Edward Michael George

Toronto's New Mayor

2010-10-26T08:43:00.006-04:00

(Un-shun)

Mine wasn't a vote for Rob Ford so much as it was a vote against Justin Trudeau.

(Re-shun)

Selley on partisanship and power

2010-08-13T10:40:00.002-04:00

In all these cases, the real villains are governments that believe, with ample justification, that they can do what they want to whomever they want, whenever they want. Governments don't care what party you voted for, or what you think about the war in Afghanistan, or whether your bookshelf's stuffed with Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand. If it's in their best interests to steamroll you, they will. Ideological partisanship dilutes by half the democratic force of the revulsion we feel -- or should feel -- when they do. It enables the very thing we all claim to detest when it happens to people we like. The answer lies in sticking up for people we don't like too.

Chris Selley, Civil liberties vs. knee-jerk loyalties

What's he(mg) listening to?

2010-08-06T09:36:00.005-04:00

The Dancing Pigeons, Ritalin (Valium too):

Kasabian, Vlad the Impaler (full song here):

Robots in Disguise again, La Nuit:

Chubbo's too good looking too

2010-07-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

What did the Guardian editors do when they were hiring woman writers? They thought of a man, then took away reason and accountability:

... It's time to get the point, Lynne. The Hill ain't ever going to look like Joanie. Giving the British woman Joanie as a role model is never going to make her feel good. At least Kate Moss's hair sometimes stands on end. At least Cindy Crawford's got a damn mole. If we're talking about images of unattainable perfection, Joanie, with her hips, bust and stature could take home a newly-invented Nobel for the accolade. Oh sure, she looks like she could pack a few Big Macs – although I'm sure Featherstone would warn us against those – but as an ideal she is quite as unattainable as any other. Her BMI, in fact, is precariously near that of a model's – at 5 foot 8 and 140 pounds it works out as 21.3 (according to Joanie's driving licence). In other words, she's the equivalent of an old-fashioned perfect 10 ...

Take, eat; this is my Scooby Snack, which is given for you

2010-07-22T11:00:00.002-04:00

Just taking a little break from my, well, break to draw your attention to this:

St. Peter’s Anglican Church has long been known as an open and inclusive place.

So open, it seems, they won’t turn anyone away. Not even a dog.

That’s how a blessed canine ended up receiving communion from interim priest Rev. Marguerite Rea during a morning service the last Sunday in June.

According to those in attendance at the historical church at 188 Carlton St. in downtown Toronto, it was a spontaneous gesture, one intended to make both the dog and its owner – a first timer at the church — feel welcomed. But at least one parishioner saw the act as an affront to the rules and regulations of the Anglican Church. He filed a complaint with the reverend and with the Anglican Diocese of Toronto about the incident – and has since left the church.

Telling reporting as always ... You see, the thing about giving the body of Christ to a dog is not so much that it offends any particular 'rule' or 'regulation' of the Anglican Church, as that it rather conspicuously offends what Christians believe (have to believe, if they are Christians) is the person of God himself. I won't bother explaining why this is so, as there is only one type who would feign ignorance of so obvious a fact, and they are precisely the people who would also defend the right of Muslims to keep dogs out of their buses and taxi cabs.

This line from the piece is of consequence though:

But congregants of the church say the act wasn’t meant to be controversial.

When the hell did people start believing that if a thing wasn't meant to be controversial, that it wasn't, then, controversial? She gave a dog communion!

Father Crouse on faith and pharmaceuticals

2010-07-04T20:15:00.001-04:00

Much of modern Christianity seems to be very world-affirming. Popular preachers often recommend religion as though it were some sort of pharmaceutical preparation designed to produce health and happiness, and maybe even social and financial success. And if it doesn't produce these obvious rewards, at the very least, it should provide us with something called "peace of mind". And on a slightly more sophisticated level, some of our leaders, and the Church press in general, speak as though the real end and purpose of Christianity were the improvement of social and economic conditions: making the world a better place. For many, that is the main justification of the Church.

...

But consider these lessons more closely: it's a strange kind of happiness they describe, and a strange kind of prosperity they promise. "Happy are ye," says St. Peter, "if ye suffer for righteousness' sake" -- happiness in suffering. And consider the conclusion of the Gospel lesson: it appears that the miraculous draught of fishes was simply a teaching device: sort of a parable in action. The point of it was not the astonishing catch of fish -- that was rather incidental. "From henceforth thou shalt catch men". And immediately convinced of the sinful futility of their lives, they forsook their occupation, and followed Jesus.

In the end, these lessons turn out to be very anti-worldly. And I think it must be said that the Gospel is not, on the whole, very world-affirming. Certainly, the world is god's Creation; and more than that, it is the sphere of his redeeming love in Christ: "God so loved the world..." But the end and object of God's creative and redemptive power -- the salvation of the world -- is somehow beyond this world. We are solemnly warned again and again not to set our affections on earthly things; and we are certainly not promised rewards of earthly happiness and prosperity. Rather we are promised tribulation. Happy are ye if ye suffer for righteousness sake."

...

What we are really concerned with here is the everlasting life of the spirit, and our earthly goods are really goods only insofar as they serve that higher end. In worldly terms, their end is destruction: "moth and rust corrupt, and thieves break through and steal." Even this planet of ours must surely have an end, and our sun is, after all, a dying star. "Here we have not continuing city," "but our homeland is in heaven, and from it we await a saviour." What is saved is the harvest of the spirit -- spirits made perfect in the knowledge and love of God.

...

Fr. Robert Crouse, Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

Do What You Feel Weekend

2010-06-28T16:36:00.004-04:00

Best video summary of the G20 thus far:*

And everybody's getting in on the act!

The Unfinished

2010-06-23T13:35:00.001-04:00

I did this one, like, a year ago, but couldn't be bothered finishing it. Listening to it yesterday, I thought: ending-shmending!

EMG and EMG discuss the etymology of the word 'shitloads'. (Click the image, press play)

It's four and half minutes long. And, no, I didn't put in any music. I figured, why bother? We're all just going to die anyway.

Dig?

Dan Gardner on "progressives"

2010-06-18T12:45:00.001-04:00

You'll have noticed how often I'm irate at the left's attempts to construe differences of political degree as differences of political kind. Put this way, I'm struck by how incredibly fucking awesome it would be if it wasn't a fantasy:

... So what does "progressive" mean today in Canada? Yesterday in this newspaper, Matt Browne and Eugene Lang published an impassioned appeal for "progressives" to unite because, apparently, most Canadians are "progressives" and the government should reflect that. "While conservatives have governed this country for four years," they wrote, "election results and polling data show consistently two-thirds of the electorate support political parties with a progressive orientation."
But since they didn't define what a "progressive orientation" is, I was left with the suspicion that, to Browne and Lang, any party that is not the Conservative party is a "progressive" party and anyone who is not a Conservative is a "progressive." That suggests that "progressive" is whatever John Baird shouts at. Which isn't much of an orientation, it seems to me.
Now, I am being a little unfair. Browne and Lang did suggest en passant "progressives" are those who "wish to use government as a force for good." This is helpful. It distinguishes "progressives" from those who wish to use government as a force for evil, such as Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars movies.
There I go being unfair again. What Browne and Lang meant, of course, is that "progressives" believe government has a constructive role to play in society, as opposed to conservatives, who believe, as Ronald Reagan put it, that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." It was this ruthless political philosophy that led Reagan to dramatically reduce the roles and responsibilities of government and shrink the federal budget to a miniscule ...
Oh, right. Reagan's famous aphorism got lots of Alex P. Keatons totally stoked 30 years ago but it actually meant very little to how he governed: When Reagan left office, government spending as a percentage of GDP was higher than when he entered. In modern times, the only significant drop in the U.S. government's share of GDP happened during the administration of that heartless conservative, Bill Clinton.
Canada got the same savage treatment at the hands of Jean Chrétien. More recently, Stephen Harper has spent money at a clip not seen since the glory days of Pierre Trudeau, and often on positively Trudeauvian schemes like regional development agencies.
And yet it's Jean Chrétien who's now involved in talks to unite "progressives" against Conservatives who, we are told, hate government so much they are shoving money down its throat. Maybe they think it will asphyxiate. Or make a nice foie gras.
Look, step back a bit and it's obvious there are great swaths of consensus clear across the political spectrum. That's true in every developed country. It's especially true in Canada. Every party supports government-funded health care. Every party supports trade liberalization. Every party supports progressive taxation. Look closely at what parties actually propose and vote for and even something as divisive as the Conservative "tough on crime" agenda is not actually all that divisive, much as some of us wish it were.
Of course the Conservatives sometimes have different priorities and emphases than the other parties. But there are also significant differences between the Liberals, New Democrats, Bloquistes, and Greens. So aside from the direction of John Baird's shouting, what defines people and parties as "progressive"?
Forget political philosophy. I think the answer is found in psychology.
...

Dan Gardner, Progressives unite, whoever you are.

Towards ignoring the questions

2010-06-04T13:40:00.000-04:00

Why does Hashem make us feel the questions if he's not going to give us any answers? - Larry Gopnik

We can distinguish between a craving for chocolate, say, and a craving for bread. A craving for water and one for wine--or indeed one for beer rather than wine. That is to say, a person does not simply crave food or drink or sleep, but a very particular set of things and circumstances, sometimes one and not the other, and often without any absolute physical need of them.

Why not then a craving for God?--as often, say, we crave the company of a particular friend and not just anybody? Or our mother rather than that friend? What person hasn't had the experience--however inexplicably--that only that person will do? Only they offer the comfort or nourishment that we need? Why then is it so hard to accept a need for this thing we know to be God? Why is the craving for Chinese food not also ludicrous?

P'itchens on selective outrage

2010-06-02T17:30:00.001-04:00

I have been to Gaza once, long ago, and can confirm that it is pretty grim, and no doubt has grown much worse since. I think the idea that a blockade will persuade the Gazans to throw out their Hamas government is nonsensical and doomed, and I think Israel's recent behaviour towards Gaza has been cruel and stupid. I opposed and still condemn the recent Israeli military attack on Gaza, which failed to meet the criteria for a just war.

But I have a nagging suspicion that those who now adopt the cause of Gaza (and have swallowed whole the propaganda narrative of the 'Aid Convoy' versus the 'Wicked Zionists') are much, much more interested in undermining Israel's long-term right to exist than they are in the undoubted plight of the Gazans. And why, exactly is that? What is the reason for this selective outrage against one nation among dozens, by no means perfect but also by no means the most oppressive or violent or ill-run state in the world, let alone the Middle East? You tell me.

...

So in the midst of this confusion, we now find ourselves in a huge row over the alleged 'Aid Convoy' manned by alleged 'Humanitarians' which approached the Israeli coast at the weekend and was boarded by Israeli armed forces.

Is this description 'Aid Convoy' (adopted by many media outlets) not itself partial? It most certainly is. The Israeli authorities offered unequivocally to deliver the ships' cargoes to Gaza if they were unloaded at the Israeli port of Ashdod and passed through the normal checks against contraband. The leaders of the 'Aid Convoy' refused this offer. Therefore it is plain that its prime purpose was not to deliver the aid, but to deliver it in a certain way, in defiance of the Israeli blockade of the Gazan ports, an action they knew from the start would bring the Israeli armed forces about their ears.

If you want to be wholly dispassionate, you might call it a 'convoy' without adornment. But to call it an 'Aid Convoy' is itself a departure from neutrality. I myself would call it a propaganda fleet, but then I am openly partisan on this issue. The use of the expression 'humanitarians' is likewise suspect, as is the use of the word 'activists' without saying what sort of activists they are.

Peter Hitchens, The Joys of Selective Outrage.

Collective ignorance: not quite the same thing as consensus

2010-06-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

It's an oft-repeated truism in ethics: "Good facts are essential for good ethics." So surely we need the facts about an issue as ethically fraught as abortion. Yet not only do we not have them, but they are intentionally not gathered or, if some are or might be available, access to them is denied.
That allows two myths that favour the pro-choice stance on abortion to be propagated: That late-term abortion is rare and that there is a consensus in Canada on the public-policy regime that should govern abortion (which, at present, is the complete absence of any law).
...
The facts on late-term abortions are intentionally made difficult to obtain. Some time ago, I contacted a staff member at Statistics Canada to ask about the numbers of late-term abortions. She told me they were instructed for political reasons not to collect statistics on the gestational age at which abortion occurs. She explained, however, that hospitals must report the number of abortions and about 45 per cent had continued to report gestational age. From these unsolicited reports, it's known that at least 400 post-viability abortions take place in Canada each year and the actual number is most probably more than twice that. The Canadian Medical Association sets viability (some chance of the child living outside the womb) at 20 weeks gestation.

...
As to trying to get specific facts on abortion, in general, two British Columbia hospitals, Vancouver General and Kelowna General, have applied to stop a freedom-of-information inquiry initiated by pro-life activists, John Hof and Ted Gerk. After the hospitals refused their request last year for information on abortion statistics, Hof and Gerk initiated applications for access to the information through the B.C. Office of Information. The province's Freedom of Information Act was amended in 2001 to specifically exclude access to information about abortion, but they are using a "public-interest-override" clause in the privacy legislation, to argue that the release of the information is in the public interest and should not be withheld. The hospitals have applied for a Section 56 exemption to Freedom of Information rules requiring disclosure, claiming that it was "plain and obvious that the records sought by the Applicant will not be disclosed." The dispute remains to be resolved.
These situations raise the issue of the ethics of intentionally blocking access to information on abortion.
Such blocking is not neutral, but a strategy to help to maintain the status quo of the complete void regarding abortion law. The unavailability of this information makes the pro-choice lobby's claims that late-term abortion is rare and that there is a consensus on abortion in Canada, much less likely to be challenged, and, therefore, bolsters its case that we do not need any law on abortion.
It is also a stance that appeals to many politicians who are terrified of an abortion debate for political reasons. A striking example of the lengths to which they will go to avoid that debate are manifested in a motion just passed unanimously by the three parties in the Quebec National Assembly, in favour of unrestricted access to free abortion, with no limitations mentioned. One can only wonder whether they all, or even just some of them, understood that they were endorsing a position that there should be no legal restrictions on aborting viable babies. If they did not understand that, it's deeply concerning; if they did, in my opinion, it's horrifying.

...

Margaret Somerville, Busting the abortion myths.

Props

2010-06-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

The inimitable Kate Beaton kicks ass once, sometimes twice a week chez Hark! a vagrant. You should be visiting if you aren't already.

Portrait of the artist as a spoiled brat

2010-05-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

The middle class is fast being taken over by a generation so trivial, ignorant, incoherent and self-regarding they make the hippies look like sophisticates.

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

(Read the whole thing.)

Something you should bear in mind: MIA's rise to fame is in no way remarkable. It was totally and utterly predictable. Something else you should bear in mind: you are responsible. You and all your idiot, shrugging friends.

And know that if you do not do your bit to change this culture, it will, eventually, flay off your skin and wear it as a baby-T to the Grammys.

(MIA's reaction to the NYT piece is further--and, I would say, damning--evidence of your appalling cowardice.)

Cormac McCarthy on bigger problems than getting old

2010-05-19T16:35:00.000-04:00

I wont talk about the war neither. I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. Got decorated for it. They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that. There aint a day I dont remember it. Some boys I know come back they went on to school up at Austin on the GI Bill, they had hard things to say about their people. Some of em did. Called em a bunch of rednecks and all such as that. Didnt like their politics. Two generations in this country is a long time. You're talkin about the early settlers. I used to tell em that havin your wife and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didnt seem to know what I was talkin about. I think the sixties in this country sobered some of em up. I hope it did. I read in papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men.

