Clipmarks | willhelm's 'culture' clips

Assault on Modernity

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:29:20 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

From across the country activists have converged on San Francisco for the 'Slow Food Nation" rally

These activists insist that consuming non-local foods harms the environment, exploits workers, severs community ties, and numbs our taste buds.

Why not also reject non-local news - such as this very report from San Francisco? And why not also reject non-local culture? Surely we Washingtonians would be happier and more in touch with ourselves if we read only novels written by locals such as Christopher Buckley and not those written by the likes of Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, or Larry McMurtry. And what's with the Kennedy Center bringing in performers from outside the Beltway? How much CO2 is unnecessarily emitted into the atmosphere whenever the Kirov Ballet flies in from St. Petersburg or when James Levine comes down from Boston? And how many local artists do we overlook in our thoughtless insistence on seeing non-local acts performed on our local stages?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

36 views of Mt Fuji

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:03:31 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Description of each art work and short article at site.

Clip Source: slorker.com

The 36 Views of Mount Fuji is a series of woodblock prints created between 1826 and 1833 by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Popular in the West, it’s one of the most well known Japanese art works due the widespread pop-culture reproduction of The Great Wave of Kanagawa (the first picture in the series) into posters, t-shirts and postcards.

1. The Great Wave off Kanagawa

2. Mount Fuji in Clear Weather (also known as Red Fuji)

3. A Shower Below The Summit

4. Fuji seen through the Mannen bridge at Fukagawa, Edo

5. The Fuji seen from the Surugadai hill, Edo

6. The coast of seven leagues in Kamakura

7. Senju in the Musashi Province

8. Tama River in the Musashi Province

9. Inume pass in the Kai Province

10. Fujimi Fuji view field in the Owari Province

11. Asakusa Honganji temple in the Eastern capital (Edo)

12. Tsukada Island in the Musashi Province

13. Shichiri beach in Sagami Province

14. Umegawa in Sagami Province

15. Kajikazawa in Kai Province

16. Mishima pass in Kai Province

Social Science is not Science

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:13:39 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "Their desire to hold on to that illusion causes them to resist many sorts of new information which conflict with their ideas. That is very human, but it ain't science.
Indeed, what goes on in the social sciences would make for a fascinating sociological study."

I have long held the view that social sciences are profound bullhockey, if I may use a technical term.

If you research the foundations of these "disciplines" you will find that they are all based in a materialist foundation and seek to confirm that foundation through the masterful manipulation of descriptive and inferential statistics.

It is time we recognize that sociology and much of the psycho-pop babble we are subjected to is nothing more than materialist propaganda.

Clip Source: maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com

Our Editor forwarded me this 1992 paper by Tooby and Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, (here in pdf, without the typos), which he found at Overcoming Bias. I wish I had known about this paper years ago.

It's a dense and scholarly critique of what is known as "The Standard Social Sciences Model." The authors argued that this dominant model is obsolete and failing, resulting in a reactionary anti-scientific movement in the social sciences.

I found it particularly interesting that the authors suggest that the clinging to an obsolete model has more to do with emotion than logic - a "fear of falling off the world." Similarly, they indicate that social scientists are emotionally attached to their blank-slate, meliorative views of human nature (there is no "human nature" - environment is everything, and thus people, culture, and society can be perfected - by them, natch).

The Long March

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:19:08 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "much of the wacky, upside-down, right-is-wrong, black-is-white stuff we see in the news these days is directly or indirectly inspired by Gramsci: the attacks on Christianity, the family, individual freedom, morality and moral judgements; multiculturalism; the cult of victimhood, "tolerance," political correctness, the replacement of the roles of family, religion, individual responsibility and choice with government rules, laws, and regs; the expansion of the State and the Welfare State and the Nanny State; anti-tradition, anti-capitalism, anti-success, anti-nationalism, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, etc - all the stuff that makes me echo Bob Grant with "It's sick out there, and getting sicker." I am sure Antonio never anticipated that a Green movement would emerge to become an ally of the slow, incrementalist and thus less-alarming Gramscian revolution."

