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Post by jdredd on Mar 31, 2018 19:12:15 GMT -5
And come to think of it, perhaps our culture seems to be stagnating because I'm an old Boomer, and I am mostly around old Boomers, and for us the culture is now pretty much set in concrete. I'm not sure many Boomers have had a new thought since Reagan was President. Or maybe it's just me.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 7, 2018 22:59:48 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/opinion/roseanne-baby-boomers.html?action=click&module=Associated&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Ross%20Douthat"All of these takes are, I’m sorry, tiresome. So let’s try to analyze the return of the Conner family in strictly cultural terms, without directly referencing the present occupant of the White House. The show’s sky-high ratings probably owe something to Roseanne’s political views and blue-collar goddess reputation, but above all they are a case study in the power the baby boom generation still wields, even as it begins to enter old age, over our collective cultural imagination. And not only that: They testify to the extent to which the boomers, for all the destruction trailing in their wake, might be the only thing holding American culture together at this point. That’s because if the boomers were destructive, they were also creative. Indeed, you can make a reasonable case that theirs was the last great burst of creativity in Western history, the last great surge of mass cultural invention. The boomers were the last generation to come of age with some traditional edifices still standing, the old bourgeois norms and Christian(ish) religion and patriotic history, which gave them something powerful to wrestle with, to rework and react against and attempt to overthrow. And because they came of age within a stable-seeming (though not for long) common culture, their revolution was experienced as a communal experience itself, something that united millions of people simply by virtue of their being young and Western in 1965 or 1969 or 1975." Here's a Gen x'er, born the same year as my son, who is the NYT's new columnist from Planet Fox (aka Bizarro World), saying something similar to what I've been saying since 2013 (not that I'm dumb enough to think for a minute it's original to me). Is it all a sign of Western decadence? Is it something not worrying about in light of global warming or the robot takeover? Will it be enough to keep the two sides of the cultural divide from physical violence? Or will immigration and the death of Boomers make a new cultural melting pot?
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Post by jdredd on Apr 25, 2018 13:18:10 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/politics/don-blankenship-china-west-virginia.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well"KEYSER, W.Va. — Don Blankenship is running for the United States Senate as a proud West Virginian with Appalachian roots, but his primary residence is a $2.4 million villa with palm trees and an infinity pool near Las Vegas. Mr. Blankenship, a Republican loyalist of President Trump, is running an America First-style campaign and calls himself an “American competitionist,” but he admires China’s state-controlled economy and has expressed interest in gaining Chinese citizenship. The former coal mining executive is widely known for spending a year in prison for his role in a mining explosion that claimed 29 lives. Yet he is running as a champion of miners and has bought TV ads that challenge settled facts about his role in the disaster." Here is a guy from the other side of the cultural divide. I think it says it all.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 28, 2018 21:44:43 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/music/kanye-west-trump-conservatives.html?hpw&rref=arts&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well"In the few days since the rapper Kanye West has doubled down on his public affinity for President Trump and other conservative figures on Twitter, his opinions — and the backlash they have wrought in some circles — have been hailed by those who have long seen the entertainment world as oppressively liberal. “Kind of a big deal,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Instagram. “Seems like a cultural turning point.” Bill O’Reilly chimed in about “ideological zealots in the entertainment industry” who were criticizing Mr. West. Jesse Watters, the Fox News commentator, argued that Mr. West, 40, had “loosened the grip the Democratic Party holds on the black vote.” The biggest pat on the back came from the president himself, who posted several tweets about Mr. West. On Friday, he wrote, “Kanye West has performed a great service to the Black Community.” The right is having a Trumpgasm because at least one cultural icon has crossed over to the wrong side of the cultural divide.
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Post by jdredd on May 24, 2018 0:46:53 GMT -5
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Post by jdredd on May 30, 2018 15:41:14 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news"WASHINGTON — Fei-Fei Li is among the brightest stars in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, somehow managing to hold down two demanding jobs simultaneously: head of Stanford University’s A.I. lab and chief scientist for A.I. at Google Cloud, one of the search giant’s most promising enterprises. Yet last September, when nervous company officials discussed how to speak publicly about Google’s first major A.I. contract with the Pentagon, Dr. Li strongly advised shunning those two potent letters. “Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI,” she wrote in an email to colleagues reviewed by The New York Times. “ Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google.” Here is an example of the cultural divide. While some employees (4,000 signed the letter) don't want anything to do with a Pentagon contract, there are the others who don't care what Google works on as long as there is profit involved.
