Ace blogger felled by fit of Spitzer envy

I don’t know how else to interpret his words. Russ Wellen writes in Scholars and Rogues:

Middle-aged men especially need to ask themselves: If we were wealthy like Spitzer and able to spend the money without our spouses noticing it, wouldn’t we too be tempted to buy a 22-year-old? Deep down, aren’t we envious of what he had been getting away with up to now?

Speaking personally, I have looked in the mirror and the mirror spoke back: You would have to take it one day at a time.

Russ, the girl is a porker. You know, as in porcine. And, as elsewhere observed, she’s covered in enough tramp stamps to force the price down to two bucks (see the Bear Sterns debacle so well covered in Scholars and Rogues).

Don’t sell yourself short. You’re one of the brilliant bloggers at Sam Smith’s Scholars and Rogues. An awkward girl, more flab than baby fat: she’d gladly pay you for it. Stop playing auto-didact with yourself and get yourself a Kristen of your own.

PhD in Mass Communications?

Sure, couldn’t have hurt at Nurenberg; but might not be needed at UColorado.

Attention seeking blogger

Another predictable posting in Scholars and Rogues slanted against a branch of the US military, this time the Marine Corps. Some unfortunate Colonel from USMC PR, reluctantly under orders to monitor the blogospheric freak show, writes a comment to refute the story and ask for patience until all the facts have come out. Then Dr Slammy replies:

Col. Lapan: Thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess the PR pro in me is struck by a couple things. First, that the USMC’s PA group (I assume that’s where you are?) is paying attention to forums like this and responding is a tribute to your willingness to understand the wild world of new media. I once had the pleasure of lecturing the Air Force’s PA division on Internet PR, so obviously I’m impressed by this.

Of course, the fact that you got pinned on time with a story breaking late Friday, etc., makes me think that not all parts of your organization are fully on-board with the 24/7 nature of new media. If I’m right, I doubt I’m telling you anything you’re not already well aware of.

In any case, I’m sure we’d all be grateful if you’d keep us posted on future developments here. Thanks again.

That’s not a reply. It’s Slammy telling us that he’s a PR pro. It’s Slammy telling us that he’s given one single lecture to the Air Force’s  PR organization or one of the Air Force’s PR organizations. It’s Slammy paying himself tribute that somebody from the Pentagon noticed his crummy, self-satisfied blog. And it’s Slammy threatening the Colonel that his blog will take an adverse view if they don’t hear back from him.

Yo, Slammy, ever think the NSA tipped the Colonel off to your posting? Maybe the US Govt has decided to get a little proactive about managing opinion in the blogosphere?  I’d think there’s enough budget in electronic surveillance to keep an eye on the crummy blogs, wouldn’t you?

Meaningless prattle across the decades

Obsession with the trivia of popular culture is an unambiguous indicator of ADD/ADHD and ritalin-induced hypomania. The blogosphere is rife with it: sub-geniuses riding the cycle from lethargic muddle to laserlike focus on the meaningless details of a barren cultural landscape. The unfortunate Dr Slammy at Scholars and Rogues provides more data for study of this disorder in his post on Buster Keaton, Johnny Depp: genius across the decades. There’s no need for me to argue that both Keaton and Depp, amusing as they may be, are no more than ephemeral products of a shallow popular culture. In Keaton’s case, interest in him doesn’t extend much beyond required classes in the film schools. And, as I don’t need to remind Dr Slammy, these things are generational: with Keaton it’s very much a case of “Let the dead bury the dead.” His audience are as mouldered away as he is. And Depp’s more interesting for the projects he chooses than for his acting: he’s boring and mannered, almost wooden. In any case, one only rhapsodizes these things during episodes of ritalin-induced hypomania.

Slammy’s fairly amusing when he rationalizes his wife’s failure to share his taste in Keaton with this line: “First I’m a poet married to a woman who doesn’t like poetry.” Married, but not bound by shared tastes? More likely Slammy’s wife likes poetry and has decent taste in poetry; but she also has the good sense to pretend not to know better for the sake of their marriage. Women fake all sorts of things.

Look Slammy, a squirrel!

Through a Glass Darkly

I’ve always associated this picture with those words, but it’s taken from Persona, a different Bergman film. The words, although possibly mistranslated, are no less evocative than the picture. The quote is from 1 Corinthians 13 12-13, where Paul writes:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Nostalgia’s like that. Distorted memories of a decade we might never have experienced, imaginings really, seem evocative of phantom beauty, sweetness, and hope. Nostalgic imaginings, imaginings as evocative as Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson looking back at you from inside a mirror, distort historical memory of a decade 40 years past and inspire a desperate yearning for return to an idealized and historically misconceived era.

