David Roberts is gay for robots

Just in case you didn't get a good enough laugh from this:

Check out this:

Is it me or were the Super Bowl commercials this year unusually ugly, misogynistic, and, worst of all, unfunny? Some of America’s biggest corporations seemed to be trying to play to Teabag America, and the results were as bitter as the teabaggers themselves. Amidst the dreck was a commercial from Audi featuring the “green police.”

Classic.

Rome

This time, the invita- tion is explicit. On its website, Mildred's asks:

"Have you given any thought to moving beyond the bedroom?"Check out Mildred's Sexy Bathrooms throughout the weekend of Big Love. You get the picture."

Yeah, you know ... The Bathroom: the place where perhaps you, and certainly innumerable strangers have made their pees and poos; where the one you will invariably find dribbled over the seat, the other sometimes spattered under it.

So c'mon you squares, schoolmarms and prudes! Relax for once in your life, and do the sexiest thing imaginable ... fucking in the shitter!

Krier on the architect's categorical imperative

The architect states: "I built this house, this city, this headquarters, this barracks." This is also the language of the king, the house owner, the craftsman. For it is a mere figure of speech. Only craftsmen and artists use the words correctly when they say: "I built this or that ..." What the architect and the sovereign are attesting is that, in varying degrees, they have intervened, in a drawing that is the basis of an urban or tectonic conception, in the design that is an authoritative graphic document, be it sketched, drawn or engraved on paper, wood, metal or in the sand.

Drawings are at once fragile as objects and powerful in their influence on the shaping of the material world.

Just like the written page, a drawing has little intrinsic value; its power and authority lie in the capacity to describe, suggest, direct, and give a form and shape to objects, structures and events according to a precise aim and vision. The authority of a drawing is like that of a banknote, a symbolic one. The same drop of ink can be used to draw a concentration camp or a splendid city; the gesture of an architect may decide whether a human community lives in a city which corresponds to its dreams, or in one which is crowded, chaotic, and hostile.

Drawing is an exercise of authority and is therefore an eminently moral activity involving personal responsibility and conscience, a sense of truth, justice, beauty, scale and proportion. As is the case with all good things in life--love, good manners, language, cooking--leaps of genius are required only rarely. The poet does not excel by inventing new words or languages but when, by subtle arrangements of otherwise familiar terms, he reveals human predicaments in new and poetic ways.

Drawing permits almost every license; in the same way as writing and the spoken word, it offers little resistance to excess or caprice.

Buildings inspired by the shape of a camembert or an artichoke mean nothing in terms of architecture; nor do they add anything to the cultures or the technology that have so superficially inspired them.

If we consider the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant, "Act only according to the maxim of a kind that you may want its principle to become a universal law," the architect may ask himself the question: What would be the consequences if the maxim on which my project is based became a general principle of architecture or urbanism? Build therefore in such a way that you and those who are dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, live in them, work in them, spend their holidays in them and grow old in them with pleasure.

Léon Krier, The Architecture of Community.

Scruton on totalitarian sentimentality

... The lesson of postwar Europe is that it is easy to flaunt compassion, but harder to bear the cost of it. Far preferable to the hard life in which disciplined teaching, costly charity, and responsible attachment are the ruling principles is the life of sentimental display, in which others are encouraged to admire you for virtues you do not possess. This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives.

As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality "totalitarian" since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to "solve" our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the "victims," who have a "right" to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state: for example, mass illegitimacy, the decline of the indigenous birthrate, and the emergence of the gang culture among the fatherless youth. We have seen this everywhere in Europe, whose situation is made worse by the pressure of mass immigration, subsidized by the state. The citizens whose taxes pay for the flood of incoming "victims" cannot protest, since the sentimentalists have succeeded in passing "hate speech" laws and in inventing crimes like "Islamophobia" which place their actions beyond discussion. This is just one example of a legislative tendency that can be observed in every area of social life: family, school, sexual relations, social initiatives, even the military -- all are being deprived of their authority and brought under the control of the "soft power" that rules from above.

Roger Scruton, Totalitarian Sentimentality

via Flea

The Ghost of Christmas Past

A merry Christmas to all my readers! I hope it finds them very well. Healthy and happy and you know.

Nothing but old stuff for you this year, but all worth a re-visit:

Snook on the occasion of receiving a Christmas card from a former student.

G.K. Chesterton on the Wise Men.

Hilaire Belloc on a remaining Christmas.

And re. those wonderful people in our midst who are actually better than Christmas.

Help! My body's racist!