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Post by jdredd on Jun 11, 2018 13:41:39 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/theater/tony-awards-review.html"Harry Potter has Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named. Last night, the Tony Awards had Donald J. Trump. CBS’s broadcast on Sunday of Broadway’s annual awards ceremony managed the considerable feat of not mentioning the name of the current president of the United States, even as it steadily celebrated currently threatened values of inclusivity, openness and equality. One participant — Robert De Niro, introducing Bruce Springsteen’s performance in the final 20 minutes of the show — broke through what felt like an orchestrated attempt to avoid controversy, using Mr. Trump’s name three times in a short, obscene salvo that brought the Radio City Music Hall audience roaring to its feet. But CBS’s censors, with the benefit of a 10-second delay, made sure the television audience didn’t hear it." Maybe it's a big turnoff for the wrong side of the cultural divide, but it still warms my heart that some people, especially in the art world, are not going to forget what a worthless POS we have in the WH.
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Post by jdredd on Jun 24, 2018 22:39:51 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opinion/sunday/suicide-rate-existential-crisis.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released startling new statistics on the rise of deaths by suicide in the United States, which are up 25 percent since 1999 across most ethnic and age groups. These numbers clearly point to a crisis — but of what kind?" "Consider that Americans today, compared with those of past generations, are less likely to know and interact with their neighbors, to believe that people are generally trustworthy and to feel that they have individuals they can confide in. This is a worrisome development from an existential perspective: Studies have shown that the more people feel a strong sense of belongingness, the more they perceive life as meaningful. Other studies have shown that lonely people view life as less meaningful than those who feel strongly connected to others." The rise of suicide numbers will probably a litmus test for what people dislike. For instance, Mother of Dredd hates Rock music, so she would probably blame that. Religious fanatics will blame lack of religion. I will probably blame it on the hyper-individualism of our age. Or maybe it's radiation from cell phones. Or could it be what I have been claiming for years: That this century is really boring.
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Post by jdredd on Jul 6, 2018 17:00:07 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/sunday/ant-man-wasp-movies-superheroes.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region"If heroes are idealized humans, then today’s reflect an exaggerated Cult of Self. They are unique, supremely talented beings who transcend laws, even those of nature. Hollywood has always cherished mavericks, but these are, literally, cartoons — computer-generated. They celebrate exceptionalism and vigilantism. The old American ideal of succeeding through cleverness, virtue and grit is absent, as is the notion of ordinary folk banding together to overcome a threat — think of “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the original “The Magnificent Seven” or any of a dozen World War II-era films. Gone is respect for the rule of law and the importance of tradition and community. Institutions and human knowledge are useless. Religion is irrelevant. Governments are corrupt and/or inept, when not downright evil. The empowered individual is all. The superhero is an alien or outcast who possesses unique powers acquired either at birth or through some accident or gift. You can imagine the avid consumers of such films electing a president who boasts “I alone” can solve the nation’s problems, and who delights in tagging his domestic and foreign opponents with villainous, comic book monikers — “Crooked Hillary,” “Rocket Man.”
He can imagine avid consumers of such films electing a President who boasts "I alone" can solve the nation's problems, and I can imagine an elitist East Coast media snob wildly blaming Trump on superhero movies. Really, I believe the average Trump voter is an older white guy who is an NRA member and is an evangelical. Not the sort of people who go to Comic-con, which is a young, very diverse crowd, diversity being a bad word to the Trump dupes.
