Wrestling match

They gave the movie an “R” rating — which meant the trailer could only run before “R”- rated movies and no one younger than 17 could see it without a parent’s permission. A half-dozen major music labels refused producers’ requests to license music for the film. Many major television networks except Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network refused to run ads promoting it. Then, curiously, the movie’s Twitter account was suspended through no fault of its own during opening weekend. (Twitter restored the account after outraged filmgoers flooded them with complaints). Tens of thousands of users (myself included) mysteriously found themselves involuntarily removed from the account’s followers and/or unable to follow it in the first place.

Get the feeling someone doesn’t want you to see “Unplanned”?

…

The “R” rating didn’t stop “Unplanned.” Instead, it validated the film’s premise. As Ashley Bratcher, the actress who plays Johnson, explained, “We don’t have nudity, we don’t have sex, we don’t have language, so the only thing they could give us an ‘R’ for is violence. So that means they agree that abortion is a violent and disturbing act.” They would not give it an “R” if it depicted a tonsillectomy.

Critics dismiss “Unplanned” as propaganda, but this is incorrect ….

Marc Thiessen, The movie abortion supporters don’t want you to see, Washington Post.

I had no idea how the deathworks were so arrayed against this lifework.

But I can’t say I’m surprised. We wrestle not against flesh and blood ….

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here, but a bit here as well. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights). Twitter can’t shut down your account there.

C.S. Lewis: Forever relevant

Lewis on the Manichean temptation

I trust that at least one very contemporary example of this comes readily to mind.

But if that’s the only example you can think of — if you’ve forgotten Pizzagate and birtherism and Obama’s-a-Muslim — or if you think those are materially different, then you, too, may be a hell-bound Manichean.

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You can read my more impromptu stuff at Micro.blog (mirrored at microblog.intellectualoid.com) and, as of February 20, 2019, at blot.im. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Twiblings

As if on cue, an example of today’s version of satanic banality. I’m really sticking my neck out on this, but here goes.

But first, remember the conclusion to my latest blog when you parse “satanic”:

The man who approaches Paradise Lost expecting to find the same Satan venerated by Scandinavian black metal bands and Anton LaVey will turn the final page of the poem and suffer sore disappointment. Milton’s Satan never kills anyone, neither does he rape, steal, or utter vulgarities. He does not kidnap children, establish cults, teach magic, participate in Halloween, or teach teenagers to play Led Zeppelin records backwards. He is not even terribly interested in conning others into such foul activities. Rather, one could triangulate the personality of Milton’s Satan using just three figures from popular culture: singer Katy Perry, fictional boss Michael Scott, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

* * *

I have no reason to think that Dr. Robert Luo or George Arison rape, steal, utter vulgarities, kidnap children, establish cults, teach magic, participate in Halloween, or teach teenagers to play Led Zeppelin records backwards. They’re just in love, and love is love, and they’re living the American dream. They’re just so gosh-durn normal (in a way that only gay couples with $300,000 to spare can be) that “‘We got pregnant before we were married …,’ Dr. Luo said.”

Scratching your head about that? Wondering if one of these men might be suspected of being a woman?

Nay, nay! It’s just that before they enjoyed their first-world destination wedding in Bora Bora and their legal-positivist union at San Francisco City Hall, they enjoyed the WEIRD perk of “engineering” a family.

Yes, there are two buns in hired ovens.

Their story is a veritable rats-nest of ARTsy deathworks, howsoever winsome and seductive.

Yes, I’ll admit it’s winsome and seductive (maybe I should be viscerally repulsed, but I’m not). Still:

They’re not really married. (I say that as someone who thinks he knows what marriage is, and this isn’t it.)
Their pseudo-marriage is inherently infertile.
They’re “commodifying” wombs to bear children that would be the product of high-tech, white-smock adultery (There! I said it!) if only they were really married.
They revel in all this and engineer their way into the fawning New York Times Weddings section.
Society apparently has already coined a term for children like the boy and the girl currently being gestated by the women they’ve commodified: “twiblings.”

So am I saying these two guys are evil all the way down?

