New movies you say?

Just so you don't get your hopes up, I'll list the flix first, so you can decide whether you really want to keep reading:

UHF
Dodgeball
Madagascar II
The Penguins of Madagascar

And last weekend we got

I am Legend
Minority Report and
Shenandoah

Did I say "new"? I meant new to me. I'll try to give each one at least three sentences:

UHF: I'd seen it on cable back when we had it. I didn't expect much from it; I figured it'd be dumb, but I laughed out loud quite a lot. Weird Al isn't much of a dramatic actor but he writes some funny stuff. The whole is better than the separate clips available on YouTube. I bought it because my daughter had been watching those.

It came double packed with

Dodgeball: I figured, "What the hell! People talked about it quite a bit, and it's cheap. Why not?" The old geezer coach (Rip Torn! Of all people!) cracked me up. And if that's not Ben Stiller's natural personality (God, I hope not!), he's one of the best actors of our generation.

The chick's hot, too.

You'll notice that I got Madagascar II and Penguins together as well (you can't be bourgeois if you're not cheap). I'm going to cheat and review them together as well. Hilarious, the lot of 'em. I don't know who Danny Jacobs is, other than the voice of King Julien, but there's another guy (along with Stiller) who's not afraid to make a complete jackass of himself for the sake of art.

The wife gave me I am Legend and Minority Report for Valentine's Day. [I love you too, Hunny Bunny!] Both of them deserve more than three sentences, but I'm lazy, so:

I am Legend: I suppose everybody knows by now that this is a repriese of the same story The Omega Man is based on. This one's a touch better, though I think Charlton Heston did a heckuva job on the older move. Will Smith is a mere five years younger than I am, (plus one month and eleven days, ignoring the two leap days)... He's 40, man! Close enough to my age, all right!?

Unfortunately, since the kids were watching it with me, I had to downplay the scary parts.

Minority Report: good action/adventure. Interesting special effects. Up there with Cruise's Mission Impossible.

Does that count as three sentences? Three fragments? It deserves better, but...well, you know.

Is it saving the best for last to put Shenandoah here? It's probably the deepest story, though there was a fair amount of schlock in it. Anderson is a very sympathetic character to me, but...didn't Sheridan burn that whole valley to the ground in 1864? They went a little easy on the Yanks, if you ask me.

But I enjoyed the speech.

Well, I didn't do anything this weekend

I slept all day Saturday (after I took down the Christmas tree and hauled it out to the curb). Today I went to church, then I watched the Arizona Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburg Steelers beat the Baltimore Ravens. During the commercials I watched my new DVD Nietzsche and the Nazis.

Kelley Ross has written a review of it, Nietzsche and the Nazis, with some strong arguments against Dr. Stephen Hicks' "personal view," which inspired me to get the DVD and view it for myself.

Here's Ross' conclusion:

Hicks is confused enough about morality that he agrees with Nietzsche on the "slave revolt," and this serves to vindicate the influence, which he mentions himself, that Nietzsche had on Ayn Rand. This merely serves to illuminate the failings and oversights of Randite ethics. Nietzsche and the Nazis would be much better if Hicks were not carrying water for the peculiarities of Ayn Rand's own defense of liberalism and capitalism. By apparently agreeing with Nietzsche's denigration of Jewish and Christian compassion and charity, Hicks in truth burdens his case for freedom, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism with a weakness that the enemies of all these, today principally on the Left (but also in Islamic Fascism), have never hesitated to exploit. Politically, leftist rhetoric is still, even in America, much more pervasive and effective than any defense of the free market or private property.

Nevertheless, despite these tendentious weaknesses, and the peculiarity of its structure, Nietzsche and the Nazis is a valuable and, on the whole, impressive work. That Nietzsche was not an individualist and that the Nazis were socialists are points that seriously need arguing against other admirers of Nietzsche, on the former point, and against those who, on the latter point, promote the leftist interpretation of fascism as a form of capitalism. Hicks does this all effectively, even as he performs the valuable historical service of preserving and expounding what the ideology of the Nazi regime actually was, and the reasons why a great many Germans really supported it. We should not forget that the eugenics movement in the United States was not completely discredited until it was obvious what the Nazis had done, faithfully, with such ideas. At the same time, the attraction of Nietzsche for Stephen Hicks himself is evidence for the thesis that intellectually serious people, whether Nazis or not, can believe this stuff.