You ever had one of those experiences where it's imperative that you do a lot of very concise thinking and speaking in a very short period of time? Like, say, in an oral exam? And you find yourself incapable of doing so because the only thing running through your mind is I'm supposed to be thinking about David Hume now. I'm supposed to be thinking about David Hume right now. I'm supposed to be thinking about fucking David Hume right fucking now!

You have? Me too. Goddamned David Hume.

Oh, and what a sight you were! Sweating profusely, grimacing, squirming, looking anywhere--the walls, the floor, the infinite distance--anywhere but at the face of your examiner. You were the very picture of discomfort and clear loathing for your predicament.

But the great thing about oral exams is that they are infrequent, and usually are undergone at a stage early enough in your life that the extent of their devastation wasn't entirely comprehended ... You usually shrugged it off by next week, I'm guessing. Yeah, me too.

Here's a question though: You ever had one of those experiences where it's imperative that you do a lot of very concise thinking and speaking in a very short period of time, and you end up being judged not by your carefully considered words--and not even by your body language--but by the body language of an actor on a TV show set on fucking mute?

"White characters are treated better across the board and this has an impact on viewers," said Weisbuch, a post-doctoral psychologist at Massachusetts's Tufts University.

In the first experiment, researchers used clips from 11 television programs – including Bones, Grey's Anatomy, CSI and Scrubs – and digitally removed one of the characters participating in the scenes.

They then muted any onscreen conversations and recruited college students who had never seen the episodes to watch.

"We took out the target character, who was either black or white, and the (remaining) character was always white," senior study author Nalini Ambady said in an interview with the Star.

"Then we just showed people and said `how much does this person like the person they're interacting with?'" said Ambady, a Tufts social psychologist.

The viewers, it was found, consistently judged the body language expressed by the visible white characters as more negative whenever the unseen character in the scene was black.

...

"Take a medical drama for example, both the black and the white characters were doctors," Ambady said. Yet while the negative body language is certainly not scripted, she was not sure if it reflects innate reactions by the white actors, is directorial in origin, or a combination of both.

"There's no bias in what they're saying, the bias seems to be in the way they are conveying, and we have no idea where that's coming from," she says.

Ambady says positive body language like smiling, nodding and leaning forward while talking is far less common when white characters engage with black co-stars.

"The black characters receive significantly less positive non-verbal behaviour. They're liked less non-verbally than white characters."

...

Thus, Ambady says, the subtle body-language bias displayed on television can create "insidious" repercussions in subconscious racial feelings among millions of viewers.

"Of course, when someone says something to you that's biased, you can correct for it, you can say `that guy's a jerk,'" she says.

Subjective, did I hear you say? Too, too, too subjective to be taken seriously as scholarship? The same thing occurred to me, but I'm not saying anything. I'm having a hard enough time trying to keep my body language in check, let alone my language language.

But this is priceless:

In a journal commentary on the study, Yale University psychologist John Dovidio said the paper's use of white college students as viewers showed just how potent the non-verbal cues were in creating bias.

"Thus, non-verbal messages influence relatively sophisticated participants who are especially motivated to appear unbiased," he says.

While Mr. Dovidio made no mention of it, one assumes that he was outraged at the clear expression of non-verbal bias evinced by anyone's seeking his opinion on the matter.

... Ah, scraping the bottom of the grievance barrel in "post-racial" America. Next up? Blind taste-tests for racism, I'm thinking.

Pity the poor creature who chooses Sprite.

The Drive

Well, the lads are back at it ... and with a vengeance! This episode's got everything! A borrowed car, cheap knives in Chinatown, the ROM Crystal, and the Gay Village.

Like I say: everything!

(Click the image. Press play)


... And you thought they'd never leave the apartment!

(Incidentals: like maybe, I don't know, four f-bombs. It's nothing, dude. Relax. Further info re. the songwriter, and the album in full, can be found here, purchased here ... Appreciators of the genius of this might also appreciate this.)

A painfully short 14 minutes.

Pants-past-the-end-of-the-numbers!

That stethoscope doesn't make you right

Chris Selley:

The Toronto Star's Catherine Porter thinks poverty alleviation outweighs medical ethics and has no problem with doctors deliberately misdiagnosing welfare recipients with afflictions that will top up their monthly payments. Think of that what you will — one shouldn't read the Star if one doesn't want to encounter logic-deprived activist journalism.

The real kicker in this piece, though, is her interview with Dr. Roland Wong, who's currently under investigation for precisely the sort of actions Porter's advocating. His defence, in a nutshell: What is a "diagnosis," anyway, in this mixed up world we're living in?

