Tod Kelly

Headline of the Week: Turns Out the South Really Is Bats**t Crazy

In separate posts, Mark and Pat reported respectively on a school district in North Carolina forcing McNuggets on children and a law in Virginia dictating that doctors were legally required to stick a camera inside a woman’s hoo-hoo before allowing a first trimester abortion. Each had discovered what looked to be evidence that the story was bogus, yet each ended up being shockingly true.  Nice going, North Carolina and Virginia.

(And may I add a personal kudos to both for correcting their posts. Very un-intertubes of them.)

New Bright Shiny Object of the Week: When Religious Beliefs and Women’s Rights Collide!

The big story of the week on the League and elsewhere was the politicking between the right and left stemming from Obama’s attempt at contraception compromise.

Burt kicked it off by looking at the mess through the eyes of the Constitution, initially declaring the compromise illegal; after further debate, though, he walked that back a bit.

Will started off on the fence but used arguments here and elsewhere to find in favor of compromise.  He then considered the issue of access as it pertains to controversial women’s healthcare issues.

Erik pointed out that despite what some might say, contraception is in fact connected to a woman’s actual health, and pointed us to a poll by Leaguer Jack Gillis which for me at least was a fine antidote to all of the vitriol.

Tom used Pew polling numbers to argue that none of it ain’t no thing.

Old Bright Shiny Object of the Week: “You Call That Art? My Kid Could Have Done That!”

Last week’s ongoing discussion on art continued, eventually morphing into a discussion on arts and politics.

For Tom & Mrs. TVD, judging art is similar to judging a diving competition.

David had a great essay about the difficulty of being an artist and stepping in front of an audience that is closer to your subject matter than you are, and what it means to be an artist and choose to step away from your medium.

Riffing off of an American Times post by Erik, J.L. asked if there was any such thing as conservative art.

I said that there was, but that conservatives refuse to embrace it.

Pat went one step further and suggested that much of what I had to say about conservative vs. liberal art could be said for people and their politics.

In her very front page posting (yay!), Rose looked at reactions to Downtown Abbey and suggested that art doesn’t need to correspond to our worldview to be meaningful.  (It was a great point, but I still refuse to see Atlas Shrugged II.)

Rufus, meanwhile, did us all one better and wrote a post that combined the high art of Zola and the pulpy low art of noire femme fatales.

Philosophy, Economics & Government

Tim asked those that claim positive rights to explain themselves.

Nob asks us to look at austerity economics in Europe.  (Quick!  Before it all collapses!)  He also looked at incentives for financial markets, and how they may not be incentivizing all the right things.

Murali had a President’s Day Week Sale, where you could buy three posts – Nozick, Rebellion Ethics and Liberalism – for the price of one.

 Culture, Personal Essay & Miscellaneous  

Eric happily noted that cutting-edge behemoth Forbes has finally entered the 21st century with its new comments section.

David’s coolest midlife crisis ever reached yet another milestone.

Mike introduced us to a pothead that could totally kick your ass.

Erik wondered what the hell James Poulos was thinking when we asked what women are for.

Jason pointed us toward some clarification restating more thorough explanation walking back on that very topic.

Burt took a look at the bizarre week that was, and suggested we all chill.  How should we chill, you say?  Burt’s glad you asked.  He lists a number of awesomely fun activities you can do when in Vegas at League Fest 2012.

You should really go.

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My favorite of all the books that I have read over the past year – hands down – was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.  I have been thinking about Wolf Hall over the past two days, after having read Erik’s weekend post on conservative art, as well as J.L.’s followup this morning.  And one of the things that I am realizing is that when we discuss “conservative art”  - and it being so incredibly horrible and easy to mock – we may be confusing works of art with the embracing of art.

Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, centers on Thomas Cromwell’s rise in Henry VIII’s court.  In the book, Cromwell’s secularism plays the role of the hero.  Christians on both sides of reformation’s battle lines are brutish bastards; whichever side is in power has no qualms torturing and killing those it rules over.  Being a believer in rationalism over religion, Cromwell works behind the scenes as best he can to lessen the bloodlust.  Coming from lowly status, he despises the conditions of the poor and often tries to use flattery and subtle ear bending to get Henry to make policy that might work to redistribute wealth.  On the other hand, Cromwell is a self made man, having pulled himself up by his bootstraps through business and soldiering.  Cromwell is enough of a conservative traditionalist that he never wonders that the world might be better off without a king like Henry (or any king for that matter), despite it’s being patently obvious.  He is enough of a progressive revolutionary that he delights in continually demonstrating that the rest of the aristocracy is either dangerous, incompetent, or both.

