What's he(mg) listenting to?

The Drums

Charlotte Gainsbourg (and Beck)

and Cat Power

Your genius is in recognizing mine

I love David Warren and everything, but he's talking absolute shit here.

Note the genius of Ignatieff's appeal: not for more contraception and abortion here, where we have surely had enough, but rather in "the poorest countries" -- which we think have long been producing "too many babies." And, too many babies who could be clamouring to come here one day. Harper's policy might increase the load; Ignatieff's might reduce it.

Even within North America, abortion appeals to some because it does, in fact, disproportionately reduce the offspring of certain racial minorities. The eugenic argument for it was actually the first to be made, back in the days when it was still acceptable to speak about the fertility of the "lower orders" and the "inferior races."

It has become an irritating habit of the right, in the face of those tedious and definitively hysterical comparisons of them to Nazis, that they now counter--and apparently in all earnest--"We're not the Nazis; you're the Nazis!"

Identity politics, of its essence, is beneath the dignity of conservatives. So when they (conservatives) take the line that some forms of identity politics are more acceptable than others, they are not, as they might think, fighting fire with fire; they are, rather, allowing the Left to set the agenda. (Indeed, they're kinda suggesting that they're more left than the Left.)

My point, with regards to the above excerpt, being: it's a ridiculous notion that there is a trend amongst those Canadians who approve-of-abortion-but-wouldn't-dream-of-having-one- themselves, that they are so inclined because of a desire to reduce, by extermination, the members of "inferior races" because they might eventually immigrate to Canada. This is to indulge in precisely the sort of pofaced, pseudo-intellectualism that has come so much to characterize the lumpen Left (i.e. just about anyone in North America with a bachelor's degree who considers himself a political liberal).

The problem here is not that people are putting the wrong sort of thought (i.e. the racist kind) into the issue of abortion. Rather, it is that they are putting precisely no thought into it--and that they believe that this is intellectually defensible.

To wit: the "genius of Ignatieff's appeal" is not that it lends itself so well to the racism/xenophobia apparently lurking in the hearts of so many Canadian women; it is, rather, that it's got us all prattling obtusely-on about "the genius of Ignatieff's appeal." As though the appeal itself were nothing as compared to its timing.

The "genius of Ignatieff's appeal," is, then, that it was so cynically calculated that people--including David Warren apparently-- would appreciate it (the appeal) more for its tactical merits than for its substance. And they did, the birdbrains.

Father Curry on types of questions and Original Sin

... Alone of all creation, mankind, that is to say, the Adam, is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator.

The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.

In the form of the story, the serpent is the occasion for the disobedience through the raising of questions. As such the serpent signifies the agency of man’s reason. The problem, however, is not with the raising of questions per se but with the direction or the intent of the questions. For the questions of the serpent do not seek an understanding, rather, to the contrary, they seek to undermine what is known as good, though not known as known. They insinuate doubt and instigate revolt. Adam and Eve prefer the lie of their wills to the truth of God’s will. The rest, as they say, is history, “of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree.”

And it is our history. Children have a way of asking profound theological questions such as “Why did God make blackflies?” How do you answer that one? ‘So that we would be reminded that this isn’t heaven’. Indeed, but neither is this world paradise. And it isn’t paradise because of the Fall. But, then you may say, ‘It just doesn’t seem fair that we should have to suffer things like colds, flues, aches and pains because of what Adam and Eve did so long ago’. Right. It doesn’t seem fair until the lesson is learned that they are we. This is our story. This is what we do. And what we do and what others do have consequences for all of us. We turn towards the ground of our self-will and away from God ...

Father David Curry, sermon for Sexagesima (2003).

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!