"Chronic constipation — who can define it, except me?" he asks. "Soya allergy — it's not a clear medical condition. I do the best to my abilities. If they lie to me, I can't change that. I have to trust the patient to a certain extent."

Not that there aren't a ton of misdiagnosed food allergies out there, but I think Dr. Wong will find soy allergy is very much a "clear medical condition." One is either allergic to soy or one isn't — a determination your friendly neighbourhood allergist will be happy to make, on OHIP's dime, assuming you've been referred to him by, say, Dr. Wong. If Dr. Wong wishes to remain Dr. Wong, as opposed to simply Poverty Activist Wong, I think he might want to stop talking to the media.

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

It's a truism that public life is service if willingly undertaken, and slavery if unwillingly.

This is so in the personal (and private) sense too, obviously, but let's save that discussion for the long winter evenings, what?

We know that anyone who seeks the limelight imagining that it is not, of its essence, a form of serious public service, will sooner or later discover--usually by pillory, almost inevitably by despair--that the liberty they take is the liberty they owe. And that they will pay, whether they want to or not. Or even whether they deserve to pay quite so much.

We, as I say, know this. It's boringly obvious.

What the example of someone like Tiger Woods gives us, though, is novel. And practical. What it tells us is that the choice between service and slavery is made from the outset. That is: the characteristic of servant or slave is not applied retroactively in the event that you've been found out, but that it is assumed--its burdens taken up and borne--at the moment this simple truth is either understood, misunderstood, or rejected.

Thus the man who decides (whether through hubris, or just a perverse and tragic kind of innocence) that he will use the privilege of his celebrity to live the life, say, of carnal fantasy played-out in pornography, does not and cannot succeed in doing so however much he tries and whatever resources he might have at his disposal. Tiger Woods didn't get caught living the fantasy of porn, after all. He got caught banging porn stars. That there is a world of difference here need not be pointed out.

And what better illustration of what this sort of celebrity has attained to? Not the high life, but the lie at the heart of the high life: the slum. A place where fantasy (such as it is) does not grant respite from grim and inevitable reality, but which gives it STDs, divorces, the loss of careers, and unhappiness and shame to last at least a couple of generations. A place in which the dream of escape has become a burden greater than reality.

... It all depends on when the revolution comes, of course, but I don't think there can be any doubt what the next permutation of celebrity scandal will be. Shit-eating. Mark my words.

CBC and me

Things are getting really slack around here and I'm really sorry about that. You're right: what I need's a good kick in the pants. Only, my legs don't go that way and, obviously, you're not allowed 'cause you'll do it too hard.

Here's something anyway:

I’m still trying to figure out whether it was a small moment of courage, or just a different way of talking about the same old story, when Peter Mansbridge brought up the Tiger Woods story on the “At Issue” panel on The National last night.

Mansbridge asked the panel for their thoughts on what the obsession with the Woods story says about us – meaning the greater “us”, as in all of us.

I think the question would have been more courageous, and more relevant if he’d meant “us” to mean “us” as in the CBC.

This from concerned former CBC journalist, Andy Clarke (who explains the reasoning for his excellent new blog, CBC and Me: Watching the CBC Do Itself In, here). He continues:

The crew in charge at the CBC now tosses around the word “transparency” to talk about how it covers things differently than it did before.

“More transparent,” they tell us.

Well here’s what I’d love to see in terms of transparency. I’d love to see Jennifer McGuire – who’s in charge of CBC News – take to the airwaves and say something like…

“You know what? We’ve been talking about this in our newsroom, and we can’t figure out for the life of us what the news value is in this story. So, we’re not going to report on it anymore. We’re going to leave it to others to obsess over, and report on. You guys are smart enough to know where to find those others, but we’re going to move on to other things.”

Fat chance, eh? It will never happen with this leadership team at the CBC.

There's much that annoys me about the CBC--I should say, there's very little that doesn't annoy me, and annoy me exponentially more with every passing year, about the CBC--but I am definitely of the opinion that it is an institution worth retaining. It requires, however, a great deal of reform. Andy Clarke's seems to be a serious and principled voice toward that end--even as he works from the outside--and is well worth your attention.

What's he(mg) listening to?

In one way or another all of these musicians have appeared in this space before.

Junior Boys:

Tom Waits and Kool Keith in a bizarrely not unsuccessful collaboration:

And Dopaminex (... this, incidentally, is the song that plays every time I enter a room. My leitmotif apparently):

The spin is settled

If you're not following this, you should be. (You can be forgiven if you haven't been, as Lorne Gunter appears to be the only Canadian journalist who's noticed.)

And Mitchieville dubs some smart onto planestupid's little parody of self-righteousness: