ShrinkWrapped

Fantasy and Delusion

Yesterday, I posted on the impossibility of reaching an accommodation with the Arab world as long as they continue to believe any and all delusional conspiracy theories in relation to the West, specifically America and Israel, while at the same time insisting on our surrender.  Since even people recognized as "moderates" tend to take part in the thought pattern, I thought it might be useful to differentiate between the manifest paranoid delusions that percolate through and persist in large parts of the Arab (and Western) body politics.

USAF_Linguist made some telling comments on the post yesterday.  He was directing his attention to the Arabic media as a reflection of the thought processes at play.  I would suggest the Western left shares the same thought structure.  The following quotes are all from the comments of USAF_Linguist:

My classmates and I have been watching episodes of a popular Al-Jazeera series, "top secret," which is done along the lines of the "unsolved mysteries" series, but in arabic and frequently focusing on 9/11 conspiracy theories. I have noticed three main trends that I find intensely alarming in this series. Firstly, the level to which they buy into a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy (in today's episode for example, they made reference to a Mosad agent on the plane with Mohamed Atta).

The anti-American, anti-Semitic left fits right at home with this characterization.  Cindy Sheehan was not the first and won't be the last to claim we went to war with Iraq for Israel at the behest of the neo-cons (ie, the "Jews".) 

Secondly, their intense cultural insecurity; in almost every episode is someone saying how helpless the Arabs are and how they could never pull off something like the september 11th attacks.

This has parallels with the subtle racism of so many liberals who were so ready to believe that the Black Americans in New Orleans once free of the yolk of the police, were capable of vile rapes, murders, throat slitting of children, and cannibalism, all of which has since been discredited. 

The Suicide Plumber

It is amazing what is going on in the world.  Mohamed Sid-Ahmed writes in the current issue of  al-Ahram, a weekly magazine headquartered in Cairo:

A few days ago, scores of people received a "breaking news" SMS on their mobiles reporting that Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the New Orleans flooding disaster and that the alleged culprit was "a suicide plumber". Though clearly sent by a prankster, it took its recipients moments to realise that it was a sick joke with no basis in fact. The incident is significant in that it shows how people have been conditioned in recent years to believe in the omnipotence of terrorism and the long reach of terrorists. Indeed, the topography of the region, which lies below sea level and is protected only by a man-made levee, made this a plausible scenario.

In fact, the topography of the region, and minimal thought, would suggest a suicide plumber, even with a particularly large bomb belt, would be unlikely in the extreme to be able to blow up a levee in New Orleans, yet apparently, there are many people in the world who are willing to believe that this could be a "plausible scenario."

The writer presents a seemingly moderate argument about terror and the aggrandizement of terror (which he does not acknowledge is aided and abetted by the media) which includes such familiar and discredited notions that terrorism is caused by poverty and can only be addressed by a comprehensive approach to poverty and then adds that only a political solution can overcome terrorism:

Serenity

Last night I was one of a small number of bloggers who had the opportunity to see Serenity in New York City, amid a packed house of people who, based on pre-movie conversations, had little knowledge of Firefly, the TV show which was the progenitor of Serenity.

Going in as someone who found Firefly to be one of the best things I have seen on my TV screen in many years, I had two major concerns:

1. Would the transition from the small screen of TV to the large screen of a movie theater, with the attendant increased budget, allow for the intimacy that the Firefly watcher was familiar with; could an audience member easily become reacquainted with the crew of the ship and become emotionally connected to the characters and their story?

2.  Would those who were naive to the charm of Firefly be able to connect to the story and characters without any previous knowledge to build upon?

The answer to both questions were a resounding "Yes!"

Not unexpectedly, the movie version offers much more action and much less character development than the TV series; however, there was ample time to introduce the varied characters, all of whom represent three dimensional human beings, and none of whom were overwhelmed by the scale of the action.  I was not disappointed in the depiction of the relationships among the varied members of the crew, all of whom I felt I knew well from the series.  As a Psychoanalyst, I was impressed at the ability of the actors to express their complex, ambivalent and conflicted feelings toward each other within the confines of an action/adventure movie (though I recognize I added several layers of complexity from having seen the series.) 

