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Today is Earth day. It’s also Lenin‘s birthday, which the Conservatives and Libertarians are quite fond of pointing out. But, then again, it’s also Jack Nicholson’s birthday. Make a conspiracy out of that.

Personally, I’ve always believed that Earth day ought to always fall on a Sunday, because without the Sun, we would have neither the Earth nor the day.

Call me selfish, but I’m not interested in protecting the environment for the sake of the Earth per se. The Earth will still be the Earth, even should its atmosphere become more like that of Venus.

The really rock-solid reason for environmentalism is that it’s worth our while to ensure the Earth can continue to sustain us humans, in my opinion. People might respond better if you focus on that bit.

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Heh. I was just idly thinking today about how much I hate the cliché of titling a book or article “Why [subject here] matter[s]”, when the news comes out that Newt Gingrich is releasing a book titled A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters.

Based on the book’s description, it sounds like he’s making the old argument that “American Exceptionalism” derives from the American hostility to government. Maybe so. But, as I wrote in response to similar remarks by Jonah Goldberg:

 “Americans are more instinctively hostile to government than most. Yet, this is not always the case. After all, didn’t most people readily believe the government’s worst-case claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?”

My point is that the people who speak of “American Exceptionalism” and “small government” do not always behave accordingly–specifically, when Republicans are in power, they are willing to tolerate–even embrace–expansions of government power.

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Via Hacker News, an interesting article by Linda Holmes, pointing out that there isn’t enough time in the world to see all the works of literature and art:

“After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you’d otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, ‘All genre fiction is trash.’ You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you’ve thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.” [Italics hers.]

I understand this. For example, I listen to almost no currently popular music and I watch very little television. I also see few new movies, preferring to watch classic old movies instead.

This is not because I assume all the new things to be worthless, however. I go by the rule of thumb that much of the currently popular stuff is awful, some of it is mildly enjoyable, and a very small portion of it is destined for immortality as great Art.* It seems probable, at any rate. Besides, I’m not absolutist about not seeing or hearing anything new. It’s a general policy, not an iron law.

But why do I choose to spend less time on “current” art and more time on older stuff, and not the other way round? The reason is that I believe it sort of helps you be less susceptible to fads in general. It’s similar to the phenomenon Paul Graham wrote about in his essay “Taste for Makers”:

“Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations. It’s hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions.”

Obviously, the major (but not only) exception to my avoidance of current art is the video game thing. Part of it is simply that I like games and that’s that, but another part of it is that most people don’t think of them as “Art” yet, and I’m hoping to be slightly ahead of the pack on this.

Having said that, I can think of lots of reasons one might choose to ignore old Art and focus on the new. There are pros and cons to both.

*This is why I’m sensitive about people condemning video games as unintelligent, immature, juvenile entertainment. It is true that most video games are just that, but not all of them. Some are truly brilliant, and I don’t like to see them condemned.

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People are quite excited over the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The couple seems nice enough, but I can’t figure out why some people–especially Americans–get so interested in it. Not that it’s wrong; I just don’t get it.

Unlike in England and  most of Europe, there’s no tradition of loyalty to a Monarch or an aristocracy in the U.S. The people who favored the Monarchy went to Canada after the Revolution. I sometimes wonder about the ways in which this affected our political system and culture.

Of course, it could be we’ve also found an outlet for that same impulse by obsessing over celebrities of other sorts.

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…when this story comes out.

I’m a skeptic by nature, but nevertheless I find conspiracy theories fun to read. I don’t know why; I guess they are just a compelling type of story to me. I wasn’t persuaded by the movie JFK, for example, but I still thought it was a great movie.

(Hat Tip to Christopher Knight)

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Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a great point:

“[M]y readings of Jane Austen, and now Edith Wharton, have really taken me back to this old claim… that women aren’t funny. As an adult, probably the first author I found to be truly humorous was Zora Neale Hurston. Better people then me can probably cite a range of other women authors who used humor in their writing, but even in my own small forays it’s clear to me that they are there. Leaving aside the desire to say something provocative, if thin, I’m thinking that a large portion of this claim originates in shrinking the range of ‘funny.’…

Also part of this is on us, by which I mean people who love books. I don’t think many people today think of fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry as particularly funny genres.” 

