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[Note: I wrote this post awhile ago, but didn’t publish it. Then I was reminded of it by thingy‘s comments on this post combined with reading this post by Nameless Cynic.]

Do you have any favorite works of art, music, literature or entertainment that you really like, but that the vast majority of critics hate? I’m not talking about stuff that’s “so bad, it’s good” here, I’m talking about something where you and a friend can be talking about this thing, and it’s like you’re talking about two different subjects. Your friend hates it for reasons you just don’t see, and you can’t make your friend see why you like it.

I think I might have some sort of mental issue with this, because there are all sorts of examples I can think of from my life. For example, remember those Star Wars prequels that everyone hated? Yeah, well… I loved them. I think they’re honestly better than the originals. [Prepares to be flamed.]

Take another example: Obsidian Entertainment‘s video game Alpha Protocol. The critics and videogamers generally hated that thing. Destructoid gave it a 2 out of 10. That just isn’t done in game reviews. I, meanwhile, thought it was an excellent game–in some ways, better than Mass Effect 2, even. [Prepares to be flamed, again.]

Even in my enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan, this issue crops up. The Grand Duke was G&S’s last operetta, and the only one to be an utter failure. And despite the lasting popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works, The Grand Duke has been ignored from its 1896 premiere to the present day. Most G&S fans hate it. And yet I love the thing. It’s my third favorite of their 14 operettas. [I probably won’t get flamed for this, but better safe than sorry]

It’s not like I don’t realize there are flaws in all these works. Yes, the dialogue in the SW prequels is very weak. Yes, sometimes the textures in Alpha Protocol don’t put in an appearance until you’re well into a mission. Yes, it occasionally seems like W.S. Gilbert utterly lost his knowledge of how rhyme and syntax work for The Grand Duke. But somehow, these flaws just don’t bother me like they do most people.

But anyway, enough about my eccentricities. I’m just curious if anyone else has ever experienced anything similar to this.

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A question for my fellow bloggers: Do you ever find it to be surprisingly hard to come up with titles for your blog posts? I mean, I sometimes spend more time trying to figure out the title than I do working on the post itself.

One technique I use is to make the title something that doesn’t make sense until you read the post. (See here and here, for example.) A potential drawback to this method is that someone scanning through post titles won’t want to look at anything they don’t understand right off the bat.

Sometimes, if I just can’t think of anything at all, I just go ahead and try to give the thing a standard headline that summarizes the basic point, but sometimes that’s not doable for a really long post that covers lots of topics. Besides which, I feel like the post titles are a good opportunity to be clever (humor me) and have the potential to complement the post in a variety of ways.

Any advice?

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“Perhaps throat cancer will move Christopher Hitchens to a change of heart.” reads the headline in The Catholic Herald.

This article seems to be an exemplary exercise in the most refined form of “holier than thou”. I thought it a rather cruelly passive-aggressive piece of writing which, especially since it’s about a sick man, seemed uncalled for. But, perhaps the author really did mean well; the point just came across poorly. It happens.

But there’s something about that headline that seems… I don’t know… gloating, perhaps? It seems to have almost the exact tone the arch-villain has when he has the hero strapped to a torture device. Or am I being too sensitive?

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I once commented on L’Hote, after its proprietor had accidentally run afoul of Tiger Beatdown, that: “feminism is a philosophical concept, not an objective thing. And because it has no real objective truth, it can ultimately only be determined by what people believe it to be.”

I guess what I was driving at with that comment was sort of the same idea that Paul Graham articulated when he wrote: “Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words.” Feminism is a philosophy, and thus it is fundamentally subject to what we think “feminism” means, and that is subject to whatever any given person wants it to mean.

I am reminded of this by the news that Sarah Palin has been trying to claim “feminism” for the conservatives. Feminists are, of course, upset–or should I say that those we typically call “feminists” are upset; for what does it truly mean to be a feminist?

The real question, I suppose, is why does Palin wish to reclaim that word for the Conservatives?

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At the end of the film The Wrath of Khan, when Spock is exposing himself to deadly radiation in order to save the crew of the Enterprise, he reminds Kirk that: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.Or the one.” When I saw this, my first thought–probably because of reading Ayn Rand–was “this is a rather neat description of Socialism.” It’s the sacrifice of the individual for the collective. And it is this notion from which all the other aspects of Socialism derive.

Supposedly, this idea is alien to the United States of America, where we value individualism. Part of the idea of “American exceptionalism” is that we are more friendly to the rights of the individual than other nations; hence, Socialism is a philosophy that Americans seemingly reject.

Or do we?

In an earlier post, I said that “War is a fundamentally Socialist undertaking.” And, indeed, it is in wartime that the Socialists and anti-individualist philosophies gain the greatest acceptance in the United States of America. Witness Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, the efforts at managing the war economy in World War I, or even the very idea of conscription. All these sacrifice the rights of individuals for the purpose of winning a war.

One of the redeeming factors of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is that he seems to have grasped this point. It sort of undermines his own thesis, of course, but nonetheless he figures out that the United States is, historically, susceptible to this sort of socialistic mood. Of course, Goldberg calls it “fascism”, and he may be right about that as well.

I have said in the past that “Fascism is nothing more than a particularly militaristic brand of Socialism”, and while I’m no longer sure if that’s the only difference, I think it’s clear that fascism is more militaristic than socialism. So, perhaps I should rephrase my earlier statement: war is a fundamentally socialist undertaking–and it’s called fascism. Again, Goldberg makes something of a decent case that socialism and fascism have some similarities that people don’t know about. (Of course, he seems to think they’re almost interchangeable.)

I realize this post is somewhat disjointed and confusing–it’s a combination of a post I’d been working on for a while, plus the stuff about Goldberg’s book that I was reminded of by this–but what I’m ultimately trying to do here is figure out just what the hell fascism actually is, and how it relates to socialism. Anyone care to help? So far, the best explanation I’ve read is here.

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 I leave it to others to be witty about this. For now, I’ll just say that I’d like it if he would explain why the hell he didn’t get Donald Rumsfeld out right after the Abu Ghraib scandal. If you want my opinion, that is the single most disastrous decision of his administration.

Any questions you’d like to hear him answer? (But know that he won’t.)

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The Supreme Court rules that videos of animal cruelty are protected by free speech:

“The ruling means that animal cruelty won’t be added to obscenity, fraud and the handful of other categories of constitutionally unprotected speech.”

(Italics mine.)

What do you think? Have they literally “screwed the pooch”?