Hostile solitudes

2010-05-17T16:15:00.000-04:00

On something rather tackily called Premier Christian Radio, Peter Hitchens discusses the subject of his new book, The Rage Against God, with one Adam Rutherford (a Guardian contributor, amongst other not-insignificant things). That subject being: the growing trend of what P'itchens' brother (i.e. Ch'itchens) calls "antitheism".

As with every other discussion of the subject, it begins in the confusion/conflation of American evangelicalism with the whole of present and historical Christianity (which P'itchens is quick to clarify), before the sciences of homosexuality and abortion are introduced to drive it (the discussion) into a very shallow but, apparently, very muddy ditch.

Rutherford was a poor choice of disputant for Hitchens, not for the reason that he is unintelligent or unreasonable (he's neither), but because he isn't himself an antitheist and doesn't really have much sympathy for the antitheist view. The debate, however, is worth listening to (even at 90 minutes) for its illustration of the manner in which essentially boutique enthusiasms have obtusely been turned into a revolutionary credo.

Note Hitchens' distinction between the USA and Britain, that one was designed, the other grew; his assessment of multiculturalism, that it can only lead to "the creation of hostile solitudes"; and his treatment of the 'secular' view that Christians imagine themselves to be "good" when that is precisely the opposite of the case. (Re. this last point: I think I explained it rather succinctly here.)

Culture Wars: Episode V - The Religious Right Strikes Back

2010-05-14T09:40:00.001-04:00

An event that has always gone almost completely unreported-- and which had nearly identical attendance numbers last year--all of a sudden finds itself being reported in the most unlikely places.

Oh baby! The Star's on board for the Culture Wars!

Flogging a dead culture war

2010-05-12T16:20:00.004-04:00

Don Martin loves gobbling up horse-shit and, man, he's fed himself to the teeth today:

For mainstream voters eyeing Stephen Harper amid the faltering fortunes of the federal Liberals, The Armageddon Factor, a look at rising Christian nationalism in Canada by political observer Marci McDonald, is likely the one book this Prime Minister doesn’t want you to read.

...
McDonald argues the important wall between religion and federal politics has become so porous it’s crumbling.

If this budding culture war flattens the Liberals in the next election, perhaps her book is a glimpse at the operating manual of a majority Conservative government.

Pl-fuckin'-ease!

"This budding culture war"? As described by a woman who pretends to stand above the American cultural model but who--like a D-list Hollywood hack--takes every single one of her cues from it?

My God this is depressing.

Welcome to the age in which culture wars are said to be raging in the conspicuous absence of either culture or actual conflict. Welcome to the age in which a patently American-aspirational attitude manages to pawn itself off as the expression of traditional Canadian values. Welcome to the age in which journalists confuse the marketing of a political fashion with a story.

It blows my mind that anybody could read Marci McDonald's embarrassing little excerpt--from what promises to be an embarrassing little book--and not come away from it perplexed and a little sad that the solution she comes up with to her middle-class, middle-aged malaise is the polarisation of liberal democratic politics along the lines of the last American election. Our politics are too fiddling, too much preoccupied with differences of degree rather than kind. What we need is a Bible Belt and a Barack Obama--and the imminent threat of turning into the USA if we don't have them!

Now that's a story. Bored Canadian idiots and the ways in which they justify their trifling existences.

Culture war? What fucking culture war? Christian nationalists, you say? Christian nationalists?

These are the guys who take their scooters down to Brighton on the weekends and have big beach fights with the Secular Anarchists, yeah? I don't know ... but they kinda sound like the ultra-fringe to me.

The abortion debate was it then? We've never had one, and we're still not having it. What we are having is a bunch of hysterics saying that even entertaining the prospect of one already constitutes a war. (Which is insane, by the way.) The very few commentators willing merely to point out that an unbelievably large number of Canadians' views on abortion don't actually conform with the current (non-existent) law risk professional pariahdom if they do.

Or the same-sex marriage debate? What, you mean the one where the people who had no trouble with the concept of civil union, but who thought calling it marriage was legally too tricky, are now referred to with the greatest of ease as homophobes, knuckle-draggers, bigots?

No. Whatever "culture war" there might have been, it exists now only in the last gasps of attrition, and in the lumpen bourgeois' fantasies about his anachronistic activism. (Recall, please, Frank Graves' crayon-stroke illustration of the divide: "Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy." Yes, Frank, and Galileo versus the Inquisition, Allies versus Axis, Skywalker versus Vader.)

Culture war my ass. This is a story about the sort of people who would pretend that such a conflict does (or could) exist where it doesn't (and couldn't) for reasons either of cynical political advantage or existential boredom.

What's he(mg) listening to?

2010-05-07T14:05:00.000-04:00

Just Shoreditch hipsters. Love the music, hate yourself: Robots in Disguise.

Anglican'ts

2010-04-21T11:45:00.001-04:00

The Church of Pascal's Wager suspects it's going to lose the bet:

The Anglican Church of Canada is inviting corporate sponsorship of its national convention this year, selling space for brand logos on delegate documents, advertising signs in its meeting spaces and a private lunch for executives with the church’s senior archbishop.

...

By most indices the Anglican Church is struggling – declining faster than any other Christian denomination in Canada, according to a recent report from its Diocese of British Columbia, closing decades-old parishes for want of money and “moved to the far margins of public life.”

...

Mr. Carrière [the Anglicans’ national director of communications and information resources] said that, ideally, the church is looking for commercial sponsorships from firms with which it does business, such as insurance companies.

Natch.

In the best of all possible worlds

2010-04-14T13:55:00.000-04:00

Jay Stone writes an unbelievably lazy piece in the Post's "Arts" section today:

In the new movie Kick-Ass, a young actor named Chloe Moretz, who is 13, dresses up as a superheroine named Hit-Girl and shocks a roomful of adults with her martial-arts chops and, more to the point, by using the last bastion of obscenity, the c-word.

Why that word became the final unutterable profanity is a question for gender-studies classes, if not Sigmund Freud, but the scene has turned Moretz into something of the star of the moment. (For the record, it appears that her mother, who was on the set at the time, suggested she say it.) It has resulted, oddly, in only mild protests, which tells us something about the level of public discourse these days, and lots about the way we have come to view young people.

And how is it, then, that we have come to view young people, ~~Pangloss~~ Jay?

Why, as "human beings" at last! As opposed, that is, to the "barely watchable" historical performances of such "abused" child actors as Judy Garland and Shirley Temple; the Oh Goshs on their lips the obvious evidence of their cinematic slavery, just as the cunts on young Ms Moretz's are the evidence of her emancipation.

And how did we come to this wonderful pass, Jay?

Younger people [in earlier films] became human beings only at the extremes of behaviour. In 1976, 14-year-old Jodie Foster played a hooker in Taxi Driver. In 1978, 12-year-old Brooke Shields appeared naked in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, a drama set in a bordello. Pretty Baby was banned in some parts of Canada, but by then, the change was on the way.

Ah, I see. Through the explicit sexualization of children. That's your angle. Well, that makes a little more sense. Because, you know, I was thinking there were a whole lot of films made before 1976 that didn't have either Judy Garland or Shirley Temple in them that could be pretty brutal--or, sorry, that gave "pre-pubescent performers" a "real life". Hell, even that bit in It's a Wonderful Life where young George Bailey gets his head beaten off by poor old Mr Gower ... That's pretty rough for a kid, eh? But maybe that's just me. How about then, oh I don't know, Blackboard Jungle? Or, hey, how about Lolita or Au Hazard Balthazar--just the sort of thing you're looking for there, daddy-o.

But, I take your point. No 13 year old girls in knee socks and mini-kilts,* brandishing small arms (w/silencer) and saying "cunt". "Real life" stuff like that. Yeah, that's true.

Still, it would've been nice if Jay had given his article a little, 'ow you say, focus by discussing where he thinks all this transgression will lead. Like--even if he was just to shoot such an absurd notion down--some discussion of the idea that when there are no more of the little taboos for adolescents to concern themselves with, they tend to find other, less innocent ones; or just a little acknowledgment maybe of what many have observed about this sort of transgression-for-transgression's-sake stuff: that all such 'progress' has a nasty habit of leading us away from the simple truth that there is nothing new under the sun; that perhaps we've been in this place before, and there was a reason why we left it.

_______________________

*Interesting cropping, you'll notice, of the above photo at the Post's site.

What's he(mg) listening to?

2010-04-09T11:05:00.000-04:00

England on the cusp of its own undoing ...

The Jesus and Mary Chain:

The Stone Roses:

The Happy Mondays:

That popping sound?

2010-04-07T17:55:00.000-04:00

Two sources:

1) The corks from champagne bottles in every office of 'Big Tobacco' the world over.

2) The heads of thousands of anti-tobacco lobbyists.

Gentlemen, you may smoke.

Smoking kills.

But a new screening technique can predict about three-quarters of the smokers who will eventually develop lethal lung cancers, authors of a groundbreaking study say.

What’s more, the biochemical signatures captured by the diagnostic screen in most cancer-prone smokers could be blocked by a new drug that could prevent the disease from progressing, according to the study released Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Why Christopher Hitchens won't return his calls

2010-04-06T12:40:00.002-04:00

Hey, Paul Schneidereit, does the Chronicle Herald really pay you to think this way?

When you believe, absolutely, that God is on your side, and those who criticize you are inspired by the devil, your capacity to rationalize is nearly unlimited.

(Find me the thinking Catholic, Paul, that thinks either of these things and I will eat a pair of your underpants.)

And does the Chronicle Herald really pay you to write this way?

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, especially the Vatican, represents a closed society whose leaders are accorded tremendous power and prestige. Like all such similar structures in human history, many of those on the inside intent on climbing the ladder to success are willing to protect their positions — and those of their colleagues — from external threats.

Dude: your understanding of this issue is as convoluted as your use of metaphor, as inept as your syntax. Moreover, you really should know that the audience you think you're appealing to has a big, big problem with appearing to be on the same side as idiots. If you're feeling as strongly about the matter as all this jabber vaguely indicates, I suggest--strongly--that you avoid any further discussion of it.

Demography won't decorate my condo!

2010-03-31T12:20:00.002-04:00

Dan Gardner's been doing some outstanding, if lonely, work on the demographic decline file and is well worth the read on this (here, here, here, and here).

What he has yet to acknowledge--short of a kind of shrug--is the ideological monolith that stands between the Canadian public and any serious discussion of the matter. Namely: the insanely obtuse (but inevitable and instantaneous) reduction of the matter to sexism.

_____________________

UPDATE (April 1st, 2010)

Dan graciously nods in the direction of this post (and wonders at the company I've got him with in my blogroll).

Pensées

2010-03-25T12:30:00.000-04:00

Un.

In an otherwise sane piece, a very jarring sentence:

The familiar image of the pale, asthenic Talmud scholar is not — or not only — an anti-Semitic stereotype, but a perduring reality.

Not certain that isn't one of the more blatantly problematic statements I've read.

Deux.

From the Home section of the Star, this headline:

One Bloor will be a bold, futuristic building

I.E. One Bloor will be a derivative, ugly building--combining features of flimsiness and repellency sufficient to ensure an easy transition to future "futuristic buildings".

Dan Gardner on true believers

2010-03-25T11:50:00.002-04:00

... The world is not complicated for the True Believer. It is Manichean. Binary. There is liberal and there is conservative. There is free speech and there is hate speech. Bright lines divide the hemispheres and what fits where is never in doubt. Indeed, the True Believer never suffers any doubt for all is certain. They have the answers and the answers are true. There's no need to examine their beliefs, to think hard, to seek out and consider alternative views and contrary evidence.
If a question is asked for which the True Believer has no answer -- like "why is this speech you loathe not protected by the right to free speech?" -- there's no need to reconsider and reflect. The True Believer simply moves on to the next slogan.
It is this quality -- not her outrageous language -- that makes Ann Coulter a blight on public discourse. But many of her critics can't see that. Because they are no different.
Well, that's not quite true. They sought to stop Coulter from speaking, and others from listening. Whatever Ann Coulter's sins, she's never done that.

Dan Gardner, Even if Ann Coulter is a villain, she isn't the villain of this piece

"A singularly unambitious movie that has more in common with 30 minute pizza than with art"

2010-03-17T15:15:00.000-04:00

Udolpho reviews It's Complicated:

[It's Complicated is] a complete catalogue of everything vital to the SWPL [Stuff White People Like] set, including but not limited to: a cheerful yet infantilized brood of attractive young adult children, professional people who run their own businesses, gourmet bakeries with sets borrowed from the Food Network, casual attitudes toward marijuana, characters who actually say things like "I'm sorry for betraying your trust"--to their kids, people who live on atomized neighborless spreads, aimless home remodeling projects, Apple laptops (now so commonplace that the sight of a glaring Apple logo somewhere onscreen may be a technique taught to all cinematographers), middle-aged people behaving without a shred of dignity, and stories about family and relationships so that none of the characters ever has a reason to leave his narcissistic cocoon.

...

What directors like Nancy Meyers give SWPLs are their ideal lifestyles and ideal self image. Money and status are never concerns, nor for that matter is success in business. Such benefits are simply what SWPLs have coming to them by virtue of their intelligence, open-mindedness, and love of novelty. It is simply a given that a SWPL will be able to expertly manage a construction company, a niche bakery (as if another one could possibly be crammed into a SWPL habitat), or a law firm without ever seeming to do more than delegate responsibilities and assign vague tasks to conscientious-looking employees. (The SWPL fantasy job is actually that of generic manager.)

Likewise, one's children behave like expertly tooled Japanese androids, their chief purpose to lend smiling (or every now and then dew-eyed) support and friendship. In some respects a SWPL's children are his true peers, perhaps even his superiors in a role-reversed arrangement (part of the fantasy of this role reversal involves never having the responsibility of a parent).

As far as personal growth, the SWPL professional is deeply committed to the therapeutic process, but like his pleas for forgiveness which do not come from penitence or remorse but from unhappiness with pleasure denied, his therapist is more like a paid companion. Paid, that is, to listen to his one-sided complaints and agonies and offer judgement-free suggestions for future onanistic introspection.

...

P'itchens makes a distinction worth remembering

2010-03-17T14:45:00.000-04:00

Wesley Crosland is I think mistaken when he says that there is no rational basis for Christian faith. On the contrary, as reason and faith are wholly connected and Christian theology is wedded to reason. In fact, some would argue that it is the first and most thorough attempt to understand the universe and its nature through reason. What he may perhaps mean is that faith cannot be based upon knowledge. That is quite true.

Peter Hitchens, The most sinister car ever built

What's he(mg) listenting to?

2010-02-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

The Drums

Charlotte Gainsbourg (and Beck)

and Cat Power

Your genius is in recognizing mine

2010-02-23T13:50:00.005-05:00

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

2010-02-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

... 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

2010-02-09T11:20:00.002-05:00

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

2010-02-04T12:05:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-03T15:15:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-03T12:10:00.001-05:00

... 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

2009-12-23T20:00:00.000-05:00

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!

2009-12-18T14:35:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-16T00:20:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-15T11:45:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-12-11T16:00:00.003-05:00

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

2009-12-04T13:10:00.000-05:00

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?

2009-11-27T12:30:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-24T13:00:00.000-05:00

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:

Hideous Public Art: Curmudgeons II - Revenge of the Killer Curmudgeons

2009-11-11T17:30:00.003-05:00

You remember that I had the good fortune recently of meeting Eric--of Diogenes Borealis--and spending an afternoon with him, right? (Half our time was spent hoisting pints on a Baldwin Street patio, the other half guffawing our way down University Avenue etc.)