Read the whole thing.

He’s right. (About the literature thing. Well, I think he’s also right about the “women can be funny” thing, but I want to focus on this.)

People tend not to realize how much humor there really is in literature. One of the things that impressed me when I recently read the book Jane Eyre is how much wit there was in it. There are no “jokes” as such, but there is a great deal of humorous dialogue. Even the works of Thomas Hardy, which are almost always very dark in subject matter, contain many humorously ironic moments and witty use of language.

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This is just pure… Palin. There’s no other way to describe it.

I wonder how taking away collective bargaining rights from the unions helps the unions… was that not what she asserted?

My “favorite” part of her speech:

“I say personally to our President, hey parent to parent, Barack Obama, for shame for you to suggest that the heart of the common-sense conservative movement would do anything to harm our esteemed elders, to harm our children with down syndrome, to harm those who are most in need. No, see in our book, you prioritize appropriately and those who need the help will get the help.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is hard for me to follow, but she seems to be saying the Republicans will prioritize about who will get help… I wonder, would they use a “panel”, of some kind, to determine who gets what? And it would be “to each according to his need“, apparently…

Is that how you read it?

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The other night, I watched this video adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound.

Then, at about 2:00 AM, I was awakened by the neighbor’s dog howling loudly.

It was a “fun” couple of seconds before my rational mind kicked in, let me tell you.

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So, there’s a big controversy about an ad showing the President of J. Crew and her son. It depicts the boy wearing pink toenail polish. The ad says that pink is her son’s favorite color. It wasn’t long before the Conservatives got word of this, and denounced it, in the words of Erin Brown, as ” blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”

I wonder if they think playing video games as a character of the opposite sex makes you transgendered, too. I ask because right now I’m playing through the game Fallout: New Vegas again as a female. Last night, I got to the part where Caesar explains his philosophy. (The famed “Hegelian Dialectics” scene.) He says–and I’m paraphrasing here–that the individual must be subordinated to a “single, unifying culture”.

This, in turn, reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s quote: “Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts.”

Back to the case of the pink toenail advertisement. In essence, the Conservatives are quite upset that the ad because it seems to glorify violating strict gender norms. But why do they care about that, anyway?

The answer, I believe, is that some of the Conservatives care about things like this as means of organizing society. They hold certain ideals of each person’s role in the society according to their gender, among other things. What makes it odd is that half the time, they are complaining of too much government intervention and going on about how individualistic they are. The other half, they’re complaining about things like the wrong people painting their toenails in the wrong colors.

Now, before I get carried away and go calling them hypocrites, I must note that none of them, to my knowledge, have actually called for government intervention to stop unauthorized toenail painting. So, this isn’t a contradiction, exactly. But it is nonetheless odd.

I think it goes back to the “Nationalism/Materialism” thing. The Materialistic side of the Republican party wants to be free to make vast amounts of money. The Nationalistic side, although they pretty much go along with this, don’t always see things that way. They believe people ought to conform to their idealized society.

(Hat Tip to Thingy)

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Okay, let me take another stab at what I was saying in this post: President Obama, like nearly every pundit in Washington, believes in the “Left-Center-Right” model of politics. Also like most pundits, he believes the Center is the best of these.

Because of this, he feels a need to explicitly talk about the good points and bad points of each side in his speeches. This isn’t wrong, unless you’re willing to argue that one side is perfect.

The problem is–apart from my quarrels with this model in general–that Obama does this so often it’s become boring and predictable. Now; because it’s a budget speech, you can’t expect it to be exciting, or even intelligible, to people who aren’t experts in this area.

Still, it just seems to me that Obama is forcing it when he really doesn’t need to.