Blowhard, Esq. writes:
- Free speech as a cultural ideal continues to erode. Fuck the PEN dissenters and college students who want “safe spaces.”
- Alan Dershowitz thinks charging the Baltimore cops with the murder of Freddie Gray is nothing but a show trial for crowd control.
- When I suggested to my law school friends who were staunchly in support of gay marriage that of course polygamy was next, I remember marveling when they expressed disgust at the idea.
- Just think how much more advanced Western Civilization would be if all those Greek female statutes had more explicit genitalia. We’d probably be living in a utopia right now.
- Over at Slate, Virginia Postrel wonders what the Venus de Milo’s arms were doing.
- Even birdhouses must be modernist.
- The great Manolo Shoeblogger reveals his identity as a professor of medieval history in Nashville. Here he is on disgusting Spanish hamburgers.
- The great novelist Ruth Rendell has died. RIP. Paleo Retiree/Michael Blowhard talked a little bit about Rendell here.
- Jesus, Sartre was full of merde, wasn’t he?
- Friend o’ the blog Todd Fletcher has a new album out. If you like good music you’ll want nothing to do with it, but you should buy it anyway. The man is in desperate need of pocket money for weed.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Having read the link just before, I was expecting something else before I clicked on the Postrel story. 😉
Instead, yet another wonder of 3D printing! People keep finding interesting new things to do with it!
And, as it happens, it still does tie in, somewhat, with the sexual theme of the previous link, in terms of who did spinning. 😉
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Thank you for the shout out. You all have been very kind to the Manolo over the years, and vastly entertaining to me. Thank you!
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From the erosion of free speech to an increasing interest in the evils of Israel, I sense the zeitgeist definitely moving closer to Europe.
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What’s fascinating about the speech issue on campuses is that the left no longer denies any of it. There are now too many stories of speech suppression to claim it’s all conservative cherry-picking. And the theories underlying this phenomenon, from hate speech to “safe spaces,” are undeniably concepts dreamed up progressives; progressives IN the academy no less (as opposed to a union group, e.g.).
They’ve moved to acknowledging this and defending it, because “conservatives control every other institution.”
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The next radical social-political experiment won’t have to do with marriage — that’s falling for the con that the gay marriage issue is about marriage first, and secondarily about whom it’s letting into the institution.
Clueless conservatives, or rather befuddled reactionaries, respond with, “Well, if you’re going to let ridiculous group X get married, why not ridiculous group Y? And ridiculous group Z? Where will the desecration of marriage end?”
But the culture war is not about marriage — it’s about giving fags all sorts of privileges that they don’t deserve, ignoring and indeed obscuring and denying the fact that they are fundamentally abnormal rather than normal.
That’s what makes the idea of them being married and committed such a joke, or the idea that two giddy Peter Pan homos are just as maternal and nurturing toward children as a mature woman. Or that what makes them *them* is no less healthy and wholesome than what makes heteros *hetero* — just don’t ask about how many diseases are devouring their beleaguered half-corpses.
Therefore the next big crusade in the culture war will be about “what other way can we propagandize homosexuality as ‘just like us’ and give them goodies accordingly?” Not “what other risible group should we allow to get married?”
Look at blacks in the Civil Rights era — it didn’t move to “what other group should we allow to enter our wholesome white schools?” They could’ve cared less about Mexicans, Orientals, American Indians, etc. Rather, it moved to “what other privileges, set-asides, and quotas can we shower on the blacks?”
The culture war is based around sacralizing a victim group (blacks, fags), not desecrating a particular institution (a side effect, not a sustained target).
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“We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous.”
Sometimes you get the feeling that Metaphysical-Mode Borges is a simulacrum of Borges, a labyrinth without a center.
Either that, or he could rattle off a page of ominous, iterative, comma-spliced, and vaguely geometrical Borgesismso in between naps. If there’s a difference.
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Thanks for the shout out! I do indeed need funds to keep me, uh, “wet”, but those willing to contribute must understand that it will just lead to more music making. And nobody wants that.
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Borges on Citizen Kane: “It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.”
That kind of critique is just a runaround so that one can criticize something that’s obviously great. To such a critic, the thing must be contained. It’s inherent greatness is an affront to such a person’s weak grasp on the world.
And I love Borges’ writing! Just, you know, geez. And Sarte in that same article comes off as a fucking idiot.
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