Emphases and links are in the original.

I must say, I didn't find the Randian touches particularly disagreeable, but, then, I've been tempering my Objectivism with Ross's insights for a number of years now. I won't feel very qualified to argue against Dr. Ross until I finally get around to finishing one of Kant's books - or, rather, several. The impression I got of Kant from my college course on him (called Romanticism and Alienation, and it wasn't exclusively about Kant, we also surveyed Fichte, Hegel, Schilling and some other German Idealists - my paper was, more or less, "Fichte and the Nazis"; I think I got a B- on it)...

Oops! Digression!

Anyway, my impression of Kant from that class was that he deserved both barrels of what Ayn Rand fired at him. It is Ross who got me to reconsider. The trouble is, I'd rather read Ross than Kant or Schopenhauer.

I know that the points Ross goes on about in his review, even with his forewarning, aren't ones in which I feel much of a personal stake, so I found it difficult to get as worked up over them as he did when I watched the movie (the first time, without the football games). I've read four books on Hitler, including Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and thirty or fourty on World War II, visited Dachau, stayed for two and a half weeks with a former SS soldier and been otherwise inundated with information about that epoch... You'd think I'd be tough to impress on that subject... But I was impressed with Hicks' presentation of the similarities and differences between Naziism and Nietzsheanism.

And, of course, I am interested in the comparison of Hicks' achievement with my own.

Update: Aha! Now I see a bit more clearly.

Honor the Earth: Impacted Nations: a traveling art show

[Feel free to skip the next post down. But if you do read it, remember, I like to make Grumpy Old Man jokes (I'm talking about my intro), so while I try not to distort the truth, read some humor into it. I'm no Dana Carvey, but I think I'm funny anyway.]

I took some pictures of the artworks on display at work. I thought you'd be interested. I think it's good stuff that deserves to be advertised. Go see an exhibit.

I don't know that these two are necessarily my favorites (the picture is, but there are a lot of close seconds), but I wanted to show a couple of pieces to indicate the variety of works on display. There is also a blanket called "Peace and Friendship Forever?" depicting some of the promises America has made and broken with the indians.

Oh, I see the "Media Coverage" links, at the bottom of the page I've linked in my title, take you to more images from the show. And here's that blanket, though there is a LOT of detail that doesn't show in that picture. I'm not showing the picture that I have because I didn't want to shrink it down to a bloggable size. I wouldn't want to do that without permission anyway. I got to that page via the "Artwork, Artist Statements and Biographies" link on the main page.







I've been sitting here for a half hour, trying to distill my thoughts about my ancestors and ancestry, the present state of indian/white relations, the meanings of the artworks... A lot of thoughts... Some of my ancestors may have been involved in oppressing others of my ancestors... All the misunderstandings and warmaking.

Oh! I've been there! On top of some of those peaks! What he describes, in the artist's statement...you feel it.

Well... Shall I be a true philistine now and smash the reverie?

No. I won't. Real life will do that soon enough. Indeed that's what a lot of the exhibit is about.

David Broza

is the greatest genius of our age.

OK, he's got serious competition from Tiger Woods. But I, personally, get more joy from music and this guy puts an extraordinary amount of joy into his music and gets back what he puts in. Maybe more.

Is it bourgeois to be passionate about great jazz? Maybe not, but Broza transcends labels and styles and classes with his jazz. He stands on the shoulders of giants, no doubt. But he's on top.

He was born in Haifa, Israel, son of the first folk singer to sing in Hebrew, met many world famous musicians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land and came to see her, then they moved to Spain, where he learned their styles and songs, and America, where he learned our jazz and rock-n-roll.

You can see it all in the PBS special: David Broza at Masada: The Sunrise Concert. I'm especially enamored of the Israeli singer (I'll probably misspell this) Kelee; a gorgeous woman with a magnificent voice. And the Jamaican water drum player, Sujya(?), who beat with his hand on a Kerr jar that he dipped in a tub of water, to marvelous musical results. And the Hebrew/Arabic duet he did with a Palastinian band leader who so joyfully sang with David and the child chorus their song of peace and love. Though I understood not a word, I raised my hands to heaven during that song. From their lips to God's ear.

