Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 11

Right wing UK comic Geoff Norcott about representing the views of the majority of the country on the BBC

Via the Spectator:

As a child he disapproved of ill-disciplined neighbours. ‘I was quite judgey about the kids that didn’t go to school and weren’t trying to better themselves. I remember one day particularly I came home from school and my mum was still in her dressing-gown, and I said, “For God’s sake! Get dressed! Achieve something with your day”, although she was a hardworking woman.’ He still has ‘a real issue’ with dressing-gowns worn during daylight hours. ‘Get up. Do something useful.’ (…)

In modern politics people want to feel something, more than anything. That’s true with Trump, true with Brexit. They just want to feel something…

 

Canadian Muslim woman calls for public burka ban

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“It was hard work, all that hiding”

writes:

That’s what shyness felt like, a shift in who I felt I was, from pride, self-knowledge to something else. Shame. Shame in happily inhabiting as much space as I did, like the first time you see yourself in a photo and you don’t look the way you thought you did, and you have that choice: be happy with that person in the photo, or change.

At seven I was abused by someone. It started off with playing a game; a game I thought I was winning. My dad had taught me to win. I remember the feeling of “I’m winning!” and the shift, the realisation I’d been tricked, that I was falling into something I didn’t understand. My parents, for reasons I’m sure made sense at the time, dealt with it inadequately. They had my long hair cut off. I was put into trousers and sweatshirts. I was told never to tell anyone about it. I was to become invisible, responsible for what had happened, and to be silent. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that after that, most of who I was became interior. Don’t be noticed. Don’t win. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t embarrass us. (…)

I am better with people now. I notice that. I wonder how many people who I have known in my life, personally or professionally, thought I was arrogant, rude, or unreliable because I was frozen with the fear that comes with shyness. How many times has my finger hovered over a button, unable to make a phone call? I still find phone calls hard, but I make myself do them. The alternative is loss, regret, a side effect of shyness I’ve only recently acknowledged. It’s changing.

‘Teenagers From Outer Space’ (1959) is, in fact, excellent — lobster and all

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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The Pocahontas Effect

I found this video so compelling:

SJWs seem to have a peculiar talent for pattern recognition that is being employed for trivial causes and ultimately dangerous ones.

I mean, who the hell would notice that blue necklace?

Well, clearly the same SJWs who “see” Trump’s hair in the new Firefox logo.

The same SJWs who I believe may have legitimate grievances (about fathers and families and, well, Harvey Weinstein) but find it safer and more satisfying to direct their fury at Trump or this week’s villain.

It’s the leftwing version of those tedious Christian weirdos who thought the Proctor and Gamble logo was “satanic.”

We rightly scoff, and yet, there’s something almost Jungian about this way of seeing, a “gift” that could surely be wielded in a more creative fashion:

As arts critics or poets, for example, for such similarities are the thing of metaphors and similes and particularly apt jokes and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of the world.

But we barely “allow” such “jobs” to exist anymore unless said critic or poet are willing to adopt and dispense the latest p.c. “wisdom.”

It’s the same with conspiracy theorists, my own bugaboo — they “see” things, “patterns” and “connections,” but… to what end? Again, it is easier and more thrilling to be a basement conspiracy theorist, an autodidact amateur “engineer” or “ballistics expert” or “forensics examiner” or “police detective,” than a real one. That conspiracy theories provide their theorists with the illusion of work and its satisfactions and importance is surely one of its most sinister aspects.

I think of Carl Sagan quoting Malcolm X, being bowled over by the ability of ghetto “numbers runners” to peform and retain thousands of calculations in their brains, and wondering what they could have done with their lives if this ability had been steered in a more productive direction.

How many of these people are the Alan Turings we could really use to win a war, but are instead the very Nazis they think they’re fighting?

(Thanks to Laura Rosen Cohen for helping me clarify my thoughts on this via email.)

Gavin McInnes: A Future Letter From a Socialist to President Trump

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“Pulp Fiction” always gave off a bad smell — On the Uma Thurman thing

Yes, we’ve been over this before. 

I have always just loathed Tarantino generally, for what some could say were “irrational” reasons:

He looks so weird, he gives off “a bad vibe.” Too many idiots think he’s a “genius.”

But, perhaps because I’m female, and a poet of some sort, I find “the rational” rather overrated.

Leaning on intuition has gotten me quite far in life, thanks; not everything can be “proven” or “studied.”

Sometimes “Because I say so” is in fact the correct answer.

Of course, this method of “thought” requires a long runway in order to take off successfully. An arithmetical puzzle can be satisfactorily solved in seconds; but the accurate answer to a human one, an artistic one, is not always so rapidly calculated.

Now: That Pulp Fiction was widely hailed as “original” by people who should have known better (film critics and literate viewers, not just pliable, youthful rubes who’ve never seen a flick older than Star Wars) was confounding enough. Even if it had been less than a blatant ripoff of numerous other movies, though, I found the film leaden, tedious, self-conscious, trying-too-hard, like a bratty little girl up on stage, alone, telling unfunny “jokes” in a very loud voice, doing a cute-I-guess but frankly inept imitation of a more poised and talented adult, all the while accompanied by shitty music on a substandard offstage radio.

