wingnuts

Rich Boomer turns rightwing, feels need to write book about it

Liberalism, wingnuts
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David Mamet interviewed for the New York Times:

Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.

Don’t you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didn’t have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life?

Mamet first came out three years ago, in a screed for the Village Voice in which he explained that all you liberals are doodyheads and he never liked you anyway. Judging from the interview above he has swallowed the whole range of wingnut beliefs whole and as uncritically as he himself said he had believed his old liberal assumptions Which is a sad commentary on (arguably) America’s greatest living playwright but typical for a lot of those road to Damascus stories. All those people who move to the right when they’re middleaged and rich always have to make up a fairytale about how their eyes were suddenly opened to the evils of liberalism, yet their conversion stories never betray more than a superficial understanding of either their old or their new politics. Their vanity doesn’t allow people like Mamet to admit they switched for purely selfish reasons, hence that urge to write books about their completely unprecendented journey from unthinking liberal to still unthinking conservative.

Guess what didn’t happen yesterday?

video, wingnuts
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It’s been incredibly annoying to have to struggle through all the coverage of one loon/conman’s (strike which is applicable) idea of when an why the world will end, all done in a jocular fashion but with a bit of whistling past the graveyard mixed in. It all makes for lazy, easy reporting and since that’s the sort of thing reporters like best, we got saturation coverage.

As an atheist this annoys me, but coming from a background of sensible protestant Christianity it offends me to see this brand of lunacy protrayed as the face of an entire religion. The socalled Rapture is a cheat, a way for people who don’t have a clue about the real meaning of their religion to get out of the hard work of being Christian. We were told in school that “the kingdom of heaven is within” and we’d have to build a new Jerusalem on Earth ourselves, rather than wait for salvation from on high. With the Rapture and everything associated with it, you can short circuit that whole tedious work of actually improving the world and get to heaven directly. It’s Christianity for wankers.

And now proper churches have to clean up the mess this particular brand of wanker left behind.

Satoshi Kanazawa is still a massive douche

sciencebollocks, wingnuts
Published on

Having a relatively old blog means you can see certain subjects coming back again and again over the years. One of such is the sheer stupidity and nastiness of Satoshi Kanazawa. In 2006 I posted about his bizarre theory that Asians cannot do science properly, two years later about his masturbatory fantasies of having Ann Coulter in charge of the War on Terror. Today he’s back in the news again for saying that evolution made Black women unattractive, especially to middle aged evolutionary psychologists paid to spout scientificesques excuses for prejudiced bullshit.

Not to long ago the London School of Economics was pilloried for taking money to let one of Khadaffi’s sons study there. Yet I think the LSE should be more ashamed for having Kanazawa on its staff…

Who keeps inviting John C. Wright to these things?

science fiction, wingnuts
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SF Signal is a commercial science fiction portal/blog which holds regular socalled Mind Melts, where they asks several science fiction writers their opinion on some topic or other. Usually these are mildly diverting but no more than that, as everybody struggles to say something original to questions like “which difficult science fiction books would you recommend”, but sometimes it goes wrong and they invite John C. Wright to participate. It’s not just that he’s a Libertarian-Catholic wingnut with a persecution complex the size of Jupiter, but that he’s so unbelievably pompous. For example:

World of Null-A was savaged by science fiction’s earliest and best known professional critic of the genre, Damon Knight, who pushed the work into undeserved obscurity, perhaps because he preferred the type of works written, or, rather, committed, by poseurs and artistes such as I mention with scorn above. Mr. Knight dismissed the paradigm-shifting technique of plot-weaving as mere sleight of hand. But perhaps it not as easy as it looks to juggle all the pieces of a jigsaw in midair, forming one picture to the reader, and then, by flipping one more bit of the puzzle into view, to both change the whole picture of what has gone before, and have the picture make sense; and then to do it again. The scientific process itself is nothing other than this juggling of jigsawwork to create successively more elegant and accurate pictures of the cosmos: to dismiss it in art is to overlook it’s significance in life. Others have attempted the Vanvogtian style of paradigm-shifting, either successfully, as with The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, or unsuccessfully, as with Mr. Knight’s own deservedly forgotten Beyond the Barrier, a work that serves as a living reminder that those who cannot perform a tricky technique of art at even an apprentice level should not mock it as a mere trick.

Nails on chalkboard.

John C. Wright comments on that Superman news

Comix, science fiction, wingnuts
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James Nicoll, delighting in the pain of his readers again, brings us John C. Wright’s considered response to the news that Superman is giving up his American citizenship:

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.

I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.

John C. Wright, for those who not know him, is a science fiction writer and a self confessed Christian Randoid whose writing has been noted for being fond of having underage school girls getting tied up and spanked and liking it. The response above is typical of him; yet he thinks of himself as a rational man. Which is also why he can be an Ayn Rand fan and a Catholic. We might think these beliefs conflict, but we lack his innate rationality.