What they showed on PBS had one flaw: it was only one hour. I could have stood another three or four.

Awesome!

V for Vendetta: preliminary notes for a review

Wikipedia article. Actually belies, somewhat, the notion that the Norsefire regime is intended as a direct outgrowth from the Thatcher government.

I prefer Spooner and the early Herbert Spencer to Bakunin. Hell, I prefer Nietzsche and Stirner to Bakunin.

I like what Moore says about the movie, "[The movie] has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

I haven't read the graphic novel. I think I will.

Update Mon. 5/21/07: Got it Saturday, read it by 5:00 Sunday - it is illuminating. Moore is right. It seems hard to believe that the movie is actually a milk-toast (must I use a "que"?) version of the story, but, yeah, it does cut out the harder edges of the fascism and anarchism in the movie. And in doing so in the case of the latter, eliminates the need for V's important distinction of the difference between anarchy and chaos.

As I say, I'm not sanguine with the Bakuninist idea that the current society must be destroyed before we can rebuild a better world, but in the case of a totally fascist world, as presented in V, I can see it.

One of the funny ironies is that they show the decapitation of a fascist state. Where have we seen that before? If you're going to be wishy-washy about it, you wind up in Iraq.

The flaw in the Bush invasions, is that the rebuilding has been undertaken using collectivist, centralized control methods. I'd like to think that they were trying not to make the mistakes in privatizing that were made in the former Soviet Union, but simply retaining centralized control of Iraq's resources hasn't proven too efficient either. Any more than it did for the Soviet Union.

I'm still reading Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism

The title bar links to it.

It's wonderful to read a summary of everything I've been studying for the past ten years. He treats the major figures of Libertarianism fairly and honestly, dealing in depth with the ideas and personalities of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman and also covers Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Leonard Read, F.A. (Baldy) Harper and a ton of other interesting characters.

When I'm done with this book it'll take a special place on my shelf with Charles Sprading's Liberty and the Great Libertarians [see FEE's review here] and Jim Powell's The Triumph of Liberty, the books that show the growth and development of the ideals of individual freedom from ancient times to today. If I had Gibbon and Macauley and Rothbard's histories, they'd be up their too. (I read Macauley's History of England online, and people I respect push the others.)

Doherty may well be the best writer of the lot, though. He breaks up the heavy going philosophical and economic theory with an occasional, well-chosen anecdote.

Since Omni pushed me into it, I'll share a couple paragraphs from the book. The first describes the "prickliness" of libertarians, but isn't properly an anecdote. The second shows the principle in action (anecdotally).

P. 19:

Like obscenity, libertarianism is something I know when I see, and other libertarians feel the same way. Many a movement libertarian's favorite pastime is reading others out of the movement for various perceived ideological crimes. As Fred Smith, head of the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, "When two libertarians find themselves agreeing on something, each knows the other has sold out." Libertarians are a contentious lot, in many cases delighting in staking ground and refusing to move on the farthest frontiers of applying the principles of noncoercion and nonaggression; resolutely finding the most outrageous and obnoxious position you could take that is theoretically compatible with libertarianism and challenging anyone to disagree. If they are not of the movement, then you can enjoy having shocked them with your purism and dedication to principle; if they are of the movement, you can gleefully read them out of it. Libertarians (not all libertarians, certainly, and not even many) have advocated on libertarian principle private ownership of nuclear weapons; the right of parents to starve their children; and that, if you fell off a building and grabbed onto a flagpole and didn't have the explicit permission of the person who owned the balcony, you ought to let yourself fall rather than violate their property rights by crawling to safety.

Actually, I suppose those illustrative vignettes are almost anecdotes. I think that passage of the book is destined to become the most famous.