All in all: The utterly unhinged acclaim with which Pulp Fiction was greeted, and which it continues to accrue, was/ is so weirdly loud — Lalala! I can’t HEAR you!! — awfully “the emperor has no clothes.”

Now we’ve located another source of that stink, and the stench emanating from the rest of Tarantino’s ouvre. 

Those dead mice in the walls were bad enough, but after 20 years we’ve finally broken further through, and found the rotting corpses of two very large rats.

I hope all you rabid fans of Tarantino are satisfied, and will now apologize for calling me an uptight party pooper who just didn’t “get it.”

I “got it” alright. Just like I did with Bill Cosby and David Letterman and Louis CK and your other dorky phoney “heroes.”

Yes, I missed one.

But you just wait and see about Bill Murray.

 

‘I was attacked for being an ignorant, trans-hating bully, and my comments were removed’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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A. O. Scott: “My Woody Allen Problem”

This:

[In “Play It Again, Sam”], Allan is sometimes visited by the specter of Humphrey Bogart, in trench coat and fedora. He has hard-boiled advice about “dames” and other matters. I had only the vaguest idea of who this apparition was supposed to be, but before long what Bogey was to Allan Felix, Woody Allen was for me. A mentor. A culture hero. A masculine ideal.

He sparked my interest in foreign films and old movies, in jazz and Russian literature, in Franz Kafka and Marshall McLuhan. Whenever there was a revival of “Sleeper,” “Bananas” or “Love and Death” in those pre-home-video days, I was there. My paperback copies of his first two collections, “Getting Even” and “Without Feathers,” were dog-eared from endless rereading. No present was ever as keenly coveted or quickly devoured as the hardcover of his third, “Side Effects,” which my parents gave me one Christmas. Mr. Allen’s prose made an even stronger impression on me than his films. His characteristic deflationary swerve from the lofty to the absurd, from high seriousness to utter banality, struck me as the very definition of funny.

The man himself was a plausible definition of sexy. The achievement of his early movies, culminating in “Annie Hall” (his seventh feature as a director) was to turn a scrawny, bookish, self-conscious nebbish into a player. His subsequent achievement was to turn himself into a serious filmmaker without surrendering that initial cachet. The Allen character in his various incarnations might be insecure, childishly silly, socially hapless (or all of the above), but he was never single for long. The aspects of his temperament held up for mockery — the hyper-intellectualism, the snobbery, the irreducible Jewishness — doubled as weapons of seduction. His self-deprecation was a tactic, a feint, a rope-a-dope, and he was plagued less by the frustration of his desires than by their fulfillment. As soon as the heart got what it wanted, it wanted something else. What impressionable, heterosexual, unathletic adolescent boy would not want a piece of that action?

Read the whole thing.

RELATED.

But men ARE attracted to teenaged girls, or to women who look like an approximation of teenaged for obvious and immutable evolutionarily reasons. (Joe Rogan is being uncharacteristically disingenuous here.)

There would otherwise be no need for the age of consent laws that were put in place by, yes, men — maybe even the same men, except they were also blessed with a particular wisdom.

‘I’ve seen every Woody Allen movie. Here’s what I’ve learned…’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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Explicating the Bible of Texas: “I speak, of course, of ‘Giant’…”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

…the 1956 multigenerational epic starring Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor that was based on a book written by an old-maid liberal feminist Jew from New York and brought to the screen by a self-righteous martinet from California who started his career working on Laurel and Hardy short films and then became “the conscience of Hollywood” after photographing the piles of dead bodies at Dachau. It’s something of a miracle that over the past six decades native Texans have embraced this saga as authentic history, given its provenance, especially since there are actually two official state movies, and the other one is based on history, not fiction. (…)

If I have a quarrel with the book, it’s that Don doesn’t really get inside George Stevens’ head. Perhaps no one ever did. Of all the famous directors of Hollywood’s heyday, Stevens is one of the most revered and least loved. His name is on buildings and endowed chairs and library collections, but there is no George Stevens cult. (…)

The rest of the army that descended on tiny Marfa, Texas, in the summer of 1955 is extensively profiled and psychoanalyzed in a delightful fast-paced narrative that doesn’t really break any new ground—people have been fascinated with Giant since the day it was announced in 1953—but Don has done us the favor of mining all the secondary sources that no person in his right mind would try to read.

People who hate James Dean are idiots. Let’s see you do this:

TCM is airing ‘Executive Action’ (1973) today, and that’s just pathetic

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“On a fundamental level, [the Chinese] don’t think like we do”

Mark Derian writes:

Chinese has more than 50,000 pictures, each representing a concept. A picture of a flower means “flower,” a picture of a house means “house,” and a picture of a middle-aged man means “dad.” It’s the kind of language you would come up with if you were an uncreative third grader. It’s limited as a tool of cognition in that it doesn’t challenge the speaker to go beyond the perceptual level of awareness. The allure of symbolic language is that it substitutes memorization for understanding.