The ’60s will never return, in part because the ’60s as conjured by Scholars and Rogues never happened. Generational identity, if there is such a thing, is no more than the imprint of popular music on the adolescent mind. And if Obama is JFK redivivus, God help him.

Politics and Shallow Demographics

The world is always looking to treat you as a stereotype of yourself. You’re not yourself, you’re your age group, your ethnicity, your education or years of education, the job you do, your sex, your income, the religion of your parents, etc. That you might be capable of thinking for yourself and acting on your own is simply denied. We understand and sympathize when African-Americans, Jews, Latinos, Italians or Asians take offense because we’ve reduced them to predictable stereotype; we recognize that stereotyping is a peculiarly flawed and lazy way to think about people in the aggregate and as individuals; but we make no demur when the stereotyping is by generation. Nobody objects to the shallowest reasoning from observation that a population is or might largely be made up of Baby Boomers, Gen Xers or Gen Y (Millennials). You might not be the color of your skin, but you are the decade you were born.

I think all of this is doubtful. I think ethnicity and skin color count for more than age group. I think religion counts for more than age group. I think level of education counts for more than age group. I think region of the country counts for more than age group. I think income counts for more than age group. And, finally, I think the individual counts for more than any of these. In the language of statistics, none of these is sufficient either alone or in combination to provide a satisfactory explanation of the variance.

The sub-literates over at Scholars and Rogues have always displayed a dreary enthusiasm for banal thinking about the generations. In his post endorsing Obama, Martin Bosworth quotes ’60s radical Tom Hayden to make his argument for him:

I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama’s moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through…If history is any guide, the new “best and brightest” of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

It seems pathetic enough that Bosworth feels he has to rely on the language and authority of some guy on Lipitor and blood pressure meds to express his reason for supporting Obama: Obama as candidate of the Millennial generation understood as a Messianic generation. But the idea is plain silly. Holy shades of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History! Fukuyama was a deluded over-achiever. Hayden, like so many other student leaders of his era, imagines his so-called generation was held together by a bond of identity that united privileged university students who enjoyed the leisure to demonstrate and take drugs at will with working class kids stuck in the military, factories, gas stations and other similarly unglamorous pursuits. The myth of the ’60s generation is no different from the myth of the Millennial generation. It’s also an open question whether the truly representative candidate of this particular generation isn’t Ron Paul. Hayden and Bosworth assign their favorite candidate to a generation in spite of abundant evidence that the generation in question favor someone entirely different in kind from Obama.

How I might be persuaded to become a libertarian

And that would be accomplished by reading the most recent drivel from bone-stupid Brian Angliss at Scholars and Rogues Libertarianism doesn’t work – but it’s still useful. After sketching out Michael Kinsley’s objections to Libertarianism in The Church Doctrines of Libertarianism, Angliss argues: “But libertarians are still useful in our culture for one, very important reason – they keep us on our toes.”

Here’s an example of Angliss stumbling on his toes:

And when libertarians ask why there should be regulations barring too much media consolidation in a single market, we’re forced to explain to them why monopolies are bad for them as much as everyone else.

The link in the quote is to a Scholars and Rogues post on the subject of FCC favoritism towards incumbent telecoms monopolies. The objection to the telecoms monopolies is that they’re per se monopolies. But the problem of monopolies still requires an explanation: they didn’t become rabid dogs of the economy because the word sounds evil. Libertarians are happy to believe that the simplest accounts of microeconomics are true and that in the presence of free markets, perfect competition, perfect information, etc., etc., etc., everyone will be much better off than any government could conceive, in the sense that total output of the economy will be maximized. For reasons too technical to explain here (see Wikipedia on monopoly), output of monopoly firms is substantially less than where competition is robust, and prices are correspondingly higher. If all of us participated in the overall society’s economic well-being, all of us would suffer in the presence of monopoly.

That’s why monopolies are bad in the economic sense. However, in relation to consolidation of journalistic outlets under single ownership, the argument relates to a loss of diversity in opinion. It’s no longer an economic argument, but a pure consideration of the damaging consequences in our outspoken society of limiting the number of important voices and opinions to the one voice of a single ownership interest. Irrespective of our other political convictions and our ignorance of economics, we understand that consolidation of ownership would effectively abridge free speech and exclude points of view that reflect competing economic interests.

Angliss doesn’t understand the distinction, Scholars and Rogues don’t understand the distinction; and it’s their half-baked sense of deep conviction supported by the shallowest understanding that destroys their value in a necessary debate with the earnest but naive Libertarianism of the Ron Paul supporters.