Not at all — if only because then I’d have to think the same sort of thing about personal friends of mine who are, variously, gay, or who are in “same-sex marriages,” or who have resorted to questionable reproductive technologies in the face of infertility.

Indeed, I’d like to think that, even if I didn’t have such friends, I could (1) remember that I’m not the ultimate judge and (2) take an empathetic trip along the imaginative path from a prototypical fecund conjugal marriage to the surrogacy simulacrum thereof in a rich gay couple “getting pregnant.”

For instance, their respective desires for the quasi-normalcy of children made them pariahs in the gay dating scene until they found each other. There’s the seed of something good there.

The Church has been too reticent about addressing these issues. The ethical principles are not right there on the surface, in the classical forms of decalogue sins.

And it wouldn’t necessarily dissuade anyone if the church did address them, as the sexual revolution is a juggernaut, and there’s nobody here but “consenting adults. Mr. Arison is ethnically Georgian, yet dismisses the Georgian (Orthodox) Church as “espous[ing] homophobia.” He’s living according to his own principles, and we have fashioned a world to “enable” him and his boyfriend — or we’d call if “enabling” if this wasn’t all so fashionable.

As it is, I’m oddly grateful for the obscurity of this blog, and understandably grateful that I have no job anyone can take from me. I doubtless have unpersoned some certified victim groups by this paroxysm of phobias.

* * * * *

Singin’ the Self-Empowerment Blues

I believe popular culture has lately taken a sharp turn toward the Satanic.

Having been taught about Satan by Dante, Milton, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, I know that demons are paradoxical beings, simultaneously crafty and bumbling. Dante’s devils are grotesque and juvenile; they fart like trumpets and molest the weak. Dante satirizes the foolishness of devils, as though to mock anyone as a fool who falls for their childish ploys. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, wrote clever devils who played the long game, laying traps and patiently waiting for their prey.

There is no better representation of the devil for our age, however, than the one conceived by John Milton. Milton’s devil is an eternal optimist, a plucky and self-confident fellow who cheers his friends by showing them how to make the best of a bad situation. As he is written in Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan has accomplished absolutely nothing worth boasting about, but he boasts nonetheless. And what exactly does one boast about when he has done nothing which is worthy of boasting about? He boasts about being true to himself and living according to his own principles, that’s what.

The man who approaches Paradise Lost expecting to find the same Satan venerated by Scandinavian black metal bands and Anton LaVey will turn the final page of the poem and suffer sore disappointment. Milton’s Satan never kills anyone, neither does he rape, steal, or utter vulgarities. He does not kidnap children, establish cults, teach magic, participate in Halloween, or teach teenagers to play Led Zeppelin records backwards. He is not even terribly interested in conning others into such foul activities. Rather, one could triangulate the personality of Milton’s Satan using just three figures from popular culture: singer Katy Perry, fictional boss Michael Scott, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

…

Joshua Gibbs The (Satanic) Power Of Positive Thinking.

Do read it all.

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Congress’s Woke Girls

A basic fact of this presidential cycle: When Donald Trump walked through the door, he burst off the jambs and made the opening bigger and more jagged, forever. Now almost anyone can walk through.

…

Last weekend there was the video of a pregnant Chelsea Clinton being accosted by an New York University student who screamed at her and waved her finger in her face. It reminded me of a struggle session, but the student herself, in her certitude, self-righteousness and chic, also reminded me of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her friends in Congress.

…

I think we all know where this started, the political brutishness, the ignoring of traditions and norms. Donald Trump is both origin and rationale.

The mean girls of Congress have learned at his knee. They have taken their tactics from him. They claim to be his reluctant imitators but I think they admire his ferocity. They have a taste for it, and a talent.

They are good at being the thing they supposedly despise. They are not the antidote to the current brutality but an iteration of it.

They are his natural children.

Peggy Noonan, Congress’s Mean Girls Are Trump’s Offspring.

Noonan’s phrase “where this started, the political brutishness, the ignoring of traditions and norms” strikes me as ambiguous, because a few paragraphs earlier she wrote of a perennial tendency:

There is always a great temptation among the young in politics, and especially of the left, to see common respect as an admission of insincerity in opposing injustice. If you were sincere you’d be passionate—fierce and rude. They see courtesy as acceding to bourgeois political norms, when they are certain the bourgeoise (sic) established those norms so they’d never be called out and forced to admit their culpability.

