Bookworm Room - Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

More thoughts on removing Confederate statues

August 18, 2017 by Bookworm 35 Comments

I explain why I think it’s reasonable to remove Confederate statues — but I also explain the strict limits I place on doing so.

In yesterday’s post about Charlottesville and Confederate statues, all the comments seemed to go to the latter issue. On that issue, I wrote that I agree with those blacks who find the statues offensive. Looking at the comments on the post, I’d like to clarify a few things and respond to a few more. Again, my points aren’t in any particular order.

1. My position is narrowly directed to statues and commemorative plaques honoring leading lights in the Confederacy — politicians and renowned military actors. Oh, and Woodrow Wilson. I’ve always loathed him and view him as the last Confederate president of the United Sttaes. I utterly oppose wiping out any other aspects of American history.

2. The States Rights argument is irrelevant. The fact is that, whatever else was at issue, the war was also about slavery and about the degradation and dehumanization of American blacks. The Union Army won that argument on the battlefield, and it’s therefore wrong that the defeated side gets to have the last word.

3. I understand that the disgusting, mostly white, radical Left is the entity carrying this torch. I also understand that this cohort Left has much larger goals, insofar as it wishes to deconstruct America entirely. Understanding that reality, though, doesn’t address — or weaken — my core point, which is that blacks are correct to find the memorials to Confederate “heroes” offensive. They should not have to live in a world in which they’re constantly confronted by statues and plaques honoring people who lost a war that revolved, in significant part, around an indecent practice. Doing so is the same as making Jews in Europe live surrounded by statues of Hitler and his crew. People in a specifically identifiable cohort should not have to see their mortal enemy — an enemy, moreover, who lost a war — get celebrated after the defeat.

4. Arguments about slavery before the Civil War or the slavery still going on in the Muslim world, are irrelevant to this discussion. We’re talking about this country, this war, and those monuments. I will note, however, that the Hebrew Bible was extremely progressive for its time. In a world in which slavery was normative and unquestioned, the Jews instead opted to treat it as indentured servitude, requiring devout Jews to free their slaves.

5. Regular readers know that, for years now, I have been decrying the Left’s habit of visiting the sins of past generations on the subsequent generations, whether it’s young Germans being forced forever to bear the stain of Nazism (a psychological harm that I believe partially accounts for the German’s willingness to welcome in the new barbarians) or current Americans being forced to pay reparations for an institution that ended more than 150 years ago and, moreover, that extracted the highest payment of all in the form of the Union Army’s blood. Current Southerners are not guilty of slavery. Indeed, as I noted when I traveled South a couple of years ago, the South is much better integrated than the North. We need to remember that specific fact in this debate, because you can be assured that the Left is trying to tar every Southerner as a Neo-Nazis. I understand people’s inclination to hang on to their past, especially when the past is aesthetically beautiful. That’s human nature, not malevolence. But sometimes we just have to let things go.

God forbid anyone might be mistaken for being pro-Life

August 17, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Only in modern academia is it necessary for people to apologize for their decision not to terminate a pregnancy, lest they be mistaken for being pro-Life.

Four times a year, Macalester College, one of the most liberal of America’s Midwestern liberal arts colleges, puts out a magazine for its alumni. As one of my friends gets this magazine, I periodically look it over, finding its articles alternately boring, amusing, and outrageous as only Leftist writing can be. In the most recent edition of Macalester Life, which hasn’t even been published to the website, there’s an article about graduates who have been hit hard by life’s tragedies.

All of these graduates have certainly faced hard times. One man was shot, a young woman got breast cancer at 25, a man’s brother died young in an accident, a woman’s daughter had a dangerous brain tumor, and the lives of two graduates who married young were permanently disrupted the man got into a bike accident leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. (If you ever wonder why ER docs don’t ride bikes, that kind of story is why.)

