The Intellectual Level Of The Leftist Blogosphere (An Example)

Gotta love our moral superiors!

It begins with this post by a blog called Mahablog which was pointing to The Daily Caller calling for news organizations to issue corrections of their early reporting linking the Tuscon shooter to the Tea Party:

Wow, talk about trying to silence your opposition! I say again, if today’s Right ever gets unfettered control of the government, they’ll turn America into a totalitarian state the likes of which Orwell could not have imagined. They complain about “political correctness,” but no one dares not be “conservatively correct” in America.

Just wait — if it hasn’t happened already — somewhere, some wingnut mouthpiece will declare open season on anyone who thinks hate speech played a part in the shooting in Tuscon. Countdown to the progroms [sic] …

Got that? Calling for a newspaper to correct faulty information is the equivalent of Orwellian totalitarianism and a pogrom.

Now, I should have known better given this level of outright stupidity, but I decided to be neighborly, so I posted this comment:

If you are really interested in the connection between violence and ideas – and you do sound as if you are – I suggest you look at the FBI’s “Most Wanted” domestic terrorist list. http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt

What conclusions do you draw from that list and the ideologies it represents?

Which drew this response:

Obviously, that right-wing terrorists get a pass. That’s been true for years. The Justice Department since Reagan has looked the other way at threats against abortion clinics until someone actually dies, for example.

To which I responded:

huh?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to say the opposite? (Unless you are complaining the Feds are not arresting people BEFORE they commit crimes.)

Do you know of someone who bombed an abortion clinic or killed an abortionist who is still on the loose? Hell, they unleashed the National Guard on that nutjob in North Carolina a few years back. It would make a lot more sense to say they are much more diligent going after those on the right as opposed to the left.

Still, now I know… you are not in fact interested in the connection between ideology and violence, only in bashing your “enemies”.

As I said, now I know.

Notice, to this point, only I have actually pointed to anything like factual information.

Here was the response:

You wanted to prove that only lefties are violent, dear. And I refuse to take the bait. Do take your hypocritical ass elsewhere.

Then I was banned from commenting.

Notice the delusional aspect of the reply here. I made no claim to the exhaustiveness of the information I pointed out. Indeed, the information I pointed out was collected by the FBI, not by some right-leaning blogger. To read this response at face value, it seems Mahablog thinks *I* have control over the FBI! ("Ground control to major nutjob!") But this is par for the course in the lefty blogosphere. When confronted with evidence they do not like, e.g. the make up of the FBI most wanted domestic terrorism list, they invent a conspiracy theory to make that evidence go away, e.g. right-wingers are secretly controlling the FBI's list making. Meet the lefty blogosphere, a place where Ockham's Razor is not welcome.

Mahablog also seems to believe their original post was a balanced assessment of the link between violence and ideology. It isn't. It only bashes the right. (The entire substance is in the quote I have above.) But, somehow, my response with information that doesn't fit their prejudices is deemed out-of-bounds.

Indeed, pointing out information they do not like makes me an "ass" to the likes of the enlightened there.

Meanwhile, a poster called "c u n d gulag" (gee, like Stalin much?) was free to post the following about yours truly:

"You probably won’t read this, but you might want to consider some salad’s. Your fat cheek’s are almost wider than your fedora. And you’ve got more “chin’s” than the Hong Kong phone directory. Also, can you really trust one finger to hold that fat head up?"

Ah the intellect of, I'm presuming, a 9 year old. And a racist 9 year old to boot.

That is the intellect that is OK at Mahablog. That is the writing that isn't asinine.

That such people, the author and gang over at Mahablog, routinely refer to themselves as "liberal" is a tragedy. If John Stuart Mill were around he would want to label himself differently.

What thinking person could blame him?

I Don't Know Much About Art, But I Know What I Hate

This is a recap of some comments I've posted today over at First Thoughts. It began when Joe Carter quoted the following:

I’ve heard many people say of contemporary art: “my kids can do that.” I encourage them, then to try it themselves, don’t let kids have all the fun! Try to make drip paintings like Jackson Pollock. Or paint an object with encaustic, layering color upon color, like Johns. Try silk screening images like Warhol. You soon find out that in the ordinary gestures and materials, there are deceptively complicated and sublime twists. Our drips become unnatural and confined, where as Pollock’s drips dance, and form delectable edges that seem to undulate in front of our eyes. Our edges of encaustic strokes become unshapely, because If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle,. If you are finally able to paint a stripe with bright colors, the stripes would not resonate, in ways that Johns’ Flags do.