Sullen candidate

Hillary Clinton isn’t very likable. Duh-uh! But if being likable is in the job description, by God let’s all go back to HS. I wake up to that nightmare roughly three mornings a week; now seeing a Presidential election turn into HS seems to be the nightmare come true.

Russ Wellen at Scholars and Rogues thinks Obama scored a zinger when he said to Hillary “You’re likable enough.” Watch the video carefully. He’s not looking at the camera, and he’s not looking at Hillary: he’s looking down at the floor, which is the best he can do to maintain control of his reaction. He’s angry, and he says the words in a grudging and sullen response to Hillary’s “He’s very likable.” He’s angry because he understands the obvious implication that there’s more to being President than ordinary captain-of-the-football team likability.

We’ve already taken note of Wellen’s shallow grasp of school murder sprees in our discussion of his post at Scholars and Rogues, School, mall and workplace shootings: Why so may? No, why so few? Just a reminder: Wellen believes these episodes to be a form of uprising against Reaganesque social inequality, excessive but not irrational. He’s not looking for trite explanations like easy availability of assault weapons in 2nd Amendment fundie states or the absolute certainty in a large population that evil-minded people will gain access to guns.

Virginia Tech is our most recent experience with a school killing spree, but the classic episode was Columbine. Again, what was the issue at Columbine? A coupla disaffected kids in a Colorado HS felt shortchanged in the school-wide competition for likability, and they rose up, Wellen-style, against their oppressors. Wellen hasn’t figured out that political life isn’t Romy and Michelle’s HS Reunion or Better off Dead. The standard of likability is puerile at best and the outcome of imposing it on the nation’s electoral process may lead to consequences far more dire than Roy Stalin’s dethronement as captain of the ski team or Romy’s final diss of A-group idol turned alcoholic philanderer, Billy Christensen.

Out of touch with the demographic

Scholars and Rogues claims to speak for a blended voice of the separately labeled generations. In her post Feminism now: the trouble with vaginas, Euphrosyne simply misses the point about Gen Y and Millennial aesthetics in body hair and their genitalia. Here’s the quote:

“Crystal,” 20-year-old labiaplasty patient: “Ever since I had the surgery, I feel young and free and prettier for my boyfriend. Even if it’s something nobody else can see, I feel better. It’s not on my mind all the time anymore.”

Excuse me. Feeling a little dizzy.

Okay, I’m back. Still dizzy, though – and I have no idea how to even begin to examine this issue. Do I start with Crystal’s internalization of unrealistic, male-generated standards of appearance? How about her right to alter her body in any way she chooses, regardless of motivation? What of the doctors who reinforce a woman’s self-loathing for a hefty profit? On the other hand, should these surgeons assume a paternalistic decision-making role for adult and (legally) sane women? Do I dare approach the perennial ball-gagged elephant in the feminist room: pornography?

Euphrosyne seems to think that poor Crystal is a victim of “male-generated standards of appearance” and a greedy crew of plastic surgeons, whose only concern is their “hefty profit.” The truth is that looks matter, everywhere. And if Crystal wants to check out her vagina, she only has to sit in front of a mirror and spread her legs. No yoga needed. A lot of Millennial girls do just that. Some end up pleased, others feel disappointed and a few like Crystal hire a plastic surgeon to address the problem. But the vaginal aesthetic in Crystal’s head was not put there by the plastic surgeon. It was there already when Crystal spread her legs and looked in the mirror, as it is with so many other girls. Ask any girl in MySpace.

Millennial girls rule!

Short attention span quota

Forgotten to take your Ritalin? No problem, Dr Slammy’s not the only guy over at Scholars and Rogues who diverts himself with aimless Web surfing when his stock of Ritalin runs low (see Yeah, great if you’ve got a bad case of ADD). There’s his journalism professor chum from a no-name Northeastern U, Denny Wilkins (Dr Denny), who writes in Quotabull at Scholars and Rogues:

There’s a freshness and exuberance to our coverage that the others just aren’t matching. Fox almost seems downright despondent in their coverage.

— Jon Klein, the president of CNN/U.S., on its ratings win over Fox News on the evening of the New Hampshire primary; Fox beat CNN on evening coverage of the Iowa caucuses.

When j-profs at no-name Northeastern Us run low on Ritalin, they get all weeny about the great journalistic issues of the day: not who won the primary, but which crummy cable channel won the epic ratings battle in covering the primary. This supplies an imaginary dignity that’s lost in the harsh reality that crummy cable channels and crummy blogs only care about the great reality show of celebrity meltdowns. (And there’s no market for j-students from no-name Northeastern Us.)

OMG Denny, a squirrel!