Each of the graduates profiled has faced these hardships with courage and I salute them for that. What I want to write about is a funny bit of hardcore Leftism that got slotted into the story about the last-named couple, the one who married young. I’ve highlighted the language that caught my eye:

Rachel Welch Tschida [class of ’90] was just 20 when her life took a major detour. She and then-boyfriend John Tschida ’89 were Mac students when they discovered that Rachel was pregnant. The couple were both firmly pro choice, Tschida says, but also crazy in love: “We always knew we were going to get married some day, so why not do it then?”

Maybe it’s just my sense of both the tragic and the ridiculous, but I was taken aback by the fact that either Ms. Tschida, or the article’s author, or both, felt it imperative to apologize for having a baby. The mere risk of being thought pro-Life was enough for them to include a large irrelevant piece of information in an otherwise interesting and uplifting look at dealing with tragedy.

Your take, please?

Photo Credit: Beautiful Belly, by Bonbon. Creative Commons license; some restrictions apply.

Where I stand on Charlottesville and Confederate monuments

August 17, 2017 by Bookworm 45 Comments

At Charlottesville, Antifa and Neo-Nazis proved to be birds of a feather; and blacks are right to want to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces.

I’ve been rather conspicuously silent about events in the South. As you know, I like to wait until the hysteria settles and facts emerge to throw in my two cents. Here are those two cents, in no particular order:

1. This needn’t have happened. The Charlottesville police stood down, which is a common tactic in Democrat-run cities when the loony Left is on the prowl.

2. Trump is correct that there were good people attending the event on both sides. The young woman who died, Heather Heyer, was one such person — and one, moreover, who had a truly moral, decent mother. I’ve read that there were others there who were not Richard Spencer supporters, but who were supporting free speech against Antifa’s thugs. Still, it was a stupid thing to say.

3. There were innumerable bad people at Charlottesville, both fascist Antifa thugs and fascist White Supremacist thugs. They’re all foul thinks and the Left is genuinely evil in its efforts to paint Trump and his supporters as fellow travelers of those White Supremacists. As a wise teen I know asked, “If you support me, and I hate you and everything you stand for, does that mean that the media gets to say that I support you just because you support me? I don’t think so.” The same teen, incidentally, said “extremism creates opposite extremists.” He hadn’t even read the Daniel Greenfield article from which I quote below when he said that.

4. There is nothing that Trump could have said about Charlottesville that would have assuaged the media. Nothing. And in talking with his supporters, I see them say that, no matter how inartfully Trump phrased things at his press conference, he was correct in the substance of what he said and they continue to applaud his bold frontal attacks against the media.

5. The media has a consistent double standard: Antifa, which is a burgeoning movement and can be seen as the militant arm of the campus Left (just as the KKK was the militant arm of the Democrat Party), is designated as a freedom fighting movement. White Supremacists, who are a teeny fraction of the American population, far less than the KKK was during its ascendancy in the 1920s and probably less than the Antifa mob, whether on campus or off, is treated not only as evil (which it is) but as representative of all conservatives.

6. When Antifa runs out of White Supremacists to attack (and it will, given the latter’s small numbers), the ground will have been laid for Antifa to attack all conservatives on the ground that they too are White Supremacists.

7. Antifa and the White Supremacists have a few things in common: They’re violent and they hate Jews. IowaHawk nailed it: [Read more…]

Leftist police chiefs and leftist rioters — a dangerous combination

August 16, 2017 by Bookworm 33 Comments

A former police officer’s tale about the 1979 White Night riots in San Francisco shows a disturbing pattern when you have a Leftist police chief or mayor.

I spoke yesterday with a friend, a former San Francisco police officer, who told me something very interesting about the White Night riots that devastated San Francisco in May 1979. I remember the riots well, as I lived in the City at the time, but the behind-the-scene details were fascinating and illuminating. Here’s what I learned:

George Moscone became the Mayor of San Francisco in 1976. Today, he would be called a Progressive. Back then, he was simply a Democrat who represented the electorate’s shift away from the old-fashioned, working- and middle-class Democrats who once had a say in San Francisco politics.

One of Moscone’s first tasks as mayor was to appoint a new Chief of Police. Traditionally, police chiefs came from within the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department, which was a solidly working- and middle-class organization with conservative social views, that was just branching out into having women and minorities serve.