Well, here's the second installment of our impressions of that day--the first can be found here--cross-posted to each of our sites.

Stop 3: The McMurtry Gardens of Justice and The Pillars of Justice.

EMG
The next stop on our stroll was not anticipated, but ended up being—in my opinion—its highlight.

Immediately outside of the Ontario Superior Court (across the street from the U.S. Consulate General) and—as we were traveling south—just past a very thin presence of still-protesting Tamils, Eric and I happened upon what are known as “The Pillars of Justice” and “The McMurtry Gardens of Justice”.

A little back- ground:

The McMurtry Gardens project—named in honour of then-Chief Justice Roy McMurtry, who was on the point of retiring—was conceived of nearly 3 years ago with the purpose of enlivening an otherwise dull block of the downtown with a sculptural garden (comprising around ten pieces, of which the Pillars are the first), contained within just the garden-variety of gardens stretching to Queen Street. The monuments were to depict “justice-related themes”; the garden itself, to borrow poor Michael Bryant's agonizing description, would “forever serve as a reminder that justice bloomed in Ontario under Roy McMurtry … [who] ensured that nothing could stop the growth of justice, human rights, and the rule of law."

Well, as it is now, there’s a little too much of the Gaza Strip about the Gardens—what with their flowerless piles of bleached-out dirt (save for a few weeds), made inaccessible by clumsily erected chain-link fences—and we’re still 9 short of the proposed 10 sculptures. (And that’s 3 years on, in case you’re not remembering. Three years!)

The Gardens wouldn’t be a hundredth so ridiculous were it not for the facts that 1) their commemorative plaque was erected well in advance of the planting of any actual greenery (work that cannot be undertaken any sooner than spring of next year), and 2) the plaque urges us to take this wasteland as our cue for a reflection on the state of our f-ing judicial system.

Nothing can stop the growth of justice, human rights, and the rule of law, eh Mr. Bryant? How about neglecting to sow their seeds?

But, no doubt, this will become a moot point in a year. Or two. Or three.

As for the Pillars … Well, this piece is something like exquisitely awful. The thing is just so banal, so unimaginative, and so aesthetically barren that it seems to me that only silver jump-suited aliens visiting our post-apocalyptic world could be impressed by it. A little primitive did I hear you say, Quaxon 2000? Yes, perhaps. But is it not admirable that this civilization evolved to the point of developing a Public Art Algorithm of which, clearly, this is a product? It puts me in mind of the emblem on our own galactic shield. You know the one: the really big spaceship made-up of 42 smaller spaceships?

This burrito of adolescent pretension is made of steel apparently, but you’d never know from looking at it; somebody had the brilliant idea of painting the thing white so that it looks like huge slabs of foam core. And while the maquette suggested that the Pillars would have a sturdy base of four steps, it only has two—bolted carelessly to a disproportionate (and concrete) third. The consequent impression of flimsiness is so vivid that you’d think a strong gust could toss the whole mess up University, bunking lightly off car-roofs and pedestrians’ heads until it got caught on a staple protruding from a telephone poll … Where it would flap for months until nothing was left of it but a few exhaust-stained tatters.

The body of Oscar Nemon’s work at least gave us the reassurance that Gumby Goes to Heaven was an exception—however glaring—to the sculptor’s rule. The same, alas, cannot be said of this artist, Edwina Sandys. (That’s pronounced “sands” by the way—who is, coincidentally, the granddaughter of Winston Churchill, whose be-bird-shitted likeness, you’ll remember, scowls but a block east of here.) There isn’t enough space here to dedicate to a proper examination of Ms. Sandys’ work; suffice it to say that anyone who thinks they are doing something challenging or original by putting a pair of tits on the crucified Christ and calling the thing “Christa” deserves to be ridiculed to scorn. Ms. Sandys is the very embodiment of social justice activism as psychosis.

By way of introduction to Eric’s analysis, I leave you with this tidbit (from James Rusk of The Globe and Mail--scroll down the thread) regarding the artist’s process:

Ms. Sandys … said she had first thought of modelling a work on the statue of Blind Justice at The Old Bailey in London, but on realizing the concept of blind justice could be misconstrued, chose a different design.

On realizing the concept of blind justice could be misconstrued, she chose a different design.

Inf-ingcredible.

Eric
Where does one start? There's not much I can add to EMG's observations about the Gardens of Justice except to re-iterate the point that if you're going to put up a monument called Gardens of Justice complete with a helpful plaque explaining the concept to puzzled viewers, you'd better include ... what's the word? ... a garden. The site in its current form just invites mockery. The boulevard down the centre of University Avenue includes some beautifully tended flower beds, but the only one specifically designed to symbolize a civic virtue - and one that has been three years in the making - looks like Berlin after the Russians were through with it in 1945.

I can just imagine some poor sap having some life-altering case adjudicated in the nearby Superior Court building after having mortgaged his meagre possessions to pay the shysters at Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, stepping out during the lunch adjournment to eat a sandwich on University Avenue. He beholds the Gardens of Justice choked with noxious weeds and promptly steps in front of a north-bound bus.

I'm willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Gardens will eventually be in full bloom sometime in the near future (since the wheels of justice do grind slowly), so perhaps I'm being a little harsh. Nevertheless, even if it is ever full of tulips this garden will still be a little cringe-inducing. It's a garden, get it? A "garden of justice!" Get it? Justice "blooms" in Ontario! Get it? They say that a pun is the lowest form of humour - ditto for visual, horticultural puns.

As for the Pillars of Justice - good lord. I assume the structure is meant to mimic the Erectheum's Porch of the Caryatids on Athens' ancient acropolis. The Erechtheum was Athens' temple to Athena Polias, protectress of the city, and the Athenians built a suitably impressive monument for her. What do we have on University Avenue? A cartoon-like structure which looks more like the temporary set from a low-budget high school production of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

Once again, the patricians responsible for this artwork have included a helpful plaque to explain its symbolism to the bewildered plebes. "We are the pillars of justice", we are told. "The missing pillar invites you to imagine that you are the twelfth juror." Oh - it's interactive! How clever! If I stand in the gap, I can participate in the justice system in all its panoply! Please. EMG and I took turns standing in the place of the missing Pillar of Justice and we both felt like idiots. In fact, EMG felt compelled to grab the ass of caryatid number 11. People walking by looked at us patronizingly like we'd just fallen off the turnip truck from some benighted art-less place east of the Don Valley. "It's a metaphor, you stupid hicks," you could almost hear them saying. "You're not meant to literally be a pillar of justice."

In this case, maybe not. A look at Edwina Sandys' previous commissions reveals a tiresome fascination with juvenile metaphors. Check out The Marriage Bed, in which one learns that marriage can literally be both a bed of roses and a bed of nails. Or how about Woman Free - another sculptural cartoon depicting, well, a free woman. I noticed on her website that the United Nations is one of her main clients. That seems fitting. She seems to produce works of art suited to government committees looking for logos for their PowerPoint presentations. Pillars of Justice fits right in with the rest of her teen-angst oeuvre. The viewer is literally a pillar of justice. Groan.

This woman is the grand-daughter of Winston Churchill? This is another sad example of the decline of once-great families. Commodore Vanderbilt's dynasty degenerated to Anderson Cooper; the Churchill line ends at Edwina Sandys. Churchill once said "success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm". Indeed.

(cross-posted at Diogenes Borealis)

Roger Scruton on what happens to liberty without substance

2009-11-09T20:35:00.000-05:00

For the most part, the people I met were quiet, studious, often deeply religious, attempting to build shrines in the catacombs, around which small circles of marginalised people could gather to venerate the memory of their national culture.

...
In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.

It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.

They sat in their offices for a while, pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much travelled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both “do business”, carefully groomed themselves for the next elections.

Not since 1945 had so many records of party membership disappeared, or so many dissident biographies been invented. Within two years the real dissidents had returned to their studies, while the world outside was racing on, led by a new political class that had learnt to add a record of outspoken dissidence to all its other dissimulations. We were witnessing what Dubcek had promised, socialism with a human face.
...
But those countries today bear no resemblance to the liberated nations that were dreamt of in the catacombs. For when the stones were lifted, and the air of freedom blew across the underground altars, the flame that had been kept alive on them was instantly blown out.

Roger Scruton, The flame that was snuffed out by freedom

(via Peter Hitchens)

Fry Fry!

2009-11-05T14:38:00.003-05:00

(Sorry to those of you who are sick of the sight of Katie Price's jugs--actually, cisterns is maybe the better word. I am too. In fact I feel positively alienated by them, and haven't visited EMG for days as a consequence. Moving on then ...)

Damian Thompson takes issue with the Edenbridge Bonfire's choice for this year's celebrity effigy--Katie Price, coincidentally enough--suggesting that there is a more deserving candidate:

[My choice] would be Stephen Fry. Yup, let him fry. Or, rather, melt, since this particular guy would be made of wobbly, self-pitying blancmange.

Hear, hear!

I used to love Stephen Fry--so much so, that for a number of years after I stopped loving him I still bought and read his dreadful books. But that's all over now. His transition from hugely talented, witty, self-effacing sceptic to twee, clownish, self-absorbed luvvie is complete and the mere sight of him makes me cringe. He has joined that sickening class of Englishmen who clearly know their cultural inheritance to be of extraordinary value, but refuse to defend it openly because they can't stand the thought of being disliked or, far greater crime!, being considered lame. So Fry's gone the route of relentless self-parody; that way he gets to retain for his personal use some vestigial remnant of the thing he can't bring himself to stop adoring--but always with a wink, so nobody thinks him unclever for doing so.

Let his example be a warning to all of you who try to serve two masters. (Apart from anything else, it gets on the brain. And you end up saying the funniest things.)

Women!

2009-10-28T16:00:00.001-04:00

The Guardian's Jean Hannah Edelstein regrets, wearily (what with the weight of the patriarchy and all that), Martin Amis' apparent misogyny:

It's always a little bit astonishing in these relatively enlightened times when someone who would like to be regarded as an important contributor to the cultural agenda relies on lazy, casual misogyny to attempt a critique. But it's the approach that Martin Amis has taken in adding his thoughts to the current (somewhat tired) debate about celebrity writers creaming off the profits of talented ones, when he remarked of Katie Price (widely recognised as his key literary rival) that "She has no waist, no arse ... an interesting face ... but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone."

I love the Guardian for this kind of stuff: the opinions that could go either way, but once the course has been chosen, are defended in the harshest possible terms.

For it's quite clear that Ms. Edelstein could just as easily have made the argument for Katie Price's own misogyny: i.e. the career reduction of her femininity to just sex appeal. (Indeed, rarely will the term 'sex appeal' seem so dewy-eyed, almost prudish, given the person it's here describing.)

The breadth of Ms. Price's fuck-puppetry act (to give it its proper name), after all, is impossible to ignore. Among other things, she is a model (complete, yes, with massive breast implants), a reality tv star, and the name into which a host of ghostwriters have thrust their best efforts at making money off the slobbering and unenlightened masses. I haven't seen enough of her (un-photoshopped, that is) to be able to confirm Amis' assessment of her waist and arse, but it is objectively the case that not only are we really worshipping her magnificent bags of silicone, we are doing so because she wants us to. We are doing so because Ms. Price can't be, erm, arsed to do anything other than self-exploit.

Edelstein gives the game away thus:

Now, I doubt that Amis has flickered across Price's radar; nor, if he has, that she cares much about his opinion since it would appear that she is currently preoccupied with her romance with her cage-fighting boyfriend and not much with writing books, which she employs someone to do on her behalf.

Mee-OW!

But surely--surely, surely, surely--these are "lazy and casual" attacks on Ms. Price based on an unfair stereotype of women, too? Does Ms. Edelstein know for a fact that this apparent bimbo is ignorant of Martin Amis? That she is so because she's too busy with her manly-man boyfriend and getting other people to earn her money for her?

... And poor old Martin Amis is being--not merely obvious--but a misogynist when he observes the same thing!

(Observes that the empress is wearing no clothes, I mean.)

Anglican Catholics

2009-10-22T11:05:00.001-04:00

The Globe and Mail expresses its concern (and you can bet it's grave) over Benedict XVI's recent gesture towards orthodox Anglicans:

The Vatican announcement will make the Catholic Church more conservative and the Anglican church more liberal. Is that what ecumenism is meant to accomplish?

No. No it isn't. Touché, Mr. Mail. Ecumenism is meant to accomplish precisely nothing, and this definitely isn't nothing.

But I love this fear, simultaneously, of the Catholic Church becoming more conservative, and the Anglican church becoming more liberal. Strangely, the Globe editorialists do not express their (undoubted) worry that the Baptists are being ignored in all this, and that they are then at some serious risk of becoming even more like Baptists.

Clever Sillies

2009-10-20T14:40:00.000-04:00

Udolpho is back. Sort of.

He's got a little forum thing going, and posts under the name Pleasureman. Here's a pretty awesome thread wherein he and a couple of guys rap about this essay by Bruce G. Charlton.

Some excerpts (from the essay):

General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism. Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

...

The over-use of abstract reasoning may be most obvious in the social domain, where normal humans are richly equipped with evolved psychological mechanisms both for here-and-now interactions (e.g. rapidly reading emotions from facial expression, gesture and posture, and speech intonation) and for ‘strategic’ modelling of social interactions to understand predict and manipulate the behaviour of others. Social strategies deploy inferred knowledge about the dispositions, motivations and intentions of others. When the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic, abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ people, they are ignoring an ‘expert system’ in favour of a non-expert system.

...

Indeed, I suggest that higher levels of the personality trait of Openness in higher IQ people may be the flip-side of this over-use of abstraction. I regard Openness as the result of deploying abstract analysis for social problems to yield unstable and unpredictable results, when innate social intelligence would tend to yield predictable and stable results. This might plausibly underlie the tendency of the most intelligent people in modernizing societies to hold ‘left-wing’ political views.

I would argue that neophilia (or novelty-seeking) is a driving attribute of the personality trait of Openness; and a disposition common in adolescents and immature adults who display what I have termed ‘psychological neoteny’.

...

My hunch is that it is this kind of IQ-advertisement which has led to the most intelligent people in modern societies having ideas about social phenomena that are not just randomly incorrect (due to inappropriately misapplying abstract analysis) but are systematically wrong. I am talking of the phenomenon known as political correctness (PC) in which foolish and false ideas have become moralistically-enforced among the ruling intellectual elite. And these ideas have invaded academic, political and social discourse. Because while the stereotypical nutty professor in the hard sciences is a brilliant scientist but silly about everything else; the stereotypical nutty professor social scientist or humanities professor is not just silly about ‘everything else’, but also silly in their professional work.

...

I infer that the motivation behind the moralizing venom of political correctness is the fact that spontaneous human instincts are universal and more powerfully-felt than the absurd abstractions of PC; plus the fact that common sense is basically correct while PC is perversely wrong. Hence, at all costs a fair debate must be prevented if the PC consensus is to be protected. Common sense requires to be stigmatized in order that it is neutralized.

Udolpho comments:

Little wonder at their entire array of emotional crutches, from art devoid of beauty (novelty must ultimately extinguish beauty) to personal lives devoid of humility or altruism (that is, the deliberate relinquishment of one's claims for the happiness of another--not the vanity of announcing one's virtue by means of contrived charities or causes).

This argument is, of course, an argument for traditionalism, for which there is currently no compelling voice in the political realm because the cognitive elite has stigmatized it--so effectively that even the putatively "conservative" parties have been shamed into dropping these questions. It is left to a fearsome mixture of populists and fringe personalities to even broach such topics as the unhealthy nature of homosexuality, the stupefyingly obvious differences between men and women which negate much of feminism, and the need for social and ethnic cohesion (which touches on so many policies). How to reduce the influence of the clever-silly cognitive elite and restore genuine conservatism is the question of the age.