And that is to speak only of the method of execution. Johns’ works not only collage materials, but they also synthesize concepts, culture, the zeitgeist of his day. One may be able to copy his technique, but it is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing as he mixes beeswax and pigments. To Jasper Johns, the medium of his art is not really encaustic, the medium of his art is Time itself.

This prompted me to respond:

If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle…

This is the reason I let professionals stain my floors and furniture. It is a skill that improves with repetition, the same way my backhand in tennis improves when I work on it (or doesn’t improve when I prefer to smash forehands all the live long day.)

…is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing…

Exactly why should anyone read something like this and NOT think “What gobbledygook.” I hate to be all pragmatic, but there is no such thing as “synthesizing confluences” except in the brains of the truly fevered. But, of course, explanation by subjective gobbledygook is what you get when the object of discussion is as semiotically empty as much of contemporary art is.

I added:

I think there is another way people mean the phrase “My kid could do that” because, in a very real way, kids DO that all the time. I think of the article in Smithsonian that pointed out that Pollock’s “Mural” was basically an excuse for hiding his signature in plain sight. It is this “Hey! Look at me!” aspect of contemporary art that people are identifying as being child like, if not childish. The difference is when a child does it it can be excused as the faltering steps of the inexperienced. When an adult artist does it, well, it can come across as little more than a narcissistic look at their favorite subject, themselves. In Pollock’s case he was simply trying to make a name for himself, literally.

This prompted an angry response from someone calling themselves ekwas:

Do you know that word, ‘zeitgeist’, ‘Rich Horton’? It’s a word from the German and it means ’spirit of the times’, which is what most everybody is thinking and feeling about life in general at a certain point in time, like right now, 2010, or a while ago, like 1967.

‘Rich Horton’, if your teacher gave you an assignment to make one picture about everything you’ve been thinking and feeling in the last year, about yourself, the economy, your friends, God, our President and Congress, people in other countries, what would you put in it? You can see right away it would take a whole lot of thinking and figuring out, wouldn’t it? How about if you didn’t even have to make a picture, you just had to write it all in 1000 words, that’s hard enough! So you can imagine that Mr. Johns works very hard, very long hours to make his famous pictures, that so many people think are very, very good.

I love the fact that my name is continually put into quotation marks by this individual. It strikes me as all the proof I need that the contemporary artistic temperament is semiotically empty. After all, a proper name is by definition a signifier of something real. However, the act of placing my name in quotation marks is a rather aggressive attempt to deny my personhood or humanity; to deny that my name signifies anything real; to demand that it too be semiotically empty.

I responded thusly:

Actually, my field is political philosophy, which has its own tradition of using nonsense terms to mask a lack of meaning (eg. “scientific Marxism,” “politics of difference”, “eternal recurrence”), so my resistence to “persuasion by subjective enthusiasm” is higher than most.

Actually, this all reminds me of the best defense of contemporary art I’ve read, Ortega y Gasset’s essay “The Dehumanization of Art.” Being Ortega, it is of course, a defense of elite privilege against the pernicious, democratic, mediocritizing influence of the masses. For Ortega, when the masses have shown the ability to recognize a beautiful painting, a stirring or lovely melody, a sonorous poem, etc., the only way for the elite to signal their non-mass status is to champion that which isn’t beautiful, stirring or sonorous. Art, in such a view, has a fundamentally political function. It is part of how an aristocracy identifies and defines itself.

Granted, when Ortega was writing he probably had in mind Debussy using discordant or atonal moments for effect in a composition, or the distortions of a cubist painting, but if art is going to be defined by its political/social function, well, then there is no distinction to be made between a Pollock painting or a “sculpture” of a crucifix submerged in urine or a “painting” of the Madonna using the medium of manure. The goal has been achieved, i.e. defining the elite who supposedly find artistic meaning in such material in opposition to the masses who do not.

Contemporary art is built almost entirely along Ortegean lines these days, and as a result it is profoundly alienating. It is sometimes amusing to see the aristocratic qualities of the champions of contemporary art clashing with their egalitarian impulses. They know that most people do not care for it (be “it” atonal music or abstract art or what have you), but the best response they can offer is “People would like it if only they were exposed to it, or weren’t so stupid.” Which is of course impossible, as its raison d’etre is to be disliked.

I've been ill all day, so this certainly cheered me up.