Moscone, however, bypassed the SFPD when looking for a new chief and, instead, appointed Charles Gain, an African-American who had been serving as Chief of Police in Oakland. At the time, Gain was widely perceived as being extremely “liberal” — as the Left defines that word, rather than the classical definition.

When he became Chief, Gain decided that the SFPD needed an image overhaul. He therefore ordered that all police vehicles should be painted baby blue, so as to appear less threatening. The police officers, when driving around in their light blue paddy wagons likened themselves to a diaper delivery service. Gain was also extremely supportive of gays, something that didn’t sit well with traditional police officers.

Given Moscone’s and Gain’s Progressive politics, it’s scarcely surprising that Dan White, an elected supervisor who was an old-fashioned, working class San Francisco conservative, would clash with them. Eventually, White announced that he was retiring as Supervisor.

Conservative elements in the City, including police officers, begged White to reconsider, so he asked for his old job back. However, the Progressives on the Board of Supervisors, including Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in America, lobbied against his reinstatement, so that they could get a firm lock on Leftist politics in San Francisco. Moscone had no problem with this agenda and refused White’s request to be reinstated.

White was extremely distraught. Unfortunately, his wife, who might have provided emotional ballast for him at this time, was out of town. So it was that Dan White sneaked into City Hall on November 11, 1978 and assassinated both Moscone and Milk. Most San Franciscans were saddened but gay San Franciscans were completely devastated. An icon had died. [Read more…]

“Shut up,” he said; or a political discussion with a Progressive

August 15, 2017 by Bookworm 29 Comments

A Progressive who’s losing ground in a political discussion always has one go-to debating tactic — silencing the opposition

This one’s short:

PROGRESSIVE: Trump is a dangerous authoritarian.

ME: Name one authoritarian thing he’s done.

PROGRESSIVE: That’s not what we’re talking about. You’re changing the subject.

ME: You said, “Trump is a dangerous authoritarian.” Tell me one authoritarian thing he’s done or that his supporters have asked for.

PROGRESSIVE: Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Talking to a German reveals Leftism’s cognitive dissonance

August 14, 2017 by Bookworm 21 Comments

Cognitive dissonance is the struggle to hold simultaneously entirely conflicting thoughts. This is what Leftists must do when they contemplate Trump.

I spoke this morning with a friend who lives in Germany. Unsolicited, the friend (who assumed, as Leftists always do, given my socio-economic status, that I am a Leftist too) began to trash Trump. I got the usual litany: Trump will kill Americans because he refuses to save Obamacare; Trump will kill Americans and Koreans because he’s threatening repercussions if Kim Jong-Un engages in an overtly aggressive act against the US or its territories; and Trump will kill the entire world because he withdrew from the (meaningless, but expensive) Paris Accords. How in the world could Americans elect the racist, bigoted, dangerous Trump?

Because the friend is older and there was no benefit to be had in offending him, I let the tirade wash over me. At the end, I offered the anodyne statement that we live in strange times. Then it was my turn. I politely asked only one question: How were things in his German town since the refugees came in?

Well, said the friend, they’re not so good. They are very expensive because they don’t work. And they bring in all their family. And they can’t be trained to work because they don’t speak German and they’re illiterate in their own language. It’s a real financial burden having them.

Also, his city really isn’t safe anymore. His apartment building has been broken into seven times already in the last year and a half. It’s also not safe to go out on the streets anymore. Frau Merkel really made a big mistake when she let in the refugees.

Again, because the friend is older and there was no benefit to be had in offending him, I held my tongue. Had I spoken, though, I would have said, “That’s why the American people elected Trump. They looked at Europe’s descent into suicidal madness and said NO.”

What struck me is the German friend’s inability to make the connection between the disastrous condition of Europe, which possesses an economically staggering welfare state overrun by immigrants who drain the system and decrease internal security, and the American decision to elect a president who explicitly said, “I will protect you from the perils of unlimited immigration, legal or illegal, by people who don’t share your values, contribute little to nothing to your country, take in more in welfare than they contribute in skill or labor, and who are a threat to your physical well-being and overall safety.”