More importantly for the ultimate success of the movie at the box office, the audience seemed to have no trouble connecting to the crew, as well; they laughed in all the right places, and to my surprise, universally applauded the movie when the final credits appeared.

Joss Whedon has produced a brilliant science fiction space opera, with the sweep and panorama of the great stories of the past (Star Wars) albeit on a smaller than galactic scale.  While the series has been called a Science Fiction Western, the Western aspect had to be minimized in order to answer many (not "all") of the questions that were left hanging by the series.  Nonetheless, the "cowboy" mentality clearly animates the crew and especially, the Captain, of Serenity.  The idea of a band of misfits doing the right thing, even at the risk of all they hold dear, is an enduring motif of the American Western.  It is comforting to imagine that wherever there is a frontier, the American cowboy will be able to find a home.

The Death of a Thousand Cuts

Yesterday I wrote a long post about a new advocacy group for a newly self-identified victim group.  They displayed all the accoutrements of the typical psychology of newly minted societal victims; their shame was transformed into pride, their anger was projected and externalized onto the greater society, and their demands were that we all adapt to their congenital anomaly, so that they would not have to continue to feel damaged.  As a bonus, they admitted to laying the groundwork now for lawsuits later against those Doctors and parents who had conspired to "assault" them in the quest to normalize their appearance.

However, before I could post the article, I was  struck by an overwhelming lassitude mixed with a touch of dread.  I chose not to post what I had written and deleted the entire piece. 

What occurred to me was that my post would be taken as an attack on the rights of these "victims" and I was opening myself up to their attack, with very little to gain.  I also realized that this has been the tactic of choice for the left/liberal side of the political spectrum for many years.  The left/liberal social experiment has been underway for almost 40 years, and the fact is that on almost every measure, the experiment has been a dismal failure. 

For the purposes of clarity and this essay, I am defining left/liberal as that political point of view that is exemplified by the New York Times.  There is a large area of overlap with the anti-Bush and BDS segments of the political spectrum, but it is more than that.  I will present a brief survey of some areas of modern liberal PC-thought, which includes "diversity" aka identity politics,  anti-war, anti- (American) military, anti-Capitalism, covert and overt anti-Semitism, and point out how their still powerful monopoly position at the choke-points of news dissemination leads to undermining of Western democratic ability to recognize and react to changing realities.

Interregnum II

For your perusal.

Some good news from the Jerusalem Post today:

A First-Temple period seal heen discovered amidst piles of rubble from Jerusalem's Temple Mount, an Israeli archaeologist said Tuesday, in what could prove to be an historic find.

The small - less than 1 cm - seal impression, or bulla, discovered Tuesday by Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay amidst piles of rubble from the Temple Mount would mark the first time that an written artifact was found from the Temple Mount dating back to the First Temple period.

With some bad news mixed in:

The 2,600 year old artifact, with three lines in ancient Hebrew, was discovered amidst piles of rubble discarded by the Islamic Wakf that Barkay and a team of young archaeologists and volunteers are sifting through on the grounds of a Jerusalem national park.

....

The seal was found amidst thousands of tons of rubble discarded by Wakf officials at city garbage dumps six years ago, following the Islamic Trust's unilateral construction of an mosque at an underground compound of the Temple Mount known as the Solomon's Stables.

The Palestinians showing the grace and respect of other faiths that Islam is becoming famous for.

In other news, this could be very significant: Indonesian Bird Flu (H5N1) Update 2

Interregnum

I will be unable to post today but hope to resume tomorrow.

Back Into the Fray

My last post stimulated a conversation that was much more powerful and rich than my original post.  Some of the comments deserve further attention.  The topic was the advisability of society offering its imprimatur for "gay Marriage."

C. Owen Johnson suggested that since marriage long ago ceased to be primarily about "socio-political-economic activity and became (a) romantic sacrament of mutual attraction", the rationale for excluding any arrangement was no longer valid.