Given all of that, is Wolf Hall a liberal tome celebrating secularism and the redistribution of capital, or is it a conservative love letter swooning over the power of rugged individualism and the the moral imperative of believing in the higher power that your forefathers believed in?  The answer, of course is that it is both – and it is neither.  Most of the best novels that I have read, in fact, are neither overtly liberal or conservative.  Rather, they are penned by writers that succeed in painting with words the human experience.  And we humans and our lives simply are not the black and white cardboard caricatures that political parties wish us to believe.

And yet the difference between the quality of art we see embraced by conservatism and liberalism is not a thing of the imagination.  But as I said above, that has everything to do with who embraces what, and nothing at all to do with the inherent politics of art.  There’s a lot of  works of art – in terms of books, painting, music, movies & TV, etc. – that have strong or weak conservative elements embedded in them.  And quite a lot of it is good, and quite a lot of it is dreck; the same can be said for “liberal art.”  The difference that so glaringly stands out, it seems to me, is the criteria that each side chooses to use when choosing art to self-identify.

Take the songs God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood, and Imagine by John Lennon.  One is considered conservative, the other liberal.*   Each is a little overly simplistic, preachy, and kind of schmaltzy.  But the way each song is treated by each side is completely different. [click to continue…]

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Headline of the Week

Everyone welcomed back Tom Van Dyke after he returned from what must have been the worst League hiatus ever. Ever.

New Bright Shiny Object of the Week

Unsurprisingly, the big “new” story was the same here as it was everywhere else on the internet: the Non-Profit Celebrity Death Match between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood.

Pat was thoroughly unimpressed with Komen’s weak-sauce apology, and I argued that Komen tripped up the moment they decided to deviate from their core mission.

Politics, Government & Elections

In Tom’s first “issues” post penned on one leg, he argued that Obama overreached by taking on the Catholic Church.

Ryan’s musings on that same contraception issue left him thinking that the employer paid mandate just isn’t the answer.

Jason, on the other hand, looked at the Contraceptive/Catholic polls and thought that we were all asking the wrong questions.  He also took a look at what due process is as opposed to should be, and looked once again at the travesty that is our prison system.

Christopher wasn’t so impressed with how the cops treat suspects before they even get to prison.

Burt took a first look at the court’s narrow ruling on Prop 8.

Erik marveled at the right’s eerie, awe-inspiring ability to always use the exact same words and phrases, and wished that they might use this power for good rather than evil.

Tim lamented that youthful countries today just don’t make constitutions like they used to back in the day.

I thought out loud about why it is we never do amendments all the time like we used to when we were young and in America’s honeymoon stage.  We were like amendment rabbits back then.  Figuring that maybe we just needed a little something exotic to put us back in the mood, I suggested we role play and make some of our own.

Mark argued that unions and libertarians need not be on opposite sides of the field.

Pat used kids in full color panels to illustrate regulatory capture.

Food & Drink

Mike thumbed his nose at New York, San Francisco, and food snobs everywhere as Kentucky cuisine became the new black…

… but you’re going to need something to wash that down with. Boegiboe suggests a glass of Arab Spring with rose syrup for Valentines Day.

Culture

Mark used his Friday Jukebox to show us that you can find good things even in Texas and Canada, and sometimes – rarely – even in a Superbowl halftime show.

I argued that not all artistic accomplishments are equal; neither, by the way, are NBA players.

Guest writer Sam, however, still does not agree with me on the whole art thing.

Real Life

David’s boat continues to go from a really cool idea to an amazing work of art.

Patrick passed along a call for help from a group of kids that will someday own all of us.

Christopher looked to play John Henry to Google’s steam engine in the growing world of patent translation.  If he beats Google but dies in the process, our next group assignment will be to write a folk song about him.

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In Sam’s recent post on snobbery, one of the more interesting threads had to do with what I refer to as art relativism. For my purposes here, let us define art relativism as the belief that in any particular study of art, all works are inherently equal. Compare Beethoven and Lee Greenwood, say the art relativists, and they are – objectively speaking – artistic equivalents. You might prefer Beethoven, but this is just because you happen to like him more. This is most likely because you are an elitist snob – and probably a disingenuous liberal and academic to boot.