Europe, especially Germany, seeks to expunge its existential guilt over WWII — and almost all of the European countries need to hide their heads in shame for the fact that, even if they stood against the Germans, they were complicit in ridding themselves of Jews — by inviting in refugees who not only intend to destroy Europe and Europeans, but who have a vitriolic hatred for the Jews that meets and even exceeds that which led Europe over the precipice into genocidal madness 75 years ago.

What’s happening in Europe is a defective mental state, something consistent with the whole notion of cognitive dissonance. After all, holding simultaneously two conflicting thoughts and proclaiming both to be true — the very essence of cognitive dissonance — is enough to drive anyone, and any nation, stark, raving mad.

One thing that you can say about Leftists is that they have an abnormally high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. After all, they can say with a straight face that sexual orientation is fixed; gender identity is fluid; and men and women are identical, except for when they’re different, something that happens only when women can be deemed superior to men. Holding those thoughts in my mind and actually believing them would rot my brain.

Photo credit: Refugees Welcome, by Paul Van Der Werf (taken in Berlin in 2010). Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.

A little vacation from politics

August 13, 2017 by Bookworm 29 Comments

I’ve been on a weekend trip and treated myself to a vacation from politics. The news has grown so grossly hysterical and dishonest that I no longer believe most of what I read anymore. It’s also become stupidly petty, with Trump castigated for failing properly to atone for the sins of white supremacists with whom he has no dealings and for whom he gives no support except in maddened Progressive fantasies.

What I did discover this weekend was something interesting about ordinary people who don’t look behind the dishonest headlines. I quizzed six people ranging in age from 18-60 about the Google kerfuffle. All of them believed the headlines about blatant sexism and misogyny. None were interested in the details.

However, all of them also believe that Google shouldn’t have fired the memo’s author. They had a cloudy belief that free speech should apply in a company dedicated to information and one knew enough to understand that the SJWs were behind the firing. The general consensus was that people need to stop taking offense and acting on it.

The one other thing that emerged is that older adults, Progressives, I might add, do not believe in the whole gender thing. They agree that the vocally transgendered are mentally ill. The recognize that fake women are destroying women’s athletics and they think that fake women have no placed in women’s restrooms.

Lastly, there was agreement that part of what’s wrong with our culture is people’s belief that they’re entitled to have want they want without compromise . . . at least without compromise on their part. We older folks (including the Progressives, spoke longingly of a time in which people who were committed to social or religious behaviors recognized that they could not bend the rest of the world to their will. The deal in America for these people has always been “We’ll leave you alone.” The new, untenable version, is that these people say “Do what I want, and think as I think, or else.”

The Google Gestapo debacle . . . leads to excellent satire

August 11, 2017 by Bookworm 8 Comments

There’s lots of outrage about Google’s war on thought-crimes, but not a lot of satire. Thankfully, what satire there is happens to be WONDERFUL.

Google recently made the decision to fire a highly qualified engineer for the thought-crime of suggesting that the Google workplace could encourage a bit more diversity. One suspects that it was women such as these who led the baying mob:

Most articles I’ve seen have breathed outrage. This one, however, breathes satire — and one of the best satires I’ve read in I don’t know how long:

To: All Google Employees
From: Unoi’m Carasee, Vice President of Mutually Exclusive Propositions
Subject: The Recent Outrage

Dear Google Employees:

[snip]

I believe some of the problem lately has been a simple misunderstanding of my last memo. Unfortunately, I mistyped that Google “approves of free speech.” I meant to write that Google must “approve free speech.” I want all of our employees to feel perfectly free to express themselves however their political, moral, or religious beliefs impel them; provided of course that they receive prior written authorization.

[snip]

I am also pleased to announce the creation of a new employee committee that we are calling Keep Getting Better (KGB). Members of the KGB are tasked with coming up with new and improved ways in which Google can advance its diversity program, with a special emphasis on maintaining proper thoughts at all times.

Read the whole thing and be prepared to laugh.