By the way, did the European invaders slaughter the Native Americans and take their land through "cleverness, virtue, and grit"? More like duplicity, avarice, and racism.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 2, 2018 5:09:18 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/zine/2018/08/13/berkeley-free-speech-why-liberal-gave-up-college/"During the three years we spent in Berkeley, my wife would sometimes joke that I had been singled out for cosmic justice: a child of the Soviet Union (and a onetime contributor to the Dartmouth Review, no less) extracted like a Woody Allen character from the New York he knows and loves, thrust into a place that remained equivocal in its assessment of Stalin. There was, indeed, something frustrating about being among people who saw no contradiction between supporting the socialist government of Venezuela, where people starved, and shopping blithely at the Berkeley Bowl amid eleven succulent varieties of organic peaches. I did not emerge from Berkeley on the right, the way David Horowitz and many others have. Yet the crisis in liberalism came to seem much more clear than it had in the many years we’d spent in New York, where a collective desperation about the state of the subways has always erased political difference. Berkeley is far too small for that, its politics potent and undiluted. And if in the 1960s Berkeley served as a symbol of liberalism’s possibilities, by 2017 it had become a symbol of liberalism’s failures. I recognize that many of my readers are conservatives, but they should not cheer that devolution. A healthy democracy needs two lungs, one supplying oxygen on the right, the other on the left. When one collapses, the whole corpus suffers." I rarely visit the predictable National Review any more, but curiosity (and masochism) got the best of me. And I found this column by a self-proclaimed "liberal" bashing good old Berkeley. I haven't lived there since 1974, so what do I know? Is there a "crisis of liberalism"? Probably. But it's matched by the "crisis" of conservatism. I do like the fact that the powers-that-be believe we can build our way out of urban crisis. The same thing is going on here in Republican-run San Diego, where it is being claimed that building more housing will solve the problem of the detritus of Capitalism (the homeless). Like they can afford ANY housing. Oh, but the "Magic of the Market" will solve all problems. None of it, of course, is MY problem.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 5, 2018 2:23:03 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/sports/nike-colin-kaepernick.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"Nike has long relied on controversy in marketing an image of edgy youthfulness. The company had Charles Barkley declare that he was not a role model and Tiger Woods remind people that some country clubs would turn him away because of his skin color. It dressed the tennis player Andre Agassi in jean shorts. This week Nike returned to that tradition, revealing Colin Kaepernick, the polarizing former N.F.L. quarterback, as a face of a major new marketing campaign honoring the 30th anniversary of its iconic “Just Do It” slogan, a move that may prove to be its most controversial yet. In an era rife with divisive political discourse, most major public companies try to avoid taking stances that could make customers angry, particularly when rabid social media campaigns can cast any decision into a larger social statement. Yet Nike has signed Mr. Kaepernick, perhaps the most divisive American athlete of his generation, to a lucrative new contract and will produce branded apparel with his name and image." Ha-ha! Kaepernick does an end run around the NFL bullies! And I would bet Nike knows its market.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 10, 2018 16:18:43 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/colin-kaepernick-nike-ad-democrats-midterm-message/"Last week, left-wing Democrat Ayanna Pressley ousted long-term incumbent Michael Capuano from the John F. Kennedy/Tip O’Neill House seat in the Democratic primary while praising the NFL anti-flag protests, which her opponent called “wrong.” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says — in Texas! — that there is “nothing more American” than kneeling for the national anthem. The judicious center-left New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes in his daily newsletter that “the anthem is a trap for Democrats.” That Nike rolled out Colin Kaepernick as its new spokesman not only knocked a couple of billion dollars off the value of the company, it also amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Republican party. The Left and its base of activists, pundits, and (increasingly) woke capitalists simply can’t let this issue go, much less acknowledge that its flag-dissing is conceptually flawed. Demonizing a huge population based on stereotypes derived from the actions of a few of its members is exactly the kind of anti-American impulse that liberals once stood so valiantly against." This continues to be pretty frackin' hilarious. So kneeling during the cheesy anthem is "dissing" the sacred flag? (I wonder: does the flag care if it is disrespected? Just asking) Well, maybe the majority believes that. But I've always directed my rants at the minority of us who think that that kind of mystical patriotism is intellectually pathetic.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 27, 2018 2:08:57 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/sports/nike-colin-kaepernick.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Sports"Knowing the 49ers were planning to cut him, Kaepernick opted out of his contract in the spring of 2017. When no other team signed him, Nike’s top marketing officials realized they had no idea what to do with him: He didn’t have a team, so they couldn’t put his name on any team gear. Baffled, top executives in Nike’s sports marketing group decided to end the company’s contract with him, according to a former employee who requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Then Nigel Powell, the longtime head of communications for Nike, learned of the decision and “went ballistic,” the former employee said. Powell argued that Nike would face backlash from the media and consumers if it was seen as siding with the N.F.L. rather than Kaepernick. And Nike, along with most apparel companies, is desperate to attract urban youth who increasingly look up to Kaepernick; the largely white, older N.F.L. fans angry at the league over the protests are not a priority for those companies, analysts say." Seems to me that NFL fans are cultural stagnancy personified.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 10, 2018 16:53:52 GMT -5
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Post by jdredd on Oct 13, 2018 7:49:55 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/opinion/liberals-trump-midterms-2020-election.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.” “If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.” I thought of that line while reading a tweet from Nate Cohn, The Times’s polling guru: “Take everything together, and, on balance, it’s been a good 10 days of state/cd polling for the GOP in a lot of important battlegrounds.” Ha-ha! I posted this in this thread because while the point of the column is the same boring thing, some Republican pointing out how Democrats don't pander to the Deplorables enough. Yawn. But I am amused how he uses a pierced tongue as an example of unattractiveness. What is attractive then? Big hair and pearl necklases? Better to lose as a hipster than win as a frumpy matron.
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