Wardsmith notably took what I might call a strong art relativistic position, posting a sexy, black velvet-style picture of a bikinied woman and declaring it the artistic equivalent to Rufus’s “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, [and] Caravaggio” (among many others). Jaybird argues (I think- but maybe it was just J being inscrutable) a certain kind of weak art relativism when he suggests that the difference between the artistic merit of classical music and top 40 music is merely the difference in the levels of Brahmin elitism displayed by the listener.  Neither Wardsmith nor Jaybird are in the minority here, I think.  In fact, I suspect that most people in our country agree with them.

I wanted to talk briefly about this.  I do agree with Sam that there is just as much snobbery involved in saying “Classical music is for wimps, I only buy Country Western CDs!” as there is “County Western music is for rubes, I only buy Baroque CDs!” However, I also feel that there is a very real difference in artistic achievement between different works of art. Are there elitist snobs you look down their nose at people who don’t agree with them? Yes, and they are indeed trying – and often they have no idea of what they speak.  But this doesn’t mean that some works aren’t greater achievements than others. Despite Ward’s insinuation that a black velvet picture of a babe with a great rack and a stunning ass has just as much claim to being a work of art as, say, Picasso’s Guernica, it really doesn’t.

Note: Despite the fact that I am partially responding here to his example of a specific painting, I’m going to beg Ward’s (and everyone else’s) forgiveness and not address this specific work, as my knowledge of visual art theory is lacking. Instead, where I focus on specific examples at all I will use music (which I have studied) and writing (where I am at least on more solid footing in terms of knowledge than I am with painting, sculpture, or mixed media).

In my experience, those that do argue strongly for art relativism have three things in common. While I would hasten to say that these observations are personal and not based on any study – and are certainly not universal – in my own travels they have generally been true:

1. Those who claim that art is only a matter of taste – or that consumer-based measurements are the best metric of art – are usually confusing “art appreciation” with “liking” something.

2. In the big Venn diagram of life, there is very little overlap of those that preach relativism in a form of art and those that have seriously studied that form of art.

3. There is however a surprisingly large – and perhaps ironic – overlap between those that are so confident that all art is relative, and those that rail against moral, religious, political, or any other kind of relativism. [click to continue…]

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Earlier this week I met with a client who heads up a non-profit that serves a particular segment of the disenfranchised. She had concerns about some projects one of her organization’s divisions were starting, but couldn’t parse out whether or not those concerns were justified.

The division in question was taking advantage of the organization’s facilities to hold events, mini-concerts and create other kinds of partnerships on their own without approval of the Board. On the one hand, this Board – and my client – encourages initiative-taking and self-starters, and tends to prefer the begging for forgiveness afterward to the far more common apathy of “Hey, it’s not in my job description!” And – make no mistake about it – all of these new projects sounded pretty damn cool. But for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on, my client instinctually felt that something wasn’t right.

“Tell me,” I asked, “these new projects that the division are creating – in what way do they serve the people you are charged with serving?”

That question was the answer, of course. None of the new projects or partnerships started by this division were either directly helping those the organization was formed to serve, nor were they raising money for those direct services. In fact, if I had to boil it down, I’d say that these new projects were all started because they were really cool sounding, and the staff had the expertise and connections to make them happen. But they had nothing at all to do with serving that segment of the disenfranchised that was the very mission of the organization.

And when you run a 501(c)(3) corporation and you lose track of your core mission due to competing bright, shiny objects, bad things tend to follow.

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Everyone, it seems, is up in arms about either Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to strike funding from Planned Parenthood, or their subsequent decision not to strike that funding.

Elias has been talking about it over at Jubilee, including a post on an item that I am pretty sure (or at least hope) will turn out to be a hoax. Pat wrote one of those posts that make a writer say “Damn, I wish I’d written that!” about the weak-sauce public apology offered by Komen. The boys at National Review are furious at people who would dare object to the PP funds being stopped. (Surprise!) John Cole doesn’t care what Komen does now; in his mind they have spit on a sacred liberal cow and he will boycott them until his hopefully-not-from-breast-cancer dying day. (Surprise!)