Fisking a risible argument that Leftists, not conservatives, are reality-based

August 11, 2017 by Bookworm 6 Comments

After explaining how the Left invented a detachment from reality, Kurt Andersen makes the laughable argument that the Left, not the Right, is reality-based.

A shining example of Andersen’s Leftist “reality-based” community.

A Leftist friend of mine told me that novelist Kurt Andersen’s article in The Atlantic, entitled How America Lost Its Mind : The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, is a “must read.” Although the article is ostensibly about a movement that began in the 1960s, one that saw America abandon facts in favor of emotions and magical thinking, the article is really a very, very, very, very long effort to say that Trump voters are credulous and irrational.

Because I am a nice person, I will not ask you to read the article — unless, of course, you are a glutton for punishment and have endless amounts of time. Instead, I’ve worked my way through this magnum opus to distill the essential points in each paragraph. To save you the time of even reading my summation — which, while long, is still shorter than Andersen’s article — here’s a quick summing up of what he says:

During the 1960s and 1970s, America went crazy. It was mostly the Left that went crazy, especially in academia, where our colleges abandoned truth and, instead, settled for moral and cultural relativism, navel gazing, and Foucault’s “everybody makes it up as they go along” theory. This madness swept the land.

Fortunately, by the 1980s, the Left managed to distill only the purest and truest thought from this insanity. Conservatives, meanwhile, embraced the crazy because they believed in God and distrusted both Big Government and the media. They were aided by the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed the crazies to hit the airwaves. First Rush and then the internet convinced conservatives that there is a God, and that both Big Government and the media deserve to be distrusted.

And that’s how we got Trump.

Andersen’s turgid, long, frequently ignorant, invariably condescending, and very nasty essay boils down to a variation of the saying that “Fascism is always descending on America, but landing on Europe.” According to Andersen, “An unprincipled retreat from reality is always bubbling and burgeoning on the Left, but only reveals itself on amongst conservatives.”

That’s really what Andersen takes 117 paragraphs to say. I know, because I read all of them and, as noted above, I’ve set out below a precis of his wordiness, along with my interlineated comments: [Read more…]

Heil, Google! A round-up of interesting takes on a fascist corporate culture

August 9, 2017 by Bookworm 96 Comments

Google’s promise was that it would allow an unfettered platform for free speech and thought. Its college-grad employees, though, made it a fascism farm.

I stopped using Google’s search engine years ago, although I’m still chained to Gmail. I was one of the first Gmail users back when it was in beta and it would upset my life a great deal if I had to switch email addresses. Still, depending on how Google comports itself in the next couple of months, Gmail may have to go too. There’s no reason for my email use to advance its fascist agenda.

Did I say “fascist agenda”? Why, yes, I think I did. That’s because Google’s decision to fire an employee who dared to speak out against the Leftist lockstep that governs everything from its workplace to its search algorithm manipulations is entirely fascist. Google is its own little state, one governed by hardcore Leftist ideology, and anyone who speaks out against that must be purged.

I actually don’t have anything original to say on the subject, but there’s so much smart stuff out there, I thought I’d share it with you. Let me begin with a collection of employee self-written bios that Paul Joseph Watson found (click on image to enlarge):

With staff like this, I’m sure tolerance of conservative opinions is paramount at Google. pic.twitter.com/FqawBCilva

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 9, 2017

Robert Avrech takes a much-deserved swipe at the Stalinists on the Fainting Couch:

James Damore was fired for expressing his opinions. Google his name and you will find that the left-wing press is demonizing him relentlessly.

Ironically, the entire affair proves his conclusions. By firing him, Google has proven that it is an intolerant ideological echo chamber.

Several fragile female engineers stayed home from their jobs at Google because the memo made them feel uncomfortable, or unsafe, or whatever parlance these overgrown babies default to in order to impose their cultural fascism on the rest of us. Presumably, these female engineers took to their fainting couches for a few hours in order to get over the shock of a non-leftist opinion.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the gulags and graveyards were filled with people who expressed opinions that the leadership considered incorrect.

In America, the left does not build gulags… not yet, anyway. Instead, it resorts to shame and creates unemployment.