They believe that to be enraged is to demonstrate seriousness. It is to show that you understand the urgency of the moment, even if others don’t. To behave in a way that shows respect for the humanity of others is to concede too much. After all, if they were truly human they’d be just as enraged as you are.

You must be crude to show the authenticity of your contempt for injustice ….

I believe, first-hand, that this is true. The Vietnam War era is when I cultivated a tactical potty-mouth, which quickly became the habitual, besetting sin my Priest must be tired of hearing about. I “understood the urgency of the moment” and thought a few unexpected epithets would raise the consciousness of my auditors (proto-wokeness — “woke” isn’t new under the sun even if the coinage is).

That’s well before Donald Trump walked through the door. But yes, Donald Trump, the ever-adolescent narcissist, brought it shamelessly into the public square. We can hope that Noonan’s wrong about “forever.”

UPDATE: A New York Times columnist thinks this is all great.

* * * * *

Justin ♥ Hailey

He had what he calls “a legitimate problem with sex.” It was his remaining vice, an addiction that had long since ceased to provide him any pleasure. Not having sex, he decided, was a way for him to feel closer to God. “He doesn’t ask us not to have sex for him because he wants rules and stuff,” Justin explains. “He’s like, I’m trying to protect you from hurt and pain. I think sex can cause a lot of pain. Sometimes people have sex because they don’t feel good enough. Because they lack self-worth. Women do that, and guys do that. I wanted to rededicate myself to God in that way because I really felt it was better for the condition of my soul.”

This (H/T GetReligion) is not profound, but it’s better than I would have expected from Justin Bieber.

Except the next three damned sentences:

“And I believe that God blessed me with Hailey as a result. There are perks. You get rewarded for good behavior.”

The longer I live, the more I think my parents’ suspicions of Christians in the entertainment industry had a lot of truth in them. I’ve even got half-baked theories on why celebs so often crash and burn spiritually, but I’ll spare you.

* * * * *

Meritocracy or virtue?

I’ve noticed something odd about the (still relatively early but) angry commentary over the college admissions scandal, whereby celebrities, “ethical fund” managers, parenting book authors and others crossed legal lines to get their slacker children into elite colleges (or at least more elite than they could get into on true merit). The odd thing is the trope that these parents are arranging for their children to “get ahead” unfairly.

But what is this “getting ahead” in the first place? What virtue is there in it? So far as I can tell, there is none whatsoever.

“Getting ahead” means superficially looking like a meritocratic success. And America is all about superfice.

What is the reality for these slackers? So far as I can tell, it’s going to hell in a delusional cocoon — or whatever sad fate awaits those lacking virtue.

So it seems to me that the most fruitful discussions that can arise out of this chapter in the annals of American superficiality are, as has always been the case, what it means to be human, and more particularly what it means to be a person of virtue — a prize infinitely more valuable than glitz and glamor.

And if you happen to favor deontological or consequentialist ethics, as the commentariat appears to, what these parents did will still fail your ethical tests. It’s unethical all the way down.

But it’s all these parents know in their bones, whatever platitudes pass their lips or gets printed in a child-raising book or fund prospectus.

So why would any sane person want their child to join their ranks?

* * * * *

Major Party Synopsis

In this freakish political atmosphere, where next year’s Presidential primaries are already populating themselves, my synopsis of the parties generally.

Both parties are deathworks, but the Democrats are careening toward insanity more giddily than the Republicans:

Same-sex marriage
Abortion
Hatred of observant Christians
Hostility toward observant Judaism
Intellectual fads like intersectionality
Foisting our sexual revolution on the rest of the world
Celebration of cultural decadence

I can’t even give Democrats an edge on dovishness. Hillary Clinton was more hawkish than Donald Trump (at least before hiring John Bolton away from Fox, soup-strainer and all); the median plausible Democrat is probably as apt to wag the dog as the median plausible Republican.