The anecdote I had in mind to illustrate the claim made above isn't nearly as funny as the passage, so, since I closed the book on it accidently and opened on a better anecdote, I'll give you that one (it doesn't illustrate that point):

P. 255:

The Circle Bastiat boys [Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico and a couple others in the 1950s] were also pranksters who liked to disrupt other people's realities for their own amusement and occasionally for moments of libertarian Zen wisdom. When talking to young socialists, they enjoyed turning some of the socialists' predictable rhetoric back on them, for example, soberly explaining that socialism might have been all right in the primitive conditions of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. But in today's complex, modern machine era, surely they could see that we must have laissez-faire--it's just the irresistable motion of history, the inevitable wave of the future, no point in fighting it.

And they had more of the right of it in saying that, as well.

Doherty puts this breezy facility with words to work (so you don't have to) in his explanations of Rand's epistemology and Austrian economics, and his portrayal of Friedman brought me to read him back into the movement. (See page 300.) I think Doherty's like me, he loves Libertarianism and libertarians (not to mention Liberty), and hates hate; knows that we can't "all just get along," but prefers to present forgivable humans rather than demons to destroy. The real demons are bad policies, not the people who come up with them.

Philistine Philosophy from Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Actually, it's bourgeois philosophy, but I like the aliteration. Sorry I let this blog sit so long. This is from Hoppe's introduction to Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty (which is also available online here):

Rothbard sought and found support for his contention regarding the possibility of a rational ethic and the reintegration of ethics and economics based on the notion of private property in the works of the late Scholastics and, in their footsteps, such "modern" natural-rights theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. Building upon their work, in The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard gives the following answer to the question of what I am justified doing here and now: every person owns his own physical body as well as all nature-given goods which he puts to use with the help of his body before anyone else does; this ownership implies his right to employ these resources as one sees fit so long as one does not thereby uninvitedly change the physical integrity of another's property or delimit another's control over it without his consent. In particular, once a good has been first appropriated or homesteaded by "mixing one's labor" with it (Locke's phrase), then ownership of it can only be acquired by means of a voluntary (contractual) transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner. These rights are absolute. Any infringement on them is subject to lawful prosecution by the victim of this infringement or his agent, and is actionable in accordance with the principles of strict liability and the proportionality of punishment.

It's much later, but if I add this things will be clearer:

Inspired in particular by the nineteenth-century American anarchist political theorists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari, from the outset Rothbard's anarchism took it for granted that there will always be murderers, thieves, thugs, con artists, etc., and that life in society would be impossible if they were not punished by physical force. As a reflection of this fundamental realism — anti-utopianism — of his private-property anarchism, Rothbard, unlike most contemporary political philosophers, accorded central importance to the subject of punishment. For him, private property and the right to physical defense were inseparable. No one can be said to be the owner of something if he is not permitted to defend his property by physical violence against invaders and invasions. "Would," Rothbard asked, "somebody be allowed to 'take the law into his own hands'? Would the victim, or a friend of the victim, be allowed to exact justice personally on the criminal?" and he answered, "of course, Yes, since all rights of punishment derive from the victim's right of self-defense" (p. 90). Hence, the question is not whether or not evil and aggression exist, but how to deal with its existence justly and efficiently, and it is only in the answer to this question that Rothbard reaches conclusions which qualify him as an anarchist.

The classical liberal answer, from the American Declaration of Independence to Mises, was to assign the indispensable task of protecting life, liberty, and property to government as its sole function. Rothbard rejected this conclusion as a non sequitur (if government was defined by its power to tax and ultimate decision-making [territorial monopoly of jurisdiction]). Private-property ownership, as the result of acts of original appropriation, production, or exchange from prior to later owner, implies the owner's right to exclusive jurisdiction regarding his property. In fact, it is the very purpose of private property to establish physically separate domains of exclusive jurisdiction (so as to avoid possible conflicts concerning the use of scarce resources). No private-property owner can possibly surrender his right to ultimate jurisdiction over and physical defense of his property to someone else — unless he sold or otherwise transferred his property (in which case someone else would have exclusive jurisdiction over it).

There have been some things missing from the Classical Liberal answers I've been studying. This book promises to provide them.

But I think I'll have to stop quoting from Mr. Hoppe's brilliant summation, lest I tread upon his copyright. The link is the title bar.

I urge you to read it.