Robert Godwin made several points directed toward marriage as an evolving institution; only with the advent of a modern "sense of self" has romantic marriage become possible.  He then brings in the question of child rearing:

...allowing homosexual marriage would be an explicit statement that having two fathers or mothers is equally beneficial to a child as having a father and mother--that a father and mother do not contribute very different things to a child's psychological development--which is hardly worthy of rebuttal.

Unfortunately, there are many people who do challenge the idea that a child does best with a father and a mother.  I will not rehash those arguments here since they do not hold much credence, however, they do form an important part of the PC narrative in which single mothers, same sex parenting, and other unconventional forms of child rearing are seen as perfectly equal to, and in many cases, better than, heterosexual parents.  Despite the censorship exerted by the PC mindset operating in Universities and the media, some facts are leaking through the iron curtain of denial.  USAF_Linguist offers a bit of a sociological historical view of marriage, which emerged as a contract designed to maximize the ability to raise children.

Into the Fray

Daffyd has posted a provocative piece about gay marriage.  He suggests that legalizing gay marriage is a mistake and supports the idea that there are predictable unintended consequences that make it problematic for society over-all.  He raises questions about some of the postulates of the gay marriage proponents:

Here are the myths:
1. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will extend the same civilizing effects of marriage to gays; isn't that good for society?
2. Gays don't choose their sexual orientation any more than straights do, so a ban on same-sex marriage is just as discriminatory as a racial ban.
3. You can't point to any specific marriage that will be damaged by allowing gays to marry, so obviously it won't have any impact on society at large, either; there is a natural tendency to pair up; people will still get married, so what's the big deal?

I have already pointed out in long ago posts that the second point produces a logical inconsistency at the heart of PC-thought which has never been addressed by its proponents.  In Political Religion, I wrote about the contradiction between asserting (with no apparent evidence) that homosexuality is an in-born, genetically determined orientation and the feminist assertion that gender is a social determined construct. 

Serenity

Middle Son, who in his capacity as Vice President of his school's student government does the PA announcements every morning, has been doing a Serenity countdown since 9/20 at the end of the regular announcements.  He and I will be seeing the preview of Serenity on Wednesday evening and I will blog about it here on Thursday (no spoilers, I promise.)  The anticipation builds.

Weather Porn

If you turned on your TV this week and scanned the news channels, you would have been struck by the coverage.  Almost every station is now seemingly offering non-stop coverage of Hurricane Rita.  There is something unsettling about this (anyone remember Natalie Holloway?)  as well as about the nature of the coverage; it is weather porn, not news.

The Supreme Court, in Roth, 1957 addressed pornography.  This was the famous case in which the court set a precedent for judging materials obscene if they appealed exclusively to "prurient interests" and had "no redeeming social value."

Dictionary.com offers three definitions of pornography, the third of which states:

Lurid or sensational material: “Recent novels about the Holocaust have kept Hitler well offstage [so as] to avoid the... pornography of the era” (Morris Dickstein).

The hallmark of pornography would, in my opinion, include the lack of any socially redeeming quality and the use of the material to elicit emotional reactions unencumbered by rational thoughts.  This seems a fair description of the LMSM's* approach to what passes for news.

Watching breathless reporters describe the horrible devastation that would be caused by Rita if she recaptures her Cat 5 strength, or even if she only hits land as a strong Cat 4 produces a curious response in the viewer.  There is minimal effort made to impart useful information.   One is meant to marvel at the courage of the correspondent in the filed whose hair is being whipped around by the wind with the surf crashing into retaining walls behind him; one is meant to feel horror and terror for the poor unfortunates caught in the path of the Storm, and cower before the power of nature; one is not expected to think critically (what are those reporters doing there if it is so dangerous?)  There are constant reminders and flashbacks of the coverage of Katrina.  We are reminded of those who are still suffering from Katrina, perhaps with a bit of editorializing thrown in about how the poor and minorities are now back in the nation's consciousness (when they really mean back in the media's consciousness) with additional pornographic descriptions of the further havoc that could be wreaked upon New Orleans if the levees fail again... and they will if there is as much rain as projected by our weather maps, we are informed by the concerned, deeply troubled reporter with the sympathy flowing in waves from his or her worried face.

There are many things that are troubling about this, even beyond the enlistment of much of the nation as an army of voyeurs.