Not coincidentally, communism offers the same allure. It’s a concrete idea that solves every societal problem in one fell decree, so there’s no point in learning much else. When the Chinese do adopt free enterprise, they only do so because it makes sense perceptually—that is, it’s practical.

Western language, however, comprises sounds that are stitched together to create concepts, which leads to a fluidity of thought. It’s the difference between learning an instrument by reading music rather than rote. It’s why we have more novels. It’s why we’re more dedicated to abstract fields like philosophy and psychology. It’s why we have more Marxist T cells.

PS: Derian’s last piece for Taki’s was back in 2012, about Bill Murray as “the Gen Y mascot.”

I’ve been predicting a #MeToo takedown of Murray for a while now.

All that “photobombing” of his is oh so very charming and adorable — right up until the moment “they” decide it isn’t anymore.

 

David Foster Wallace: Proof in his own words that he was overrated

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“Frankly, I know my share of L.A. white, Asian, and Hispanic leftists who don’t care very much for blacks at all”

David Cole writes:

…this video of a “genocidally racist” high school girl should have been the lead story on MSNBC for five nights running. There should have been a minimum of thirty stories about it on Salon, and Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte should have been locking arms and marching through town singing “We Shall Overcome.”

The reason the story didn’t go national is simple: The girl who recorded the video isn’t white. She’s Desirae Fernandez, a Latina. So the national media had no interest. The Elk Grove Unified School District announced that Ms. Fernandez was no longer part of their student body, and everybody went about their business…until this month, when the district decided to hold an “anti-racism” open meeting. A Pleasant Grove senior, Rachael Francois—who is black—caught the attention of the press with stories of antiblack racism she’d encountered at the school. Now reporters from bigger markets became interested, because the villains in Francois’ tales are white.

It didn’t appear to matter to the Bee’s dogged scoop-meisters that Francois apparently straight-up lied to them. “It really makes you feel different from everyone else, especially going to a predominately white school,” she’s quoted as saying. According to the Bee’s own figures, whites make up only 38% of the student body. They comprise the largest plurality, but the school is in no way “predominantly white.”

 

Review of ‘The Great British Dream Factory’ with bonus heavy metal videos

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“Smoking is a physical pleasure that reminds us that life is not merely a physical affair”

writes:

It is a debit against the health of the body that credits to the health of the mind. As such, in its own small way, it is a reminder of the afterlife. It is also part of a civilized terrestrial life, and European life in particular. This makes it—along with humor, culture, and all the other hard-to-control aspects of our magnificent race—an irresistible target of the left. Being an indefatigable servant of human freedom, I smoke progressively more as various governments clamp down on it. Over a long lunch before Christmas my pal concluded that I just like “vice signaling.”

RELATED: “Can we all just admit that smoking looks cool?”

Also? Science!

 

‘[P]lease forgive me for having seen Soylent Green at age 12’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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“The Libertarian Case for Drug Prohibition”

Timothy Hsiao writes:

In other words, freedom isn’t just the bare ability to do something; it is the ability to act under the influence of properly functioning cognitive faculties. This point is pivotal in making sense of the legal concepts of consent, coercion, and competence. Young children are unable to enter into legally binding contracts because their cognitive capacities are not fully developed. Likewise, insanity defenses are based on the understanding that cognitively disabled or insane persons cannot be held criminally liable for their actions. There cannot be freedom without rationality. (…)

Prohibition makes drugs more expensive and less available, which in turn reduces drug use. Alcohol prohibition, which many think ended in failure, actually reduced per capita alcohol consumption by about 30 to 50 percent. Cirrhosis death rates, admissions to state mental hospitals for alcohol psychosis, and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct also declined dramatically. While is true that alcohol prohibition did ultimately fail, it failed for political reasons. In terms of reducing alcohol use, prohibition was a success. And given that excessive alcohol consumption impairs clear thinking (in addition to the $250 billion annual cost that it imposes on the nation), it is worth asking whether we should bring back some form of stringent alcohol regulation for reasons considered earlier.

Of course, not all drugs are used recreationally. Alcohol can be consumed as a mild social lubricant without the intention to get drunk. But this is not true of marijuana, as the whole point of non-medical marijuana use is to get high (and, as we will see, most cases of so-called “medical” use are indistinguishable from recreational use). Nobody smokes a joint wanting to avoid the high. So too with heroin, cocaine, and other drugs. These drugs would be the target of prohibition, since their paradigmatic use is abuse, unlike alcohol.

It is true that there will still be some who will go through the effort to illegally obtain drugs even if prohibition is enacted. Perfect compliance, however, isn’t the standard of success when it comes to lawmaking. Laws against murder, assault, and theft don’t stop all of these crimes, but nobody is proposing that we legalize these things.

‘The term ‘inbreeding’ is an unpleasant one, but it is an exact description of what is happening in 21st-century Britain’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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