The Pennies

2009-10-09T15:28:00.000-04:00

At long last: the next episode of EMG and EMG! And it's far too pants for a blurb, so just listen already.

(Click the image, press play)

(Incidentals: no swearing ... unless you consider one 'prick' swearing. The song in full can be found here, the album here.)

Run time is just over 8 minutes.

Ransom note book reviews

2009-09-29T13:35:00.004-04:00

From the Heather Mallick stylebook:

Write down a thousand odd words, each on an individual chit of paper. Make sure to include a few that you clearly don’t understand. Like “grandeur”.
Mix words in bag. (Cloth please. No plastic.)
Overturn bag, allowing contents to fall evenly over floor.
Topmost 15 words—as they have fallen—will comprise first line of essay; second 15 from top, second line; third 15 from top, third line; and so forth.
Email to editor.
Turn TV back on.

NOTE: Words, phrases and “sentences” may be rearranged and/or improved upon at your discretion to ensure that none of the following are omitted:

a) Endless repetitions of what aspire to be—but aren’t quite—progressive platitudes.

b) Obtuse flattery of author, interspersed (on a one sentence per paragraph basis) with the crude substance of an attempt at an actual book review.

c) Basic contradictions. (E.G. In paragraph 15 suggest that mankind continually fails to grasp the obvious message of the author’s oeuvre; in paragraph 18 claim that the author doesn’t, nor has she ever, intended a message.)

d) A comparison—as though it was a compliment—of the author to, say, the mythical personage responsible for unleashing evil on mankind. Remain oblivious to kick-you-in-the-nuts irony of same.

(xposted)

flair n. promiscuousness and/or buffoonery

2009-09-24T14:10:00.003-04:00

From every- body’s favourite novelty newspaper:

By imitating Trudeau, Ignatieff could recast himself as a leader with a bold vision for Canada, a man who offered voters a stark alternative to Harper, rather than the uninspiring leader whose main policy positions seem merely to mirror those of the Conservatives.

…

[Trudeau] was internationally famous and he made Canadians believe we mattered on the world stage.

…

And he had flair, dating a series of beautiful women and once performing a pirouette behind Queen Elizabeth's back.

In contrast, Ignatieff, a man of intellect and international experience like Trudeau, comes across as too packaged, stiff, seemingly afraid to take a stand on any issue that pollsters tell him is unpopular.

…

To regain momentum, Ignatieff needs to offer voters bold programs for the future. To do so, he should steal from Trudeau's agenda, running on just two or three overriding themes that resonate with Canadians, such as championing medicare or restoring our image as global peacemakers.

…

Being bold, taking risks, speaking his mind, promoting programs that made this country better: they all worked for Trudeau.

They might just work for Ignatieff, too.

Dare we point out that there’s a difference between making “Canadians believe [they] mattered on the world stage” and Canada actually mattering on the world stage? Or perhaps that’s the columnist’s point, the cynical scamp. The emphasis should really be on that word “believe” then, shouldn’t it? As in: making Canadians “believe” that championing medicare and restoring our image as global peacemakers are bold, risk-taking stands that the pollsters consider unpopular.

(Cross-posted at Small Dead Animals, where I'm guest-blogging for a bit.)

What's he(mg) listening to?

2009-09-18T16:00:00.001-04:00

As there's a French theme to today's picks, you'll be pointing out that my post title should've been in French. Seeing, however, as I'm just not that confident in my French, let's call it a political decision that I didn't.

We begin with Jacques Dutronc--brilliant song and probably the worst video you've ever seen:

Les Négresses Vertes:

And MC Solaar:

Où est la piscine? Splish splosh.

Hideous Public Art - Two Curmudgeons Stroll Down University Avenue

2009-09-15T21:20:00.001-04:00

You'll remember that I'm a big fan of the Hideous Public Art series at the blog Diogenes Borealis, yes? Well, I had the very good fortune recently of meeting its author, Eric, and spending an afternoon with him. Half our time was spent hoisting pints on a Baldwin Street patio, the other half guffawing our way down University Avenue (by way of the AGO), taking in the sights there ... Better call them spectacles actually.

A distillation of some of our thoughts and conversation here follows--the first of what will likely be 3 or 4 joint critiques, cross-posted to each of our sites.

Stop 1: The Art Gallery of Ontario.

Eric
After having ranted numerous times about Daniel Libeskind’s grotesque addition to the ROM known as “The Crystal”, it was appropriate to take a cursory glance at Frank Gehry’s recent renovation of the AGO. I was prepared to hate it, but it doesn’t provoke a strong reaction in me either way. The old AGO building was nothing to write home about, so the new Dundas Street facade certainly isn’t any worse. It has a certain charm with its expanses of clear glass stretched over a soaring wooden frame, but it reminds me of a transparent beached whale. At least it isn’t yet another iteration of his signature crumpled tin-foil buildings, which are getting a little tiresome. The back of the building (facing Grange Park) is truly ugly; with its massive expanse of blue anodized aluminum cladding and its modern staircases curving down like claws around The Grange. It looks like an alien spacecraft that has landed in Victorian London.

EMG
Gehry’s redesign of the AGO is an improvement on the original building right up to the point where it does this dreadful thing you’re seeing done to the poor old Grange. Which is to say, seen from the northeast corner of Dundas and McCaul, it’s really something. Get around the other side, though, and you’re punched in the eyeballs, and beaten relentlessly about the credulity.

I notice that the façade is the same colour as the holograms on the Transformers toys of my boyhood; and no doubt if Eric and I had bothered to look at it from the right angle, we could’ve made out a Decepticon insignia.

So a slight variation on the alien spacecraft theme in my view: not quite suited to the physical demands of interstellar warfare, Capsizedboat-tron awaits the order for his post-colonization duties (something cushy in the Ministry for Space-propaganda, if it’s convenient) set spang in the centre of ever-accommodating Toronto.

Stop 2: Per Ardua ad Astra - Dundas Street & University Avenue

Eric
This is probably Toronto’s most famous piece of Hideous Public Art. Known officially as Per Ardua ad Astra (“through adversity to the stars” - the motto of the Royal Canadian Air Force) it was unveiled by none other than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1984 as a memorial to Canadian airmen. It was sculpted by Oscar Nemon (1906 - 1985), a Croatian emigre who settled in England during the war and who is justly famous for his portrait sculptures of luminaries like Sigmund Freud and Winston Churchill. Per Ardua ad Astra was his last work.

Per Ardua was very controversial when it was installed. Paid for by philanthropist and art patron Hal Jackman, the former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, it attracted criticism for being “politically motivated” and for being installed without consulting the Toronto arts community. At the time the Globe and Mail called it "vapid," "ghastly" and a "mediocre sculptural doodad" and art dealer Av Isaacs organized a protest against it. Nemon himself, when he saw that the city had placed his work on a plinth against his express wishes, reportedly said that they had made it look like “a tulip in a box” (as opposed to just a tulip, I suppose). Shortly after it was installed, vandals spray-painted the words “Gumby goes to Heaven” on the plinth and it’s been called that by Toronto residents ever since. The Great Canadian Book of Lists puts it at number six on its list of “Ten Controversial Moments in Canadian Art”.

Well, who am I to argue with the arts critic at the Globe and Mail? This thing really is a mediocre sculptural doodad. Prominently positioned in the middle of a major intersection on Toronto’s most ceremonial boulevard, it looks really out of place like it should be in a playground instead. I can imagine it installed in an amusement park somewhere with water spouting out of its hands. Its childish appearance is all the more startling when one realizes that it is in fact a memorial to Canadian airmen who fought and died in combat (including seven Victoria Cross winners). I can imagine the look on the Queen’s face when she pulled the shroud off this thing at the unveiling.

I just can’t understand the iconography of this sculpture. Is Gumby releasing a Dove of Peace? Perhaps warding off the Eagle of Fascism? Maybe just shooing away the Shitting Seagull of Lake Ontario? As art it’s just ridiculous, but as a war memorial it’s insulting.

EMG
I was surprised to discover that the sculptor, Oscar Nemon, is also responsible for the Winston Churchills to be found next Nathan Phillip’s Square here in Toronto, and outside of the Halifax Public Library. (No doubt there are others as well.) I’ve always rather liked these monuments—in spite, that is, of the effect the pebble-grained body has on the unstylized head, i.e. emphasis of the loads of birdshit on Winnie's face as compared with the body, where the stuff is effectively disguised in relief. And, indeed, there is much that is admirable about t he corpus of Mr. Nemon’s work. But the Canadian Airman’s Memorial (aka Per Ardua Ad Astra, aka Gumby Goes to Heaven ) really is awful.

(And if I can just note: while I sympathize wholeheartedly with the mockery intended by the nickname, it strikes me as being a little inadequate. I get more a feeling of: Gumby’s Had Way Too Much To Drink, And Is Way Too Excited That A Village People Record’s Been Put On. For which, apparently, gay Gumby is about to get squashed by a homophobic anvil.)

It goes without saying that this bronze and marble piece is conspicuously ugly/trite, but, like Eric, what annoys me most about it is the confusion of its visual metaphors:

Here we have the figure, stretched impossibly to the heavens—its oversized hands palm-upwards and outwards, implying both the skyward aspiration and the hands’ transformation into wings—but then, for some reason, we’ve got an eagle, and an incongruously proportionate one, atop all that. I mean, if we are trying to describe man’s growth through technological progress (as per the former RCAF—the institution here being commemorated) then why go any further than the gumbification-and-wingy-hands theme? Or, if it’s the idea of man harnessing the power of flight, why not just have some regular sized dude dangling from the bird?

And don’t forget the memorial’s motto/title: through adversity to the stars. The stars! Yet another dimension of metaphorical convolution! Wouldn’t it have been at least a little less muddled if Gumby were reaching for a star, then? (Though, yes, that would be rather too Soviet, wouldn’t it?)

The thing’s just a mess.

(cross-posted at Diogenes Borealis)

Reprise

2009-09-14T17:05:00.001-04:00

Sorry for thin posting. No doubt this will soon change given the gobsmacking ambitions of certain politicians.

And sorry for the lack of EMG and EMGs--I know how some of you have come to depend on them for your spiritual sustenance. But there's been a lot of construction in my neighbourhood lately and recording's basically been impossible. So we're still in reruns.

The archive, of course, is always there in the sidebar for you to make your way through (just under the blogroll), but I was listening to a couple of them last night and feel compelled to recommend another listening of The Acceptable Usage. Really just absolute genius. And that's me saying that, so ...

And The Girlfriend.

Pants, pants, and pants again!

Chris Selley sees the logic through

2009-09-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

In expressing my exasperation at Naomi Klein' s baffling, circuitous and slippery attempt to defend her and her cohorts' protest against Israeli films at the Toronto International Film Festival — or, if you believe her, against the way these Israeli films have been “packaged” — I neglected to follow her argument, such as it was, through to its logical and damning implications.
For those of you lucky enough not to have read her piece in The Globe and Mail, and foolish enough not to have read this morning's Full Pundit, I will summarize her reasoning: Israel did bad things in Gaza, and is trying to resuscitate its international reputation through a re-branding campaign, which doesn't help Gazans any, and threatens to let Israel off the hook for the aforementioned bad things. The package of Israeli films to be shown in Toronto may or may not be related to this re-branding exercise — this is the most equivocal part of Klein's article — but it nevertheless “matches Israel's stated propaganda goals to a T.”

This is a standard (and odious) political play: “You yourself may not be [insert bad thing here], but your actions facilitate [the bad thing], and thus are misguided.” National Post readers will be familiar with it from the debate over Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, and free speech in general. Ezra Levant isn't a neo-Nazi, his opponents might say (and have said), but his campaign for absolute free speech nevertheless emboldens neo-Nazis. Why does Ezra Levant want to embolden neo-Nazis?

But here's the thing. If Klein believes showing these films as a package is wrong because it happens to intersect with the propaganda goals of an unrelated third party, then it's only fair that her actions be scanned against the propaganda goals of other third parties for points of intersection.

So, would the most bug-eyed, missile-launching fanatics of Hezbollah and Hamas support or oppose showing these films? I think they'd oppose it. Indeed, one might argue that cancelling the event would match their propaganda goals to a T. One might even argue that Naomi Klein was, in fact, facilitating misery in Israel. I sure as hell wouldn't argue that, but someone might. Someone like... well, like Naomi Klein.
...

Chris Selley, Leonard Cohen, Naomi Klein and boycott politics

Dennis Dale on going 'round the prickly pear

2009-09-09T11:20:00.000-04:00

Has the media's recoiling fascination with the Angry White Mobs of health care reform's roadshow crippled that effort and stalled the Obama administration?

Marshaling evidence to that effect, liberal codger E.J.Dionne, for one, draws the only relevant conclusion: there is no such thing as a "liberal media bias." In giving the "tea-baggers" all that sneering attention, the media overstated their numbers and fury; and as we all know consequence equals intent and consequences are always intended. Employing their conspiratorial mob tactics (political organization and assembly, raised voices, unfashionable clothing) they snookered the media into acting as their own oblivious man behind the curtain, projecting the illusion of a powerful force. It's a new twist on an old story: idealistic and naive city folk brave the American interior in search of a dream, get taken by slick operating small-towners. It was a Simpson's episode. Of course, eventually everything will be a Simpsons episode.

...

Media bias, liberal or not, is nothing more than the aggregate of the influential class' prejudices, fantasies, and phobias. It is not action but drift. Its predictable nature creates the illusion of direction and control. But once set in motion, round and round it goes, where the narrative stops, nobody knows.

Dennis Dale, Narrative Blowback

Shock value and Brookfield Place

2009-09-04T00:30:00.002-04:00

Un.

The basis for what has been treated as 'daring' for the last 50 years:

An ignoramus has a very elaborate opinion.

Deux.

There is something extremely irritating (but still not shocking) about inferior architecture that treats superior architecture as an artefact.

Viva la contrarevoluciòn!

2009-09-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

Gerald Warner on the strangest thing I've ever heard:

You do not have to go all the way in supporting the English Democrats party, whose silly proposal for an English parliament would add another superfluous layer to already excessive government, to raise a glass to Peter Davies, the party’s elected Mayor of Doncaster. Davies, the father of Tory MP Philip Davies, is one of just 11 directly elected mayors and he is enjoying increasing media exposure because of his outrageous agenda which, against all the tenets of consensual British politics, consists of doing what the public wants.

In his first week in office he cut his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, which is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. He also scrapped the mayoral limousine. He is ending Doncaster’s twinning with five towns around the world, an arrangement which he describes as “just for people to fly off and have a binge at the council’s expense”. He intends now to reduce (that’s right, reduce) council tax by 3 per cent this year.

The “diversity” portfolio has been abolished from the council’s cabinet. From next year no more funding will be given to the town’s “Gay Pride” event, on the grounds that people do not need to parade their sexuality, whatever it may be, at taxpayers’ expense. Black History Month, International Women’s Day and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month are similarly destined to become history.

Council funding of translation services for immigrants has been scrapped because he believes incomers should take the trouble to learn English. Officials have been ordered to abandon bureaucratic gobbledegook language. Davies is saving the taxpayers £80,000 by disaffiliating from the pointless Local Government Association and the Local Government Information Unit. He aims to abolish all non-jobs on the council, as epitomised by “community cohesion officers”. He is taking advice from the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Campaign Against Political Correctness.