* * * * *

Good, profitable, dirty fun

On Fat Tuesday, 1988, I was in Boston for a Technology in the Practice of Law conference. (I was a very techy lawyer, relatively speaking: I traveled with my TRS-80 Model 100 for real-time notes and an NEC Multispeed HD 15-pound luggable for post-processing those notes, transferred by serial cable.)

I went out walking in the not-too-chilly coastal March evening, and was impressed by the number of pious college boys retching and relieving themselves in the alleys after doing their darndest to get into the True Spirit of Lent. I’m sure all of them got their ashes the next day and abstained from vice for the next 46 days.

I don’t care to see how far N’Awlins outdoes Boston, and I sure don’t plan ever to contribute to Brazil’s $1.8 billion annual tourist trade by doing Carnival, especially as I might get some sprayover golden shower on me.

A few principled Brazilian politicians — pecksniffs if you’re Bloomberg’s South America correspondent — took some issue with the “cherished, if hedonistic and boozy, cultural institution” (New York Times), whose justification is the riches that pour into Brazil from tourists less repressed than I.

There is something of the deathworks in Carnival, it seems to me, but I’ll let that go.

There definitely is something of the deathworks in the Bloomberg correspondent’s take on the Mayor who expressed some disapproval in advance and pulled some public funds:

Brazil as usual was on fine-feathered display during this year’s Carnival, the rolling street party that captures this nation at its irreverent best …

Rio’s Carnival is Brazil’s signature holiday, the premier attraction for international tourists, and a vitamin jolt for a city still staggered by three years of economic prostration.

Rio pulls in 30 percent of the 6.78 billion reais ($1.8 billion) in tourist revenue that Brazil is expected to generate this year, according to a study by the National Confederation of Goods, Services and Tourism. So skimping on Rio’s carnival is shortchanging Brazil. “Crivella doesn’t understand the difference between his private beliefs and his public role,” anthropologist and noted carnival scholar Roberto DaMatta told me. “As mayor he’s part of Carnival’s cast.”

(Emphasis added)

“Irreverence,” the mocking of holy things, is good business, you see, and the Mayor of Rio is derelict in his duty if he doesn’t bow to the new gods of debauchery once per year on the new high anti-holy day.

Surely I’m overreacting, you may say. Well, judge for yourself, from the New York Times description:

As millions of Brazilians enjoyed the last few hours of Carnival, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, denounced what he said was the debauchery of the festivities, and posted a video on Twitter that he presented as graphic proof.

“I don’t feel comfortable showing this, but we have to expose the truth so the people can be aware,” the president wrote alongside a video he posted that showed one man urinating on another in public. “This is what many street parties during Carnival have turned into.”

The video shows a man, wearing a black jockstrap, dancing on what appears to be a bus stop. At one point a second man urinates on the head of the man in the jockstrap. Mr. Bolsonaro urged his 3.4 million Twitter followers to draw their own conclusions and comment on the video.

… the post signals that Mr. Bolsonaro sees value in stoking societal debates over sexual orientation and morality that turbocharged his rise to power.

Note well that the saints in this story are the purported B&D boys taking golden showers, while the sinners are those who suggest that such ought not be taken in public — transvaluation of values and a deathwork in the combined names of mammon and iconic iconoclasm.

* * * * *

Men thrashing women – a deathwork

“Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around,” the 62-year-old Navratilova wrote. “[T]he rules on trans athletes reward cheats and punish the innocent.” She added: “It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her.

Athlete Ally’s response was swift and certain:

Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.

“First of all, trans women are women, period,” the organization’s statement continued. “They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes. There is no evidence at all that the average trans woman is any bigger, stronger, or faster than the average cisgender woman, …

[T]he very existence of women’s sports is predicated, as Martina Navratilova recognized, on the now-highly politically incorrect observation that the two sexes are radically different physically … When biological males and biological females compete with each other on the playing fields, the biological females almost always lose.

…

For decades feminists have castigated heterosexual men for trying to “erase” women—from history, from society, from political life. But the real erasure of women these days is coming from their fellow progressives. They are being denied their distinctive female sports, their distinctive female bodies, and, ultimately, their distinctive female identities.

Charlotte Allen (emphasis added)

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