Clip Source: www.yankeefarm.net

Our well-informed readers, Buddy among them, occasionally refer to "Gramscian tactics," or describe something as "Gramscian."

It is difficult to understand what has been happening politically in the US and in Europe for the past 30 years without understanding the influence of Gramsci (1891-1937) on Western Leftist thinking and strategizing.

Gramsci was a clever Italian neo-Marxist who realized that the West, due to its prosperity, its increasingly-wide access to education and opportunity, social mobility, and its readiness to repair injustices (due to its Judeo-Christian morality), would never be amenable to a violent proletarian socialist revolution.

So he came up with Plan B, which is often termed "Gramscian tactics."

Thus Western "hegemonic culture" became the enemy

And defeating that enemy could not be done with guns. It required a "long march through the culture" to slowly discredit and undermine its institutions, values, and foundations.

Tags: progressives, cultural marxism, social control, culture, politics

Rationalization drives the culture war

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:17:10 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "According to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, for example, all those reluctant to participate in his rationalization for killing people (including, it turns out, some who are not even ill) are the real problem; the judicial system is "corrupt," the medical profession is "insane," and the press is "meretricious." Of the coroner who found nothing medically wrong with several of his victims, Dr. Kevorkian said that he is a "liar and a fanatical religious nut."

Clip Source: www.orthodoxytoday.org

The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable.

Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior.

For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture.

Culture of Vice - Robert Reilly

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:10:12 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole. "

Clip Source: www.orthodoxytoday.org

In The Ethics Aristotle wrote, "men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives." This is also true when revolutionary changes are cultural. What might these "private" reasons be, and why do they become public in the form of revolutionary changes? The answer to these questions lies in the intimate psychology of moral failure.

For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good.

Why there is a culture war

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:44:43 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: www.orthodoxytoday.org

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society -- schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations -- civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) -- that all life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

Tags: fascism, progressivism, social control, culture, america

The Nazi War on Cancer

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:32:13 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "Proctor reveals then that the war against Jews and the war on cancer were not that far apart, having grown out of the same Nazi ideology. If that is true, he further posits, what are we to make of so much of the "progressive" health reforms put forth by the Nazis, ideas that echo today's push against smoking and alcohol and toward improved diet, exercise, and "clean living"? He sees as the answer not so much the need to refute the ideas themselves but the opportunity to see Nazism in its full complexity, good and evil together. "

And, get this:

"It is only by acknowledging and examining this "flip side of fascism," Proctor suggests, that we can really understand the appeal of such totalitarianism. "

Clip Source: www.ushmm.org

n his book, The Nazi War on Cancer, Robert Proctor examines the powerful and widespread campaign for the health and well-being of the German Volk in the 1930s and '40s. Cancer serves as the lens through which Proctor looks into German culture of the time, gaining a unique glimpse into the Nazi push for racial hygiene and ethnic superiority.

it sponsored some of the most groundbreaking cancer research and the most extensive health education of this century, including one of the most aggressive antismoking campaigns ever seen.

Proctor describes this scientific and educational groundswell, detailing the efforts to expose carcinogens of all types, including radiation, asbestos, pesticides, and tobacco and to "enlighten" the people about the dangers of consuming too much alcohol, meat, caffeine, and other drugs.

Malignancy, Proctor points out, is "a powerful metaphor, stigmatizing all that was undesirable in the Nazi scheme of things"

The language you speak affects your personality

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:07:21 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

Switching languages can also switch personality: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers David Luna from Baruch College and Torsten Ringberg and Laura A. Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification.

"Language can be a cue that activates different culture-specific frames," the researchers said in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers said the women classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.

"In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted," they said.