Davies’s views are calculated to put Harriet Harridan into intensive care for six months. He disregards all “green claptrap”, is creating more parking spaces to encourage traffic in the town for the benefit of business (”I’m not green and I’m not conned by global warming”). He has asked the Electoral Commission to reduce the number of Doncaster’s councillors from 63 to 21 (”If Pittsburgh can manage with nine councillors, why do we need 63?”).

You may be feeling disorientated, overcome by a surreal sensation, on hearing such extraordinary, unprecedented views. They are the almost forgotten, forcibly extinguished voice of sanity which most people had thought forever excised from British politics. These policies are common sense, which is something we have not experienced in any council chamber, still less the House of Commons, in decades. The establishment is moving heaven and earth to discredit and obstruct Davies. He is that ultimate embarrassment: the boy who reveals that the Emperor has no clothes.

If it is good enough for Doncaster, it is good enough for Britain. Our effete, corrupt, politically correct politicians must be compelled to follow suit. Once upon a time, such policies would have been axiomatic in the Tory Party. In the Cameron-occupied Conservative Party of today they are regarded as anathema. There has to be an inflexible public will to enforce the country’s wishes on the political class under pain of ejection from public life. That is the sole agenda for the next general election. The mainstream parties, as currently constituted, are no longer electable.

More here and here.

That hissing sound

2009-09-01T16:20:00.001-04:00

*And, yes, the artwork is an EMG (and Mrs.) original*

Christopher Booker on the "barbecue summers" that refuse to materialize:

The idea that temperature records might be a state secret seems strange enough, but when the policies of governments across the world are based on that data it becomes odder still that no outsider should be allowed to see it. Weirdest of all, however, is the Met Office's claim that to release the data would "damage the trust that scientists have in those scientists who happen to be employed in the public sector".

Doesn't the Met Office realise that trust in it has already been damaged enough by its batty predictions of "barbecue summers"? If it wants to restore that trust, it should first come clean about its data, and then reprogramme its computer to give us forecasts that are not skewed by its obsession with global warming – which is not happening.

James Delingpole provides a little perspective:

Power cuts (and the energy gap) represent a clear and present danger to Britain and her economy. ‘Climate change’ does not. Unless we get our priorities right very soon, we’re all going to be in deep, deep trouble. And no amount of impassioned protesting by environmentally conscious ex-public-school-children or bien-pensant celebrities will be able to get us out of the hole that they personally did so much to help dig.

Biblical literalists all!

2009-08-25T23:55:00.002-04:00

It's very frustrating to me to hear certain people moan on about the sort of 'Christian' who 'takes the Bible too literally.'

Frustrating, I say, because it is very, very, very often the case that precisely these people abandoned their own faith--or, indeed, refused to come within a barge pole's length of one in the first place--for the very reason that they take the Bible so literally.

What's he(mg) listening to?

2009-08-21T14:00:00.001-04:00

EMG can't be bothered posting, 'cause he's too busy listening to righteous tracks.

Like this one (even if the video's a weeny-fest):

This one:

And this one:

... only, because Groove Armada are way lamer than their name suggests, I can't embed it, so you have to follow the link like a chump.

"Anglicans"

2009-08-14T17:30:00.005-04:00

Hey, if I was to tell you that the Liberal Party--and, indeed, liberalism itself--were finished, would you believe me?

No?

Would it make any difference if I told you that, as of this morning, I'm a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party and therefore reliably positioned to make the call?

No?

Good. Because it really would be bollocks, wouldn't it?

I mean, any jackass can say he's a liberal--even have a membership in the Liberal Party--and not actually be a liberal.

All you'd need do to find out if I really was a liberal would be to peruse the last five or six of the posts below; whereupon, one assumes, you'd snort and say something really witty like, "Yeah and I'm Mother Teresa, chowderhead. How's about you, me, and that cigar store Indian start a rock band called The Blue Nazis?"

And I would totally understand your doing this.

So maybe you'll understand my reaction when H.E. Baber--self-styled "Episcopalian" (that is "Anglican")--gets to spanking about the state of her church.

Witness!

Clergy will likely write off these comments as ignorant or short-sighted. [Well, they won't now, or else they'll have fallen into your cunning trap! Well played! --ed.] The church, they will note, is not merely a collection of congregations that maintain buildings and do liturgy. Through most of its history, the church has been a transnational institution, under the oversight of bishops, meeting in councils to establish doctrine and policy. It engages with the world and provides moral guidance to its members.
My question however is whether the institutional church should be operating in this way.

What, as a church, you mean? As opposed to, well, nothing. --Sorry, sorry; you were saying:

Members of the Episcopal church are highly educated and well-informed. There is no reason why they should look to the church for moral guidance. As for prophetic proclamation and witness to the world, the church's efforts are pointless. Christendom is over: the world does not recognise the Anglican communion as a moral authority and pays no attention to its statements on matters of public concern.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhh! What? What, what, WHAT?!--

Trained professionals operating under the auspices of secular institutions study social, political and economic issues. Government and secular non-profits provide social services and concern themselves with economic development, peace and justice, the environment and human rights. There is no reason why the Anglican communion should maintain an additional institutional structure to engage in these activities. Institutional structure doesn't come cheap and it would be far more efficient if Christians worked through existing secular organisations.

(Gurgling sounds.)

When it comes to establishing doctrine, I doubt that most Anglicans, if they are honest, seriously believe that anything of importance hangs on theological correctness ... Laypeople who see church as nothing more than a local congregation, which maintains a building, provides Sunday services and rites of passage, and functions as a venue for community activities are not short-sighted. They are right. The institutional church has nothing else of interest to offer its members or anyone else that isn't provided by secular organisations.

... Eesh. Well, while she may play one on TV, H.E. Baber is neither an Anglican nor is she (as her bio claims) a scholar.

But let's just see if we can get this straight:

1) The Anglican Church is "a transnational institution, under the oversight of bishops, meeting in councils to establish doctrine and policy" that "engages with the world and provides moral guidance to its members." (Note: apparently eternal salvation falls under the catch-all "moral guidance".)

Baber suggests that if only the Anglican Church would stop doing those things, then people would recognize that it serves none of those ends.

2) The Anglican Church would be well-advised to abandon its own outreach programs and serve their secular equivalents, because there is absolutely no difference between the two, given premise 1).

3) "Most" Anglicans have no interest in "theological correctness". Which is to say, most Anglicans have no interest in being Anglicans. Therefore aren't Anglicans; therefore the Anglican Church does not exist. Therefore the Anglican Church has no business claiming to exist.

4) (Which, chronologically, should've come between 1 and 2--but which is the best, and is therefore saved for last ... ) Anglicans are "highly educated" and "well-informed". What makes Anglicans highly educated and well-informed is a species of, apparently, uniquely Anglican apophasis: i.e. they are highly educated and well-informed to the extent that their education and information exclude anything that might be considered "Anglican". It is, therefore, in Anglicanism's best interests, and most consistent with its Christian duty, that it acknowledge to the world that, erm, "Christendom is over". The "world", after all, does not acknowledge its moral authority, and therefore it cannot have any. (Securus judicat orbis terrarum.)

Fantastic! And I hope Ms. Baber will understand the compliment when I say that she has come to replace the God that I--as an Anglican--would never have been such a bumpkinish bore as to have believed in in the first place.

What's worth noting, though, is that I don't think I know a single atheist as terrified of using the name of Jesus Christ as Baber apparently is. Heck, many of them even know that He has something to do with Anglicanism.

Anyway ... I'm off to OXFAM to get me some Communion.

________________________

ADDENDUM (Aug. 18th)

Publius gives us the atheist's take on Christian atheists such as H.E. Baber.

Stuff stupid people like

2009-08-07T00:50:00.001-04:00

There was a fire scare in the building the other day. So, not an actual fire in the end, but somebody put a pot on the stove before going out and there was a lot of smoke. So all the rest of us were driven outside by the fire alarm to kick at the pavement and make awkward conversation until the firemen arrived.

The subject quickly turned to who 4D was again, and just where the hell they thought it was that they were living. 6B warmed to this immediately--6B being a woman who is, and I'm not exaggerating here, only just this side of Down's Syndrome. She mocked 4D thus, affecting an Appalachian accent: "Somebuddy left the possum pie in too long, Ma! Dagged if I don't know which way to turn them switches to get 'em to go off."

And it was as though I'd been struck by a thunderbolt! ... I realized, then and there: even trash imagine themselves to be small L liberals now.

That they make a point of staying up late to watch Jon Stewart too!

Making sense of it all

2009-08-05T15:15:00.002-04:00

Carol Anne Burger slew Jessica Kalish by stabbing her 222 times with a Philips-head screwdriver. The moral of the story?

After the sad incident, some observers suggested that the story of Jess and Carol highlighted the need for across-the-board legal recognition of civil unions and same-sex marriages.

Wow. Now that's what I call a stretch.

And in case it isn't clear: the suggested problem here isn't that Ms. Burger was driven to commit this definitively evil act because of the lifetime of discrimination she'd suffered as a lesbian. This wasn't a desperate and perverse concession to, and consummation of, the 'abnormality' legally imposed upon her by society. For she and Ms. Kalish were married! In Massachusetts in 2005! Rather, the problem is that the state of Florida wouldn't legally recognize their divorce.

"It's very messy for us to get disentangled," says Elizabeth F. Schwartz, a Miami-based family attorney specializing in same-sex issues. "This is one example of many of a couple that entered into a marriage and then couldn't get themselves out of it. When the kind people of Massachusetts grant you the right to marry but Florida won't recognize those marriages, it can make getting a divorce very difficult. Certainly the answer is not to kill your ex, but it does remind us that the consequences can be grave when we don't have a legal and appropriate way out."

Hmmmnn ... Let's see here: 222 stab wounds to the upper body less 1 state recognition of a same-sex couple's right to end their marriage ...

Nope! Still doesn't balance.

But while we're on this tack: I wonder what "some observers" might have had to say about this little detail:

[Burger] got dressed, drove a mile in the opposite direction of the BMW [containing Kalish's dead body--ed.], and dropped Jessica's keys and wallet in a rough neighborhood.

Boynton Beach has an awful lot of Hispanic and Haitian residents, I gather. I wonder how many of them live in this "rough neighborhood" just south of Gateway Blvd? Seems like an odd place for a fiercely Democrat, progressive activist, Huffington Post blogger to be planting evidence, don't you think? Of course, it wouldn't be if we recognized that the woman was just a complete nutjob. But seeing as we're playing down that angle.

John Henry Newman on religion that isn't

2009-07-30T21:30:00.001-04:00

... Let us not then deceive ourselves; what God demands of us is to fulfil His law, or at least to aim at fulfilling it; to be content with nothing short of perfect obedience,—to attempt every thing,—to avail ourselves of the aids given us, and throw ourselves, not first, but afterwards on God's mercy for our short-comings. This is, I know, at first hearing a startling doctrine; and so averse are our hearts to it, that some men even attempt to maintain that it is an unchristian doctrine. A forlorn expedient indeed, with the Bible to refer to, and its statements about the strait gate and the narrow way. Still men would fain avail themselves of it, if they could; they argue that all enforcement of religion as a service or duty is erroneous, or what they call legal, and that no observance is right but what proceeds from impulse, or what they call the heart. They would fain prove that the law is not binding on us, because Christ has fulfilled it; or because, as is the case, faith would be accepted instead of obedience in those who had not yet had time to begin fulfilling it.
Such persons appeal to Scripture, and they must be refuted, as is not difficult, from Scripture; but the multitude of men do not take so much trouble about the matter. Instead of even professing to discover what God has said, they take what they call a common-sense view of it. They maintain it is impossible that religion should really be so strict according to God's design. They condemn the notion as over-strained and morose. They profess to admire and take pleasure in religion as a whole, but think that it should not be needlessly pressed in details, or, as they express it, carried too far. They complain only of its particularity, if I may use the term, or its want of indulgence and consideration in little things; that is, in other words, they like religion before they have experience of it,-in prospect,—at a distance,—till they have to be religious. They like to talk of it, they like to see men religious; they think it commendable and highly important; but directly religion comes home to them in real particulars of whatever kind, they like it not. It suffices them to have seen and praised it; they feel it a burden whenever they feel it at all, whenever it calls upon them to do what otherwise they would not do. In a word, the state of the multitude of men is this,—their hearts are going the wrong way; and their real quarrel with religion, if they know themselves, is not that it is strict, or engrossing, or imperative, not that it goes too far, but that it is religion. It is religion itself which we all by nature dislike, not the excess merely. Nature tends towards the earth, and God is in heaven. If I want to travel north, and all the roads are cut to the east, of course I shall complain of the roads. I shall find nothing but obstacles; I shall have to surmount walls, and cross rivers, and go round about, and after all fail of my end. Such is the conduct of those who are not bold enough to give up a profession of religion, yet wish to serve the world. They try to reach Babylon by roads which run to Mount Sion. Do you not see that they necessarily must meet with thwartings, crossings, disappointments, and failure? They go mile after mile, watching in vain for the turrets of the city of Vanity, because they are on the wrong road; and, unwilling to own what they are really seeking, they find fault with the road as circuitous and wearisome. They accuse religion of interfering with what they consider their innocent pleasures and wishes. But religion is a bondage only to those who have not the heart to like it, who are not cast into its mould. Accordingly, in the verse before the text, St. Paul thanks God that his brethren had "obeyed from the heart that form of teaching, into which they had been delivered." We Christians are cast into a certain mould. So far as we keep within it, we are not sensible that it is a mould, or has an outline. It is when our hearts would overflow in some evil direction, then we discover that we are confined, and consider ourselves in prison. It is the law in our members warring against the law of the Spirit which brings us into a distressing bondage. Let us then see where we stand, and what we must do. Heaven cannot change; God is "without variableness or shadow of turning." His "word endureth for ever in heaven." His law is from everlasting to everlasting. We must change. We must go over to the side of heaven. Never had a soul true happiness but in conformity to God, in obedience to His will. We must become what we are not; we must learn to love what we do not love, and practise ourselves in what is difficult. We must have the law of the Spirit of life written and set up in our hearts, "that the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us," and that we may learn to please and to love God.

John Henry Newman, The Strictness of the Law of Christ

Sometimes my enemy's enemy is just some chick

2009-07-28T13:55:00.001-04:00

Don't tell me that this is a fiddly point. Too many of my friends and allies in the blogging world are lauding Margaret Wente's garbage-column in today's Globe because it's hard on the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. For some reason they're all ignoring the howlingly absurd 'sane alternative' in which she couches her observations.

She begins:

White cops and black men can be an unhappy mix. Last week, all hell broke loose when a white cop intercepted a black man trying to break into a big house near Harvard University. Unfortunately for the cop, the man was Henry Louis Gates, a prominent African-American scholar, and he lives there. Tempers flared. Accusations of racial profiling filled the air. Prof. Gates was promptly arrested for disorderly conduct, i.e., mouthing off. It turned out the cop was a race-relations trainer. Barack Obama got involved, declared them both fine men and invited them to the White House for a beer.

If only things worked that way in Canada ...

And ends:

Can't [Barbara Hall and the OHRT] just buy everyone a beer? That's what Mr. Obama would do.

No he fucking wouldn't, Margaret! You've left a big goddamn detail out here--as absolutely anyone who doesn't live under a stone could tell you.

What Obama would do--that is to say, what he did do--was to use the Office of the President of the United States to render an utterly biased judgement on a matter he admitted knowing nothing about, and that was none of his goddamn business in the first place.

(The President, mercifully, only made a fool of himself in this. Mercifully, I say, because the only other option was the destruction of a man's career and reputation, not to speak of the reputation of the Cambridge police.)

This, it seems to me, is exactly the sort of thing Barbara Hall would do. And, indeed, has done.

