters and Nazis.
But the truth
is, any fool can pull off crap like that. It’s easy.
The single hardest thing
to do in the arts is not to shock or disturb or sear or radicalize—but to
delight.

My brilliant campaign commercial idea

Yeah, okay, I don't know a thing about campaigning or commercials, this is just an ad I would enjoy. Start off with an old timey, Ken Burns style retelling of Davey Crockett's "Not Yours to Give" speech , then have an announcer or Bobby Jindal or someone say, "Giving your money to the needy is charity. Giving your neighbor's money to the needy is theft." Then close with the following words on the screen, read by the announcer, too: "Vote charity. Vote Republican."

I know, never gonna happen, but it would be great, and it would really drive liberals mad. And then if they made a big deal out of it you could run a follow-up ad with the stats about how you would never know it to hear Obama and friends talk, but Americans are by far the most charitable people in the world, and how Republicans are more charitable than Democrats. Maybe even throw something in showing a clip about Joe Biden talking how important and patriotic it is to pay high taxes to help the poor, and then flash on the screen while he's talking the numbers of how Biden gave a total of like five bucks and a smile to charity in his whole life.

Steven Crowder is my hero

Hardliner

So I was listening to the noon news on the radio, and the anchor was going through a bunch of the top stories, throwing in little editorial comments as he did. There was some story about how North Korea is apparently trying to make a missile that could reach America's coast, and the anchor laughed at it, saying how idiotic the North Koreans would have to be to even consider it, because, as he put, "a minute after that missile would hit America, there would be no more North Korea." Now, I am certainly not here to argue with that sentiment, believe me. But then, a few stories later, the news shifted to Israel's elections, and the anchor talked about how the recent Hamas missile attacks guarantee that "hardliner" Benjamin Netanyahu will get elected. And the way he said "hardliner," well, you had to hear it, the anchor's voice was dripping with disdain and criticism, as if he were talking about a serial killer or something.

I know I'm hardly the first person to notice this, but sometimes the incredible blindness of people about Israel is just astonishing. Nobody except the most extreme America-hating liberal and President Obama's closest friends (but I repeat myself) would think twice about simply ending the existence of an entire country if that country launched a single missile into America. But the Palestinians are literally launching dozens of rockets every single day, deeper and deeper into Israel, deliberately trying to maim and murder as many civilians as possible, and yet if an Israeli leader wants to fight back with only the one arm tied behind his back instead of both, polite society and the media and liberals all label him a "hardliner." If only the Israelis were even remotely "hardline" instead of absurdly and suicidally overcivilized, we would never have to worry about Hamas or their ilk ever again.

And I don't care how eloquent their justifications may be, nobody will ever convince me that anti-Israeli sentiment is anything other than good old fashioned jew-hatred.