Tags: language, psychology, news, science, gender, via:twitter

Novak on Scott McClellan's take on Plame affair

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:26:58 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: excerpt in piece by Thomas E. Brewton

Clip Source: www.intellectualconservative.com

In Scott McClellan's purported tell-all memoir of his trials as President Bush's press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's role leaking to me Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA employee. That fits the partisan Democratic version of the Plame affair, in keeping with the overall tenor of the book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

In claiming he was misled about the Plame affair, McClellan mentions Armitage only twice. Armitage being the leaker undermines the Democratic theory, now accepted by McClellan, that Bush, Vice President Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove aimed to delegitimize Wilson as a war critic. The way that McClellan handles the leak leads former colleagues to suggest he could not have written this book by himself.

16 year old isolates plastic-eating bacteria !

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:04:11 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

Clip Source: news.therecord.com

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic -- not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature.

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

Such is the broken state of dependency

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:16:35 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: More regulation to avoid government controlling what we eat.

Clip Source: blogs.usatoday.com

While the mad-cow fears in South Korea might be overblown, neither the U.S. cattle industry nor the federal government seems to understand that food is not like steel or plastics. What people eat is an intensely personal matter. In many of the countries that have banned U.S. beef, food is part of the culture and, in some cases, the religion.

In the USA, food might be less spiritual, but it is keenly important. Some consumers are turning away from large-scale agriculture, buying organic products and even dealing directly with local farms through subscription programs known as Community Sponsored Agriculture.

To some degree, those consumers and protesters in the streets of South Korea are sending the same message: They don't want big government and powerful industries telling them what's for dinner.

No! Cannes does not matter. Thank Goodness

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:54:57 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: I found this absolutely hilarious.

Clip Source: www.time.com

The other, sadder truth is that the foreign films shown here, and at big festivals like Berlin, Venice, Toronto and New York, have never had less an impact on the average U.S. moviegoer than they do now. Long gone is the time when every American with a pretense to culture felt obliged to know all about ten or twenty top European or Asian directors. (Long gone is the time when Americans felt required to have a pretense to culture, let alone the real thing.) The winners of Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, used to be guaranteed a healthy run in American art houses. But the franchise auteurs whose films are in this year's main competition — Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne from Belgium, Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Turkey, Jia Zhangke from China — have made hardly a dent in the States, on either moviegoers or young moviemakers. They are leaders without followers.

Ignoring the Rules

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:22:40 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: www.todayisthatday.com

Almost from the cradle, people are conditioned to strive not for what they actually want, but rather for whatever their local culture believes is possible for them.

What kind of self-replicating, culturally limiting crap is that?

Just because the people who have come before you lived their lives by a certain set of rules has absolutely nothing to do with what YOU are capable of.

The "rules" that any given society lives by are simply manifestations of the beliefs that are held by the members of that society. When the members change their beliefs, the entire society will then change its beliefs.

The only cultural "norms" are whatever any given culture believes those norms to be.

Why do Palestinians get more attention than Tibetans?

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:48:39 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Prager:
"The first reason is terror. The Palestinian leadership decided, with the support of the Palestinian people, that murdering as many innocent people was the fastest way to garner world attention. They were right. On the other hand, as The Economist notes in its March 28, 2008 issue, "Tibetan nationalists have hardly ever resorted to terrorist tactics…" It is interesting to speculate how the world would have reacted had Tibetans hijacked international flights, slaughtered Chinese citizens in Chinese restaurants and temples, on Chinese buses and trains, and massacred Chinese schoolchildren."

The second reason is oil and support from Arabs. The Palestinians have the unqualified support of all Middle Eastern oil-producing nations and the support of the Muslim world. The Tibetans are poor and have the support of no nations, let alone oil-producing ones.

Clip Source: www.townhall.com

The long-suffering Tibetans have been in the news. This happens perhaps once or twice a decade. In a more moral world, however, public opinion would be far more preoccupied with Tibetans than with Palestinians, would be as harsh on China as it is on Israel, and would be as fawning on Israel as it now is on China.

Consider the facts: Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the world's oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated, 6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.

Palestinians have none of these characteristics.

Why have the Palestinians received such undeserved attention and support, and the far more aggrieved and persecuted and moral Tibetans given virtually no support or attention?