... And why should everyone get a beer, by the way? If anything, Obama should be buying, Sgt. Crowley should be drinking, and Skip Gates should be watching, in silence, from the corner.

Reprise

2009-07-23T12:20:00.002-04:00

For those of you who missed the last two episodes of EMG and EMG:

The Metrosexual Meta- physician examines how an ironic appreciation of kitschy sentiment can turn into an earnest and shrill worldview. Easily an 8.7 on the the Scathing Social Commentary Scale ... Maybe runs the tiniest bit long.

The Big Cheese was just an excuse to do a lot of swearing. Hence the flatus ex machina. Deal with it, prudes!

Cant and the law

2009-07-18T20:52:00.003-04:00

The problem underlying the concept of same-sex marriage had nothing to do with law, nor did it have anything to do with rights. The problem with same-sex marriage was one, put simply, of language.

In this matter, as with so many others, the zeitgeist confused means with ends. (Or perhaps I should say that it confused meaning with ends.)

The law (and the rights that it protects) depends on language and not the other way around. Thus, a man may swat a fly and rest assured that he will not be charged with murder.

So long, that is, as the definition of murder remains intact.

Alter language--even if it is for so noble-seeming a purpose as the protection of rights--and you are not amending the law, but blasting at its foundation. Should that foundation crumble, so too, with time, will the law, rights, justice.

A compromise was necessary on this issue, and was possible. The greater loss in not doing so was the relegation of all men to one of only three types: hysterics, opportunists, and bigots.

Isaac Williams on Trinity 5 and your arrogant presumption

2009-07-16T20:50:00.001-04:00

... This is the important warning of this Sunday: the necessity of withdrawing all our affections, interest, and anxieties from the things of time, and fixing them without reserve upon Christ in God, that we may serve Him with joy. Let us apply this to the outward course of this world, in public matters. Many are anxious that these should “be so peaceably ordered,” that the Church may serve God in quietness; but then they seem to think that this is to be effected by their own governance, and not by the governance of God; for otherwise how could they be so full of manifold anxieties, so absorbed in the success of their own wishes and management? and from hence what a world of bitter thoughts and jealousies, low and mean joys, and still meaner fears? From the state of their hearts on this subject, one might think that God had given up unto them the government of His own world. St. Paul commands that we pray “for kings, and all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty.” Observe what are the means for this end. It is prayer only; it is to God only that we are to look in this, as in all other matters. For it is by looking to God in such matters, that not only will the objects we desire be brought about, but also our own souls healed with respect to them. It is the only cure for our own anxious desires and private ends.
Such is the lesson which the Collect appears so seasonably to bring before us at this time with regard to the course of public affairs. But it applies no less forcibly to our own personal interests; for as we pray to God that He will so govern this world that His Church may joyfully serve Him in quietness, so also must we leave it entirely to Him alone, that the course of outward events may be so ordered- that the soul may serve Him without distraction. To serve Him with joy is quite impossible, unless it be with an undivided heart; to serve Him in godly quietness can never be, if we are disquieted and “troubled about many things;” and disquieted we certainly must be, so far as we are not deeply in our hearts convinced that the course of this world, with regard to ourselves, must be ordered by His governance, and not by our own. O blessed and peaceful knowledge, which His Spirit alone can give! hidden anchor of the soul which, amidst the storms of this world, binds it to the eternal shore !
And now to return once more to the Epistle. What can be more seasonable and valuable than that concluding exhortation of St. Peter, Who can harm you if ye be followers of that which is good? and if, for righteousness’ sake, ye suffer persecution, happy are ye. And be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled. Sanctify God in your hearts, and all will be well. Fear Him, and ye need fear nothing else. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,” and all will work together for your good, your great and final happiness.
...
Why then, it may be asked, do we pray that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered, that His Church may joyfully serve God in quietness; if this joyfulness in God may be in the midst of persecution, and He may be served in quietness amidst the storms of the world? The fact is, that this distraction of heart, which hinders us from the true service of God, does not so much arise from troubles and enemies that are without, as from the fear of them; and it is by prayer to God that we get rid of such fears.

Isaac Williams, The Peaceable Ordering of the World

h/t to KDN for LC

Barbara Kay, will you marry me?

2009-07-15T11:10:00.000-04:00

Imagine if, instead of narrating the actual drama of the 1917 Halifax Explosion in his riveting 1941 novel, Barometer Rising, Hugh MacLennan had chosen to focus, as we are told February does, on the "swelling loneliness and eventual letting-go" of one woman bereft of a beloved husband in the conflagration. Zzzzzzz.

Not only are her characters plucked from her own experience, Moore boasts to Laidlaw that "she intentionally didn't interview any families affected by the disaster." Imagine: There are many people still alive -- though they won't be forever -- who actually remember the tragedy as it happened, yet in terms of "research," their doubtlessly compelling survivor experience is trumped by Moore's memories of the personal sadness evoked when her 41-year-old father "died of natural causes" (again, emphasis mine).

Me, me, me and my extraordinary capacity for sadness. Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it's all about nobly suffering women or feminized men: men immobilized in situations of physical, psychological or economic impotence (that is when they're not falling through the ice and nearly drowning), rather than demonstrating manly courage in risk-taking or heroic mode.

Barbara Kay, Unreadably Canadian

Open email to Mr. Toad

2009-07-11T20:45:00.001-04:00

Good evening. In light of this, I was sort of wondering how you can be a Roman Catholic and a gay supporter at the same time?

I mean, not only do they deny homosexuals' very existence - they think you should be punished for appearing in any way supportive of them, or those like them.

It's your life and all that, but I was just wondering how you sleep at night?

As I've indicated before, if the Papists don't want you, the Anglicans--and just about every other dying Protestant denomination--do.

Faithfully yours,

EMG

What's he(mg) listening to?

2009-07-10T20:10:00.002-04:00

New segment here at EMG: What's he listening to?

Today I'm listening to Dr. Octagon:

(aka Kool Keith)

And Beans:

(aka Beans)

Aiight?

SITREP

2009-07-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

I do have an excuse for my long silence for once. My internet's been down. And now I'm working on a couple of things that aren't leaving me much spare time.

Meanwhile, though, why don't you drop by casa Borealis for the latest installment of Eric's brilliant-if-too-fitful series Hideous Public Art:

This monumental bronze excrescence is called "Universal Man" and was created by Gerald Gladstone in 1976. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Gladstone frequently complained that "his work was misundertood by the Canada Council's arts bureaucracy" - quite the statement considering the hideous art inflicted on the public by Canada's "arts bureaucracy" over the years.

It originally stood at the base of the CN Tower to "give a balance of human scale" to the world's tallest free-standing structure. It was removed in 1987 and re-erected in 1994 in a parking lot on the west side of the Yorkdale shopping mall, where it was unveiled by North York Mayor Mel Lastman (himself a living monument to bad taste). According to the accompanying plaque, Universal Man was created "to symbolize the earthbound human energies reaching towards a higher universal knowledge".

Here it is in its current location, reaching towards a higher universal knowledge outside the entrance to the Bay.

...

Poor Universal Man. Erected to give a human scale to Toronto's most prominent structure, removed from public view for seven years and then installed ignominiously in a parking lot outside a suburban shopping mall. Is this the fate of western culture?

The whole of Eric's HPA series is, it seems to me, the best kind of blogging and I recommend it highly. My particular favourite is this one.

Local flavour, local talent

2009-06-26T13:30:00.002-04:00

I know, I know. The burning question on all of your minds is: what's EMG got on his iPod?

And the blistering answer, you weanies, is: what am I, a strawberry-flavoured-cigarillo-smoking tween?! The day I buy an iPod is the day I eat an iPod.

If it's not coming out of my stereo, it's the music of Toronto's feeble excuse for urbanity that serenades me through my various routines. My half-wit neighbour cursing out her kids for the seventeenth time today, for instance. Or the Super across the alleyway cursing out the bums who've made a jolly old common area of his orderly heap of bed-bug infested mattresses. (I know the mattresses are infested with bed-bugs because the Super spray-painted "BED BUGS" on them--in, what would be big, unmistakable letters, but for the bums' bums planted exactly there, so that they read BE[bum]GS now.) Or the hum and smash and (again) curse and crash of the economy-defying condo that's being built around the corner.

But I'll tell you what I've got in my stereo that's of note, both of them Toronto-ish bands:

The Junior Boys, from Hamilton. Part of the electronic scene here, which is, I gotta admit, pretty wicked.

And Timber Timbre, from Toronto. This is from their last album (Medicinals), which (album) I highly recommend:

--In spite, that is, of the tedious and twee theme of the video. (A better track is "Patron Saint Hunter", but for the life of me, I can't find a version of it anywhere.)

... Of course, there are three trays in my CD player, and the third still holds this album (by non-Canadians), with this still-awesome song.

Selley on what stinks

2009-06-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

... Today, however, I’m not clear whether union leaders give a damn about public opinion—or indeed, the public. Whenever there’s a public sector strike, you’ll hear people say ruefully that Tactic X—say, blocking taxpayers’ access to municipal buildings, parking garages and the hell-on-earth waste transfer stations they’ve been forced to drive to precisely because of the strike—won’t win them any support. But surely even union leaders can’t be deluded enough to think it will.

...

[C]learly the labour movement is not on an upward trajectory. It’s in a corkscrew dive. Its automaking brothers and sisters are giving up salary, benefits and old age security like candy on Halloween. People urging CUPE members to surrender their obscene sick leave entitlements are citing precedent in cities all over the country and continent. The picketers I saw this week chanting “fee-fi-fo-fum, we won’t give up what we’ve already won” under the crack of an organizer's whip looked dispirited and embarrassed, and rightfully so. It’s difficult to see how any of this is helping The Worker, writ large. And yet these unions still have the time to operate as a sort of leftist pamphlet made flesh: Palestine this, abortion that, free sex changes for everyone! To people of my generation and younger, they might as well be alien life forms speaking in extraterrestrial riddles. We literally have no idea what the hell these people are on about.

In short, I think it’s incumbent upon the labour movement and its component unions to justify their continued existence to Canadians—to explain how they’re not, perversely, a force for inequality in society. If they’re around solely to protect their members’ entitlements (or, at least, their senior members’) no matter now ridiculous those entitlements are—if they’re just the last, scrappy vestiges of a cause that’s already admitted defeat, or perhaps even victory—then there’s not much reason for Canadians to support them. There’s sure as bloody hell no reason to support them if they actually turn against those Canadians, whose taxes, after all, underwrite the entitlements.

Chris Selley, The labour movement needs to justify its existence

Out of the mouths of babes and suckers

2009-06-23T17:05:00.007-04:00

This year marks the 150th an- niversary of the Catholic Children's Society (West- minster) and the Mass was an opportunity to look forward, taking the theme of "Faith in the Future".

Children were invited to write a word on a paper brick which represented what they would like to change about the future.

One child said "family" another said "hope" and another "trust" and another "justice". The bricks were used by the children to build a wall before the altar, which was designed to symbolise the foundations their faith provides for the building of their future and the future of the world.

So, wait a second. These (very clichéd) children want to change family, hope, trust and justice? That's not quite right, is it?

Something dicky with the phrasing of the question, I think. And anyway, from a Catholic perspective I should've said that the little swots had already got their wish: the concepts of family, hope, trust and justice have all been irrevocably changed.

As has, apparently, the proper object of faith.

h/t Orwell's Picnic

______________________________

ADDENDUM (11:50 PM)

It just occurs to me: these words were written on "paper bricks"? Paper bricks? Indeed.

Cosh on the Taliban So-Cons

2009-06-23T14:25:00.005-04:00

Colby Cosh is losing it I think.

It used to be that you'd have only one weird column for every, say, ten normal, good ones. You know the thing: these shrill, air-agitating protests-in-the-face-of-blank-stares, which only ever seem to amount to a plea that everyone recognize in him this rare new breed of political superman who is, get this, fiscally conservative but totally not socially conservative. (World-beating stuff, obviously, and, my God, can somebody help me clean this mess off the floor because my mind's just been blown out my ears!) But lately the ratio has been getting too close to even.

Today he makes the argument that Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan's invocation of "the family" as justification for his controversial legislation--giving terrifying new powers of investigation to the police--somehow reflects on the nation's social conservatives and their fetishistic (nay, theocratic!) notion of the sanctity of "the family". Rather, that is, than reflecting on the abuse of the term by "cynical" politicians. (Cynical? Even that seems like a stretch. Sounds more like political boilerplate to me.)

He says:

No bogus, ill-advised expansion of state power was ever perpetrated on this continent without "families" being hauled out as part of the pretext.

Oooookaaaaaayyyy ...

But Colby, couldn't we also say that no bona fide, well-advised expansion (or contraction--ha ha, just kidding) of state power was ever perpetrated without "families" being hauled out as a pretext, too?

I mean, surely the thing about politicians always (always, always, always!) using the welfare of families to advance their political ends is that ... everyone belongs to one! I mean, you may as well complain that no bogus, ill-advised expansion of state power was ever perpetrated without people being hauled out as a pretext. Goddamn social conservatives and their perverse obsession with fucking "people"!

He continues:

Maintaining a healthy, functioning, non-corrupt liberal democracy would be a simple matter if everyone were immune to the intramural passions that the appeal ad familiam -- the appeal to innocence, safety and the love between a parent and child -- stirs up.

Um. Sorry guy, but I think everyone already is.

I mean, I don't have the stats or anything, but the whole "Won't somebody please think of the children!"-Helen-Lovejoy-cliché is the joke that even Helen-Lovejoy-types make these days. Like I say: this stuff is conspicuously pro forma. (Or I should say, inconspicuously pro forma, as I doubt a single person noticed it apart from Mr.--sorry, Ms.--Cosh.)

He then goes on to compare social conservatives to the Taliban, then says he didn't, then he says this:

But maybe some of you so-cons out there reading this can see that you have a special responsibility to stand up for (and help "conserve") truly essential and time-hallowed "liberal" features of our society, like search warrants, when they are threatened in the name of the "family."

God damn! Yeah, because you can't fling tennis balls by the half-hour in any of Canada's more densely populated areas without hitting a raving, totally unashamed social conservative! But still, this is begging the question. Can somebody tell me who these legions of so-cons are that are so-vocally supporting the proposed legislation?

And please, please, please don't tell me that the Harper Tories are so-cons. Please.

One art, please!

2009-06-22T15:35:00.001-04:00

James Howard Kunstler's most recent podcast on "art"--as "therapy" for "amateurs and children"--is brilliant. Indeed, his pronunciation of the word throughout the (20 minute) show is itself somehow evocative of art's present-day essence: a kind of unwieldy concretion of bubble-gum, bauxite and a few balled-up pages from Dadaism for Dummies.

Keep your commonplace book handy as there is much that is quotable here. For instance:

"[So much of the art in public spaces] is a make-work project for people on the margins of the economy, including the artists themselves."

"[This is] art that is not connected to artistry or craft. It is simply the banging together of modular materials."

"It's no longer OK to just protest through self-abasement that we're living in a crap culture. Now we have to get beyond the crap culture and build a real culture."

And note the coining of the phrase "Rape-o-matic public space". Highly recommended.

The Mayor on Letterman

2009-06-16T13:50:00.003-04:00

Things have been getting a little sweary/crass around here and I apologize for that, but I can't resist this:

... Secondly: David Letterman is an ultra-liberal on an ultra-liberal television station, yucking it up with fellow ultra-liberals in an ultra-liberal state. Why bother trying to fight that nonsense? Pick your battles, you’ll never get through to them on this one.