Exciting times make for exciting posts at WOW! Magazine

August 8, 2017 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Over at WOW! Magazine, you’ll find a stellar collection of informed, thoughtful posts about all of today’s headline topics.

I had planned to put up more than one original post today, and I might still try to do so tonight, but the day quickly spun out of my control. Thankfully, my fellow Watcher’s Council members have been quite busy looking at the world and putting up fascinating and thoughtful posts. I think you’ll enjoy whichever of their posts you read:

Justine Damond: Rights And Responsibilities

The self-driving Tesla: a review from a passenger’s perspective

WoW! Forum: What Will Be The Major Tech And Science Breakthroughs In The Next 10 Years?

A broken kitchen sink explains everything that’s wrong with socialism

Law Enforcement is Boycotting Dunkin’ Donuts over Response to Clerk’s Refusal to Serve Officers.

Texas: Campus Concealed Carry [Read more…]

A nearly-nuclear North Korea: Your opinions and ideas, please?

August 8, 2017 by Bookworm 36 Comments

After 24-years of American bribes and pandering, North Korea has crossed a nuclear threshold. I’m interested in your opinions and ideas about this problem.

It happened: North Korea crossed a major threshold on the way to becoming a fully nuclear state:

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

We can blame presidents from both sides of the aisle for kicking this can down the road — although I feel obligated to point out that, out of the prior three administrations, spanning 24 years, Democrats made bad decisions for 16 years and a Republican made bad decisions for only 8. Does this math matter? I don’t know, but it’s still a fact.

Where does this leave us now? Austin Bay has for some time now been saying that there are really only six possible solutions to the North Korea problem, and he really doesn’t like any of them. It’s a long article, and one I highly recommend. The bullet-points for the six solutions are: [Read more…]

The self-driving Tesla: a review from a passenger’s perspective

August 7, 2017 by Bookworm 9 Comments

The Tesla is a clever car with lots of gadgets, but it makes for an uncomfortable ride and can be dangerously stupid at times.

I had the opportunity to drive in a “self-driving” Tesla, an automatic system that is simultaneously impressive and awful. The Tesla Model S 75D is not a fully self-driving automobile. It does, however, have a few tricks. Thanks to sensors all around it, it can drive in a well-marked line without any participation from the driver, engage in responsive breaking and accelerating based upon the speed of the car in front, and change lanes if the driver uses the turn-signal.

At all times, though, the driver has to pay attention and be ready to take control. Thus, the Tesla needs human control if the car signals that it needs help, which might happen if the lane markings vanish, or if the driver is uncomfortable with the way in which the car is handling the situation.

The car really seems to hit its stride in slow, stop-and-go traffic. It will inch forward on the freeway without the driver having to accelerate and decelerate all the time. That’s certainly less stressful. Moreover, because the dynamics in stop-and-go are very, very slow, there’s little risk of the car making a poor choice about whether to accelerate or brake. My bet is that this function stops a lot of potential fender benders.

Things are less appealing at high speeds. The first problem is that, despite the car’s periodic reminder to the driver to pay attention, the reality is that, if people don’t have to pay attention, they won’t. This is especially true given all the things one can do with the giant computer screen. The driver can’t watch a movie, but he can constantly fuss with the interface in a way no sane driver who is solely responsible for the car’s behavior would ever do. In my little jaunt, the driver several times failed to help the car when the car needed help.

The second problem, and it’s a doozy from my perspective, is that the car is a rolling puke mobile. The word “puke” is not a typo. [Read more…]

A broken kitchen sink explains everything that’s wrong with socialism

August 7, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

The wonders of a newly installed kitchen sink remind me how I learned that socialism is an irredeemably corrupt system that will always fail.

One of the things that I haven’t blogged in 2017 about is the fact that, owing to storm damage in January, I’ve been without a functioning kitchen this year. Six and a half months is a long time, which can only be explained by a lot of “becauses”: Because I’m not the only one who suffered from this, because Marin has very low unemployment, and because a lot of contractors closed up shop and moved away during the height of the recession, finding skilled labor to rebuild the kitchen has been difficult.