Finally: look at the picture I posted. That’s Letterman’s wife. Ya. Imagine, he’s making fun of Sarah Palin, and every night he goes home and has to fuck the dead body of Boris Karloff. No wonder Letterman is angry. If you had to give tender kisses to a neck that has a bolt sticking out of it, you’d be mad too ...

Ah, the contrapasso!

For the record, I'm not a fan of the (I'm sorry, but) decidedly underwhelming, soi-disant "valley trash" Sarah Palin. But that Boris Karloff line kept me laughing for about ten minutes.

______________________

ADDENDUM (3:50 PM)

Did I say underwhelming? I meant to say so stupid, so devoid of dignity, it's embarrassing. That, or just plain old: exploitative to the point of creepiness. The way she's handled this, I don't know if she isn't in fact worse than Letterman.

Not to speak of her dimwit husband:

Todd Palin issued a statement last week that said "any 'jokes' about raping my 14-year-old are despicable."

Yeah, Todd. That couldn't have gone without saying.

The politics of the personal

2009-06-11T14:20:00.003-04:00

Listen to the fucking language coming out of these idiots' mouths:

Calling it an issue close to his heart as the child of an immigrant single mother, Mayor David Miller tonight threw his support behind a movement to extend the right to vote in Toronto municipal elections to non-citizens.
Politically enfranchising newcomers who reside in the city but have not yet attained their citizenship would be a first in Canada but not the world.

“It’s my view that those people who have chosen to make Toronto their home and live here permanently should have the right to vote in municipal elections in exactly the same way as Canadian citizens,” the Mayor said to applause from some 200 people attending a city-organized panel discussion on the topic that was held in the council chambers at City Hall this evening.

“From my perspective you can’t be an inclusive and open government unless all of the residents have an ability to choose that government.”
...

[C]ouncillor Janet Davis (Beaches East York) ... also approves of granting voting rights to non-citizens, saying it “goes to the heart of ensuring social inclusion.”

...

Author Alan Broadbent, chairman of the Maytree Foundation, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy and the Tamarack Institute ... [said] “The choice is really this: will we give them shackles or will we given [sic] them wings."

God damn!

And while I have no doubt that all of this is just so much cynical political maneuvering, I know too that somewhere in the back of these twits' minds there's this semi-formed notion that Toronto's "non-citizens" consist of a bunch of undernourished but impishly delightful pickpockets and chimney-sweeps clutching empty porridge bowls and singing in chorus "It's clear / we're / going to get along!" if only we'd listen.

I mean, why is Janet Davis talking about going "to the heart of ensuring social inclusion" rather than just "ensuring social inclusion"? And why is David Miller stressing the fact that his mother was "single" in addition to being an "immigrant"? And where the hell does Alan Broadbent get the idea that this "shackles" and "wings" business doesn't betray him as an hysteric and a fool?

Because they know that no matter how much question-begging puke about feelings they fling at us, we'll lap it up like dogs.

It's sooooo embarrassing.

(I'm reminded of this scene (advance to minute 5:47) from Armando Iannucci's--absolutely-must-must-see political satire--The Thick of It, where the character of Hugh Abbot (Minister for the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship) is caught in a bureaucratic impropriety. All is set to rights when, at the inquiry, he says of his scrotum-twistingly obvious opportunism, that "It's a personal thing ... But if government isn't personal then what the hell is it?")*

But I quite liked this panel member's contribution to the discussion:

Astrid De Vries, deputy consul-general at the Dutch consulate in Toronto, offered facts on the Netherlands’s three-decade experience allowing non-citizens present in the country five years to vote in municipal elections and even run for office.
She said the origins of the idea came from successive national governments and cut across party lines, gathering support on both the left and right of the political spectrum there and is considered quite successful.

Yes, indeed. Quite successful.

__________________________

*The whole series is available on Youtube. I strongly encourage you to watch it.

My Lady Nicotine

2009-06-09T21:20:00.002-04:00

I think part of the delight of smoking for many teenagers is being able to moan on about how hard it is to give it up. Indeed, I think many of them acquire the habit for just that reason. When I was a teenager I remember being very impressed by these types. Such a grown-up predicament, I thought. Of course, I see now that only a teenager could get so little out of tobacco. (Them, and that breed of adult who don't experience adolescence so much as they are infected by it. Like tetanus.)

Dennis Dale makes a few distinctions

2009-06-04T11:00:00.001-04:00

... Alas, what remains of the moneyed press increasingly exists not across an antagonistic divide from the powerful, but is fragmented by the same factional rifts and insulated by the same elite prejudices. Big Media is an adjunct of the ruling class. This, combined with its connoisseur's appreciation of the art and artifice of politics, renders it congenitally incapable of distinguishing political maneuver from statesmanship. Which brings me, finally, to the subject.

It's become difficult to tell where the President's political skills leave off and Big Media's credulity begins. The mistaking of platitude for profundity and condescension for compromise has become downright pathological in the age of the Wonder Brother. Never has so little awed so many so much.

This incapacity increases as our democracy matures, a consequence of age, accelerated by the Obama effect, the increasing viability of the Fox News/MSNBC model of advocacy journalism, and the much deserved disrepute into which the Republican Party has fallen. If independence is our measure of health, the fourth estate, having endured a fitful adolescence and the disillusionment of middle age, is entering its dotage. As is the case with the aged, it's intellect is no longer supple and its biases are irrevocably set; it's less and less able to control its utterances for the sake of decorum; it grows fonder of sentimental kitsch. The press' gushing over this or that vaporous issuance from President Obama is the equivalent of the kitten and puppies calendars decorating an old folks' home. Correct that; the various artistic representations of Obama are precisely equivalent.

So when President Obama directly addressed abortion in his speech at Notre Dame, what we witnessed wasn't a brave offer of compromise--the president made certain there would be no change in his decidedly uncompromising support for taxpayer-funded abortion on demand in every municipality in the country. Offering meaningless, self-congratulatory expressions of compromise unattached to substance in such a way is an act more often described disapprovingly as nerve, not bravery.

The relevant thing about the speech was the venue, and the complete surrender of a former bastion of opposition to the cruel, calculating expedience of the president's position, abandoning (to use the president's sort of language) the powerless and voiceless to the vocal and demanding. I presume the president is familiar with Ralph Ellison's concept of "invisibility"; this would be the defining feature of the unborn child (though the president's insistence on abortion goes beyond unborn to unwanted, as he will not sacrifice the good graces of Planned Parenthood to compromise on behalf of children who survive extraction). The president's definition of abortion as a "choice" is unremarkable in our low, dishonest age after all. No; contrary to the adulatory response from the president's vast amen corner, what we witnessed wasn't a marvel of rhetoric or magnanimity, but a decisive application of power.

Condescension is a form of disdain. The president took his position on abortion, a position the church once insisted was unconscionable (some things aren't open to compromise--rather this used to be true; compromise is sometimes a low, degrading thing, just as "unity", another favorite of the president, is sometimes tyranny) and planted it like a flag in the heart of what was once one of its grandest institutions. To the cheers of its children. And what remains of the press, mistaking political gamesmanship for statesmanship, hasn't the ability left to notice.

Dennis Dale, Condescension and Credulity

Q.E.D.

2009-06-01T15:55:00.004-04:00

Lysiane Gagnon is sorta onto something here:

As mean-spirited as they are, the negative Conservative ads launched against Michael Ignatieff will hurt him and his Liberal Party. The ads are not targeting urban, well-travelled voters, but a wider constituency that weighs much more in the polling booths.

Many people viscerally resent those who travel often and in faraway places to boot. At best, these “jet-setters” are presumed to be inordinately lucky, which triggers envy. At worst, there is the suspicion that a cosmopolitan such as Mr. Ignatieff is not a loyal Canadian.

You're close, Lysiane. Very, very close.

But I think you'll find that the purpose of the ads is not to inspire dislike of Ignatieff through "envy" of his jet-setting lifestyle. Rather, I think it is to persuade us that Ignatieff is one of a class of sneeringly obtuse liberal intellectuals who thinks so little of the "wider constituency that weighs much more in the polling booths"* that he--typical of the breed, don't you know--actually imagines them capable of making important political decisions based purely on spite.

The ads are trying to persuade us, in short, that Michael Ignatieff is someone like--well--you, Lysiane.

___________________________

*And, no, she's not saying that the rural and untravelled are fat. It just reads that way.

Mock and Pillory

2009-05-27T12:45:00.002-04:00

Resist the urge to treat this as a wheeze. It's a bloody brilliant idea and should be taken seriously.

Perhaps Canada is drifting towards disaster while our elected officials bicker, snipe and throw pies at each other. Or perhaps our federal system has succeeded despite this sideshow for so long that the really important things are sort of firewalled off, and Canada will continue to prosper even as its politics tries to find a lower place than the gutter. Either way, it's clear that politicians waste a huge chunk of their time (for lack of a better word) discussing—and political journalists waste a good chunk of their time covering—issues that don’t really matter.

...

Any format that involves even a 10-second clip from Question Period needs serious tweaking if not outright abandonment, unless it's designed, like I said before, to mock or pillory the participants.

Whoah, hang on, that’s it—that should be the new format. Hell, that could be the new name: Mock and Pillory. “Welcome to the broadcast. First up, we’ll ask some smart, disinterested people what they think about employment insurance. Then, we’ll show you what our politicians said about it, while pointing out all their errors, distortions and outright lies. Then, as ever, we’ll show you the best bits of Question Period overdubbed with the soundtrack from Benny Hill.” It’s win-win, no? CBC can keep Canadians “connected” to their government without giving them an ounce more respect than they deserve. And if they want to be taken seriously again, all they have to do is start behaving like civilized, reasonably intelligent human beings.

Well that certainly would be a refreshing change from what it is now: listening to our poor pundits toss off their intellectual vanities about politician X's "brilliant" or "lame" political maneuvering. --As though the fat-kid-wiles of Canadian politics could ever, in a million-bazillion years, be said to offer even the consolation of wit or sophistication.

via Olaf

A house built on sand

2009-05-26T22:24:00.006-04:00

(Note: I should've pointed out when this was first posted that this is not news. The Phillips piece is about 7 months old.)

Melanie Phillips:

On Tuesday evening I attended the debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. This was the second public encounter between the two men, but it turned out to be very different from the first. Lennox is the Oxford mathematics professor whose book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is to my mind an excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion as expressed in his book The God Delusion -- all the more devastating because Lennox attacks him on the basis of science itself. In the first debate, which can be seen on video on this website, Dawkins was badly caught off-balance by Lennox’s argument precisely because, possibly for the first time, he was being challenged on his own chosen scientific ground.
This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:

A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

Are we surprised? ... Really?! But the man's always been an ass!

The Big Cheese

2009-05-22T20:25:00.001-04:00

As with The Girlfriend, this week's episode is lighter fare than usual:

EMG explains to EMG the futility of trying not to use swear words. (Click image, press play)

(Incidentals: there's a lot of swearing in this one, obviously. I couldn't find a copy of the song for download, but youtube has it.)

Play time is about 3 and a half minutes. Half a smoke.

As pants as it gets!

A heartbreaking post of staggering genius

2009-05-19T15:15:00.003-04:00

Man, Rick McGinnis has got some awesome readers!

Take the one that wrote to him recently about the film JCVD. He (the reader) thought that JCVD was "a despicable farce" and that it would've been far more appropriately titled "Les Racines de JCVD: America in the Age of Obama."

Brilliant, what?! What an outstanding chap this reader of Rick McGinnis' sounds to be!

Rick, however, gently disagrees with his reader (whom, for the sake of simplicity, let's refer to as the Enlightened if Misunderstood Gentleman) and gives the film an uncharacteristically noncommittal review, as he did some time ago with Happy-Go-Lucky. (A movie which, if I'm any judge, the Enlightened if Misunderstood Gentleman thought a giant piece of shit too.)

He (Rick) sums up thus:

A film like JCVD is catnip for a critic, much like Being John Malkovich, or a good Woody Allen film, if you go back far enough in history. By this measure, any film can become a critical favorite as long as it harnesses that moment in a Looney Tunes cartoon when Bugs Bunny takes a break from tormenting Elmer Fudd, turns to the audience and says confidentially, "I do this sort of thing to him all through the picture."

OK ... So I shouldn't say that he's exactly noncommittal about the film. He clearly considers it to be gimmicky and overrated.

But it seems to me (and to the Enlightened if Misunderstood Gentleman as well, obviously, so that makes two of us at least) that Rick misses something extremely important in his analysis.

Indeed, to the extent that the gimmick employed by the film--that meta business, the cinematic self-reference stuff à la Being John Malkovich--to the extent, I say, that the gimmick itself fails, or anyway is fatally inconsistent, Rick is misleading us even in his attempt to dismiss the film as thin and derivative. For: while JCVD may give us its equivalent of Bugs Bunny turning to the audience and saying that he does this sort of thing all through the picture, the problem is: he doesn't do this sort of thing all through the picture. He stops after a point and does a most unBugs Bunnyish thing.

But let me just pause here for a moment in the interests of full disclosure.

You should know that I've been made privy to the full exchange of emails between Rick McGinnis and the Enlightened if Misunderstood Gentleman--hell, better just call him the EMG. And I think it's worth noting that in the last of those emails the EMG, having just read Rick's review, made a most disingenuous admission. He said:

... [I]t occurs to me that whereas some people are more inclined to rate a film according to whether or not it succeeded in being entertaining, I tend to rate them according to whether or not they succeeded in being part of an elaborate conspiracy to insult me.

Ignoring the slightly hamfisted phrasing here (the EMG, apparently, isn't always as succinct as I think he'd like to be), you'll notice that the EMG seems to be backing off his criticisms of the film out of deference to his illustrious correspondent. He prefers instead to humbly assume the role of the crank. This is understandable, perhaps, as Rick McGinnis is a talented and accomplished writer, whereas the most that can be said of the EMG, I gather, is that he didn't actually burn down an orphanage. (I.E. A little research on my part reveals that after leaving his native Luxembourg at the tender age of 18 to pursue what looked like a very promising career composing Haiku, the EMG apparently squandered his talents writing doggerel for gun and car enthusiast magazines, and now fitfully maintains a "blogspot" blog in some utterly obscure corner of the internet.)

But so moved was I by the EMG's penetrating observations about JCVD--so convinced was I that there was more to this man than Rick McGinnis's easy dismissal of him suggested--that I pressed him for more. At first he deferred self-effacingly, replying by way of a poem of his entitled "The Sneeze":

Alas, no promise of relief!
The lightly tickled membrane
(more tickled for the lightness)
suggesting ecstatic release,
is quelled by a seemingly endless,
face-curdling pause
and then nothing.

I remain, as yet, only teased
by the sneeze[d].

But I continued to hound him and eventually he gave in, sending me the following-- What can only be described as a tour de force Critique des Critiques! Indeed, it seems to me that there is a strong suggestion here that not only is the EMG not some b-list hack from the nether end of the blogosphere, but that he's something like a genius whose obscurity can only continue in a perverse, hypocritical and unforgiving world.

Behold!

Dear Mr. George,

I am overwhelmed by your eloquence and charm! Here, if you insist, is a defence of my comments to Mr. McGinnis about the excremental JCVD:

Pace your effusions re. the alternative title that I came up with for the film--Les Racines de JCVD: America in the Age of Obama--I should say that it was meant more to indicate the extremity of my disgust than as a serious comment on the film's politics. It's worth noting too that I was on my fourth tallboy of Stella Artois when I wrote it, and was feeling a little--'ow you say?--uninhibited. There is, I suppose, a fiddly little argument to be made for the film's encapsulating something of the narcissism of the Obama era ethos, but let me come back to this later in the email.

Why did I think the film "a despicable farce"? Two reasons, intimately connected. The first: the film fails in all serious respects, save as a platform to show-off some of Jean-Claude Van Damme's hitherto unexploited talents as an actor. The second: while it might be the case that certain films have the power to resurrect dead careers, no film can be considered good if it serves only that purpose.

The question, then, is how does the film fail? Well, answer me this: is JCVD a black comedy, or is it an uplifting drama? A little bit of both, did I hear you say? Well quite. And that's the point: to the extent that it tries to be both of these, it does not (it cannot!) succeed in being either.

McGinnis's comparison of JCVD to Being John Malkovich is, for this reason, an unfortunate one, as the films provide far more of a contrast. BJM is a relentless--indeed, ruthless--lampoon of the cult of celebrity and its spiritual analogue, the pursuit of immortality. The film's title character, the actor as himself, is then portrayed quite literally as a cipher; an "overrated sack of shit" at the mercy of various losers and eccentrics with privileged access to his head. The annihilation of Malkovich's ego at the film's end is brutal and decisive, as is the life-sentence given Craig Schwartz's ego for the crime of trying to hijack Malkovich's existentional nullity to supplement his own.

Now, while JCVD begins quite promisingly as a satire of celebrity in this vein, that is not how it ends. Indeed, the film comes off as more of a vindication of celebrity--or anyway of Van Damme's celebrity--to the extent that he spends so much time pofacedly repudiating it (his celebrity).

I mean: here we have this brilliant (if not entirely original) scenario of an aging, lecherous b-movie action star in debt up to his still absurdly bulging trapezius muscles, freshly rejected by his daughter in a child custody battle, who's stuck on the wuss end of a "real life" hostage-taking ... And what do we get? A vomit-inducing soliloquy--"making Hamlet sound like an extrovert" as the great Ebert puts it--lamenting America's depravity, his own shameful abandonment of his "racines", and a particularly obtuse assertion that poor people have more talent than him.

(And to those who say that, if nothing else, here is the evidence of Van Damme's as-yet-untapped acting ability, let me simply point out that this feeling likely has more to do with the fact that they'd never heard the man speak without a faltering and buffoonish accent before. It was bound to sound impressive.)

Note, furthermore, that from this point on the film disowns its tacit conceit: that it is satire on a world-beating scale. It becomes, instead, a story of manful perseverance, sacrifice and, yes, redemption: i.e. by Van Damme's attainment of the renewed love and respect of his daughter, and a meaningful life teaching murderers, thieves and rapists karate.

Of course, as I read that last line over I see that this still sort of sounds like satire. Alas, no. The shift in tone is unmistakable; we go from remorseless cinematic-self-effacement one moment, to almost smothering sentimentality the next. And to be clear: my problem with this has nothing to do with my belief that sentimentality is a failure of feeling (and thus not a worthy object of art). Even I can admit (grudgingly) that some gruesomely maudlin films are good, and succeed as such. But the thing about sentimental films is that they are, of their nature, irony-averse; and as we all know, you can't suck and blow at the same time.

I mean, honestly! What would your reaction be to Gary Sinise's character if, in The Green Mile, he winked at the camera and referred to Michael Duncan's character as "Lennie"? Or "Malkovich", for that matter? It would be fine if the film was meant as a spoof of Of Mice and Men. But it wasn't. (Rather, it was the touching tale of a giant retard with an army of zombie mice, who died for our sins in a novelty-sized electric chair.)

Still--I think I hear you saying--even if the film is a failure, calling it "a despicable farce" is to overstate it. You're letting your emotions get the better of you, no?

No. Though I'm having some difficulty trying to think of a fitting way of illustrating why a film that raises the stakes as high as JCVD deserves to lose everything if it doesn't have a really, really good hand ... That is, I'm having difficulty illustrating it with something other than a gambling metaphor.

Consider it this way:

Let's imagine for a moment that I don't exist. That is to say: Let's imagine that the email contained within this blog post is, in fact, wholly a creation of yours and not--as it is--of our respective hands. So let us imagine, then, that I am an elaborate device you've fashioned to make a very simple point about the dishonesty of using one type of bad art to condemn another type of bad art.

Now imagine the reaction of your readers when they discover after reading 1,833 words, that the substance of your argument resides more in its form than in does in its content. That, furthermore, the 1,258 words following the 799th word of this post serve no real purpose beyond lending a little verisimilitude to the oh-so-clever conceit of those first 799 words. That, indeed, the 1,258 words following the 799th word were written more to emphasize what they don't get around to talking about--namely, the whole America in the Age of Obama business--than what they do.

... That's a whole lot of reading for a whole little point, what? And the device doesn't even have the virtue of being original! Don't you think your readers would get angry about this? Don't you think they might wonder who exactly you thought you were impressing? A critic, was it?

That's more than just a farce. It's despicable too. And Q.E.D.

Anyway, I had intended to say more, but that's as much as I can manage for you I'm afraid. I spend my evenings volunteering (natch), teaching immigrants ESL and you've made me late for tonight's class. My output has been a little thin recently, as you noted, but I have reason to hope that some new projects of mine might make their way into one or two publications of note. I'll send you a link and perhaps you'll return the favour by sending it on to somebody with a proper readership.

Yours,

[the Enlightened if Misunderstood Gentleman]

Piffle

2009-05-15T21:26:00.002-04:00

Both of them, right? Just piffle. Plain and simple.

Otherwise it doesn't make any sense. Surely.

Moribund

2009-05-14T19:31:00.006-04:00

There is no such thing as success ...

... there are only intervals between failures.

tolerance n. Fluffy euphemism for nihilism

2009-05-08T13:50:00.004-04:00

It was predictable, I know, but the speed with which Michael Ignatieff went from public intellectual to sinisterly vacuous Canadian politician really came as a shock to me. You'll agree, though, that the thoroughness of his transformation is remarkable even by Canadian standards. I mean, while Paul Martin's leap from statesman-ish Minister of Finance to bug-eyed, Tourette's-afflicted Prime Minister was something to behold--in an unfortunate, fat-kid-with-asthma-on-track-and-field-day kind of way-- Ignatieff's seems positively Olympian by comparison. Indeed (and if you'll allow me to switch the metaphor ... again), it seems to me that at this point it's less a case of his having sold-out, as it is of his having sold his soul.

Mark Steyn is well-worth the read on this:

[T]he sedating pretentiousness of Mr. Ignatieff’s prose style shouldn’t disguise the fact that this may be the most morally contemptible statement by a Canadian party leader since Confederation ... When Michael Ignatieff insists that a 'father' 'trying' to take 'two sick little girls to his parents' is 'a story of us,' he is inviting Canadians to collude in a lie as obvious as it is wicked.

And if you haven't already done so, see Robert Fulford on some other of Ignatieff's meta-political fact-tweaking:

[Ignatieff] tells us that William Grant’s son, the philosopher George Grant [i.e. Ignatieff's uncle], respected William’s [i.e. Ignatieff's grandfather's] judgment: “George knew his father was a liberal, both small L and big L, who sometimes voted for the socialist CCF from sheer exasperation.” Perhaps Ignatieff wants his grandfather to have been that sort of liberal but he confuses the wish with the fact. The CCF (precursor of the NDP) was founded in 1932 and didn’t contest a federal election till the autumn of 1935, some months after William Grant’s death.

(Image shamelessly stolen from Darcey.)

De minimis non curat whaaaat?!

2009-05-05T15:00:00.015-04:00

As conservatives undertake that most liberal exercise of purging from their ranks the apparent causes of all the world's ills, I notice that that hackneyed business about same sex marriage is being trotted-out once again.

The sort of person who remains opposed to SSM, they say, these so-called socons, are keeping us in the dark ages. (That would be the dark ages of four years ago--ed.) I mean, the idiots said the skies would fall, if you can believe it. Swear to God! Do we really want to continue our association with these people? I mean! Falling skies?! I don't want to make a big deal of this, but just so everybody knows: I think they're a bunch of weirdo squares too. ... Falling skies, ha! What a bunch of crazi-- What's that? No, I was just saying what a bunch of crazies those social conservatives are. Yeah, I'm still talking about tha-- What am I? Why, I'm a Libertarian! No, not like the Nazis! etc etc ... ...

Uggh.

Yes OK, guys. We get it. You don't actually know any homosexuals but that totally doesn't mean that you're not, like, completely comfortable with them; doesn't mean that you're, like, a homophobe or something.

Relax, for God's sake.

Tom Wolfe on conservative monkeys

2009-04-19T21:15:00.000-04:00

Hoyt's strong suit was humor, irony, insouciance, and being coolly gross, Animal House-style. In the American lit classes, they were always talking about The Catcher in the Rye, but Holden Caulfield was a whining, neurotic wuss. For his, Hoyt's, generation it was Animal House. He must have watched it ten times himself ... The part where Belushi smacks his cheeks and says, "I'm a zit" ... awesome ... and Dumb and Dumber and Swingers and Tommy Boy and The Usual Suspects, Old School ... He'd loved those movies. He'd laughed his head off ... gross, coolly gross ... but did anybody else in the house get the serious point that made all that so awesome? Probably not. It was actually all about being a man in the Age of the Wuss. A fraternity like Saint Ray, if you truly understood it, forged you into a man who stood apart from the ordinary run of passive, compliant American college boys. Saint Ray was a MasterCard that gave you carte blanche to assert yourself--he loved that metaphor. Of course, you couldn't go through life like a frat boy, breaking rules just for the fun of it. The frat-boy stuff was sort of like basic training. One of the things you learned as a Saint Ray--if you were a real brother and not some mistake like I.P.--was how rattled and baffled people were when confronted by those who take no shit.

[...]

Everywhere you looked at this university there were people knocking "the frats" and the frat boys--the administration, which blamed them for the evils of alcohol, pot, cocaine, ecstasy ... the dorks, GPA geeks, Goths, lesbos, homobos, bi-bos, S and Mbos, blackbos, Latinos, Indians--from India and the reservation--and other whining diversoids, who blamed them for racism, sexism, classism, whatever the fuck that was, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, fringe-rightism, homophobia ... The only value ingrained at this institution was a weepy tolerance for losers ... The old gale began blowing, and the concept enlarged ... If America ever had to go to war again, fight with the country's fate on the line, not just in some "police action," there would be only one source of officers other than the military academies: frat boys. They were the only educated males left who were conditioned to think and react ... like men. They were the only--

The concept would have grown still larger had not a boy named Hadlock Mills--known as Heady, which was short for Headlock--come in from out of the entry gallery and said with a slight smirk, "Hoyt, there's a young lady here to see you."

Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons

A change of heart?

2009-04-17T12:04:00.003-04:00

Alas, no. Still, it seems an unlikely argument from a man so convinced of his inalienable right to an abortion:

The case against [gender reassignment surgery] is usually made by Catholics, but nothing about it depends on any religious premise. It boils down to this: Gender reassignment constitutes the irreversible surgical mutilation of a healthy body — and thus violates the traditional prime directive of medicine — in the effort to correct a delusion, one which may be reversible.

Couldn't agree more.

Apocalyptic Bushwa

2009-04-09T17:00:00.001-04:00

Is it possible that there is an alternative English language that I'm unaware of? One that uses all the same words, but in which sentences like this have an obvious--and non-preposterous--meaning?

Given current economic realities, this is no longer a utopian proposal, but an urgent necessity. (Toronto Star)

God I hope that's what it is.

That being said ...

2009-04-09T00:15:00.007-04:00

Now I know that I've said a lot of mean things about Jian Ghomeshi in this space, but credit where credit's due: the guy handles himself pretty bloody outstandingly in the face of this sulking, beetle-browed prima donna:

Pretty impressive--as I'm fairly certain that if I was in Jian's shoes I would've been incoherent with terror. Hell, I'm fairly certain I would've been crying.

Still ... If, say, I wasn't a congenital coward, and found myself in Jian's shoes, I imagine being a little less restrained:

BBT: Would you say that to Tom Petty?

EMG: Would I say that to Tom Petty? Sorry, Tom Petty? As in Tom Petty?

BBT: Would you--

EMG: Sorry! Sorry! If I can just interrupt: are you comparing yourself to Tom fuckin' Petty?!

BBT: You--

EMG: I tell you what, you jumped-up Jed Clampett, why don't you just get the hell out of my studio!

BBT smacks microphone away from face. Rises (with some difficulty) from chair.

EMG: Yeah! Off you go, fella. And try not to let the door smack the toupee off your wattled amateur head on the way out. [calling into hallway] And I think I'm gonna fill the next ten minutes of air--that nobody would've bothered paying attention to if I hadn't mentioned your goddam Hollywood credentials--with a little Tom Petty!

... Five minutes later I'd be kicking myself for failing to point out that even Billy Bob's little act here was stolen.

The Metrosexual Metaphysician

2009-04-07T10:57:00.001-04:00

A brand new episode of everybody's favourite narcissistic experiment, EMG and EMG!

This week's offering: EMG demonstrates the power of music to turn aspirational-class inanities into profundities. (Click image, press play)

Obiter dictum: it occurs to me that "cancer" could've worked just as nicely as the last word of the piece.

(Incidentals: no real swearing here, just one dickhead. A copy of the song in full can be found here.)

Play time is 9 minutes ... That's 9 laugh-packed minutes!

Super-pants!

Proper Hitchens on the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty

2009-04-07T10:48:00.007-04:00

The problem with these declarations [i.e. such as the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man"], with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? ...

...
"Bentham praised the traditional reluctance of the English Parliament to enact abstract propositions. Everyone in Europe agreed that in England was a free country; that there was, for example, freedom of speech although there was no law which expressly said so. To say that we enjoyed freedom of speech was a descriptive general-isation of particular English laws which limited the circumstances in which publications were actionable or the government could suppress them. It was these specific laws which gave people their rights.
It is in England, rather than in France, said Bentham, that the discovery of the rights of man ought naturally to have taken its rise: it is we - we English, that have the better right to it ... Our right to this precious discovery, such as it is, of the rights of man, must, I repeat it, have been prior to that of the French. It has been seen how peculiarly rich we are in materials for making it. Right, the substantive right, is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights."
Well, I agree completely with that. But Lord Hoffmann doesn't. He thinks these gas-filled documents are valuable because they "provide a standard for political criticism of institutions and officials". His only objection, as it emerges later, is to the abuse of such documents by foreign judges. He thinks the English courts, staffed by nice liberals like his good self, should have the exclusive right to rule on 'human rights'.
But why should such documents provide a standard? Who says that these ideas are right? How do we know what they mean anyway? Who decides what they mean when we disagree? This is why I described them as "atheistical." They are an attempt to replace the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as the main texts by which right and wrong should be judged. And they raise the point, so tirelessly made by Theists such as me, that unless you have a set of founding rules which are universally believed to be divinely ordained, and which cannot be tampered with by governments, you have no reliable basis for deciding between right and wrong.
Despite this flaw, "Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.
Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.
...
That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.

Peter Hitchens, "Conservative liberty and left-wing liberty"

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings

2009-03-27T10:35:00.002-04:00

Eric happens upon a treasure:

Who says romance is dead? I found this on the floor of the post office today, obviously torn from the three-ring binder of a budding Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Love hurts and brings tears to my eyes.
Love brings undesired feelings to my heart that I despise.
Love is stupid and pointless and a waste of time.
Love makes me feel as if I spent all day rolling around in the dirt and grime.
Love sucks fucking ass.
I hate it, love is retarded.
I hate every bit, love just makes me want to die
But instead I lay on my bed and cry
Because I'm in love.

Ah yes, in the spring a young woman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of ... rolling around in the dirt and grime, sucking retarded ass.