Things are finally starting to come together, though. I got my new counter two weeks ago. I got the new floor one week ago but it was installed wrong, so I need a new new floor. Last week, my stove and oven were reconnected. That’s all been exciting and, occasionally, frustrating.

But today! Today is a special day. Today I have running water in my kitchen.

Please understand that I’ve had running water in my house all along. With two bathrooms, there’s been water upstairs from the kitchen and downstairs from the kitchen. (Our house is built on a hill, so what would ordinarily be a two-story house is a sprawling two-and-a-half story house.) There just hasn’t been water in the kitchen.

It’s not until you don’t have water in the kitchen that you realize how much you depend upon that kitchen sink. Everything from quickly rinsing your hands after eating something greasy or sticky, to washing fruits, to cleaning dishes, is easier — much easier — when you have a kitchen sink.

But you know what the most important thing is about a kitchen sink? A kitchen sink explains why communism stinks. Yes, that sounds like a non-sequitur, but it isn’t. Instead, the case of the missing kitchen sink in East Berlin explains why, when Democrats moved hard Left, I baulked and, instead, moved right. This story begins in the 1920s in Berlin…. [Read more…]

Dunkirk: A contrary view about a movie everyone else loves

August 6, 2017 by Bookworm 16 Comments

Dunkirk doesn’t fail because it’s insufficiently diverse. It fails because, like the Left itself, it ignores individualism and opts for nameless masses.

Don’t worry. This is not going to be a review decrying Dunkirk because of its failure to include women, people of color, homosexuals, or differently gendered in its cast of thousands. Instead, I’m going to say the really un-sayable: The movie is boring.

Dunkirk essentially follows three story lines during the evacuation from Dunkirk: a pair of soldiers desperately trying to get on a ship, and being perpetually thwarted by German attacks; a father piloting a pleasure boat from England to Dunkirk, accompanied by his young son and a 17-year-old boy from their community; a few RAF pilots, indistinguishable from each other; and an admiral, who has the most lines and provides a tiny bit of actual context. Barring the trio on the pleasure boat, none of the characters have names or discernible personalities.

Throughout the film, you get to see men on the beach getting bombed, men on ships getting bombed, men in airplanes getting shot down, and people drowning. One sees virtually no blood or wounds. It’s indistinguishable from the computer games my son and his friends used to play.

What also makes Dunkirk indistinguishable from the computer games is the utter lack of context. There’s an “enemy” and there are faceless drones trying to escape the enemy. That’s all. There’s no sense of a valiant democracy taking a stand against a monstrous totalitarian regime, its soldiers fueled into “supermen” by an endless supply of amphetamines, and its wealth and weapons derived from conquest and slave labor. It’s just “soldiers” and “sailors” escaping from “the enemy.” Again, computer game stuff.

What really bugged me about Dunkirk, though, is that this lack of context extended, not just to the nature of the battle but to the individuals being evacuated or doing the evacuating. Dunkirk is essentially Stalin-esque in the way it reduces individuals to meaningless cogs. After all, it is Stalin who is reputed to have said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” This is a statistical movie — and as far as I’m concerned, that is the ultimate insult to the West, which fought for individual liberty, versus Hitler’s Left, which saw humans as cogs for the aggrandizement of state and dictator.

Because the movie was so bleached of life, it was easy to get into its rhythm. Repose, rush, death; repose, rush, death; repose, rush, death. A few moments of anodyne self-cowardice here, another moment of sort-of heroism there. The movie also used an irritating soundtrack, intended to get your heart beating. It had the opposite effect on me, because it was a signal that something would get blown up. Without even unpredictable excitement, the movie also failed in terms of raising my heartbeat.

With writer and director Christopher Nolan’s considerable filmmaking gifts, this could have been an epic film. Instead, it was an epic video game.

Hacksaw Ridge was a much better movie, despite the schmaltzy first half, because it was about individuals responding to extreme situations. In this respect, I found it much more “American” than the Stalin-esque Dunkirk.