And really, everyone who’s anyone is weighing in on either which version of Komen is Good or Evil, the poor PR machineries Komen has at its disposal, of what this means to “feminism” in general.

You know what no one’s talking about? Breast cancer. [click to continue…]

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As most here know, I am an avowed Basketball & NBA fan.  I’m an addict that refuses the 12 steps.

And while we don’t usually do sports highlights here, I am going to do so today.  Partially because it’s Friday and I’m feeling lazy, partially because it’s actually sunny here for the first time in months and I feel like treating myself.  But mostly because this past week brought the most awesome NBA highlight ever, and the most awesomely bad NBA highlight ever.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here is the best the NBA has to offer:

And the worst:

Seriously, I could watch either one of these over and over and never get tired of them.

ps –  For this math & science geeks, here is a pretty fantastic piece by ESPN explaining the physics of how Kendrick Perkin’s bodying Blake Griffn mid-air actually makes Griffin’s dunk possible:

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(Note: This week Rufus brought up the point that with so many posts these days it’s easy to miss stuff.  He suggested we begin doing a weekly review, similar to The Dish.  Great idea!  So starting today, each Friday(-ish) I will do up a quick list of the posts from the past week.  This will now be a regular feature that all can look forward to, until such time as I get bored of it and no one steps in to do in my place.  Which is to say maybe this may well be a one shot deal.  Since it took longer than I thought it would to put this together, I would appreciate hearing honest feedback as to whether people actually find this helpful, or if no one’s ever going to be checking it out.  Thanks.)

The Big Headline

Promising a series of posts on Government 2.0, this past week was most notable for the return of beloved prodigal son Scott Payne.

The New Bright Shiny Object of the Week

The topic of the week was probably Charles Murray’s How Thick Is Your Bubble.  Jason had us take the quiz to determine exactly how thick that bubble was, and then – after reviewing the results – was unsure that Murray’s thesis stood up.

Part of there reason for that might have been that Murray was confusing preference with facts, according to guest writer Sam Wilkinson.

JL wondered where the middle class went in Murray’s thesis.

Pat, on the other hand, riffed off of Murray and tackled the issue of realistic bigotry in the workplace.

Politics, Government & Elections

Elias confessed his feelings in a swooning, flowery love letter to David Frum, and then willingly walked the minefields of Israel-Firsters.

Eric asked everyone to join him as he live-blogged the last Florida debate, and then did Newt a solid in his newest Atlantic piece.

Elias was not overly impressed with those debaters.

Ethan was not overly impressed with the entire state of the Union.

Mark showed how the question of whether or not federal workers are overpaid is actually a complicated one to answer.

Jason lamented the state of our prison system.

Pat finally confessed to being a terrorist. We were all very surprised.  He was always such a quiet boy, and kept mostly to himself.

Education

In education, Mike looked at the competing benefits of roots and mobility where public education is concerned.

Shawn strapped himself in the Way Back Machine to take on an old Freddie DeBoer reaction to the POTUS sending his kids to a private school rather than a public one.

Pat submitted a mandatory library for the techie-to-be, not one volume of which I will be able understand a word of.

Entertainment & the Arts

Ethan weighed the merits of ebooks vs. book-books following Jonathan Franzen’s recent comments.

Noting that we never seem to feature country or bluegrass, Mike took a big stick to last week’s Friday Jukebox and rectified the situation.

Rufus looked at heredity and eugenics through the lens of Nana on his second Zola post.  He also promised to discover you at a bus station and make you a star on Broadway, baby, if you could just help him with a plot device.

Focusing on issues of Hollywood and morality, I argued that Red Tails is not proof that Hollywood is not un-American; also, I vowed to never eat a human fetus – or at least not when I was in Oklahoma.  In either case, I sought God for forgiveness.

Burt wondered if the porn industry would survive mandatory latex.

Ryan dove into Homeland on Showtime, only to find that he was not so comfortable with its politics.

Essays & Cultural Issues

Following up on early posts, guest writer Stillwater connected conservative politics and racism.

Not to be outdone with third-rail subject matter, Mike threw down on class warfare and why it’s so hard to resist.

Christopher wondered to what degree immigration status should play in green-lighting life and death operations.

I submitted that even though his legacy should be positive, Joe Paterno had to be fired.

David mused on the tragic fate of the Pelican as he continued his Mon Tikki project.  He then fessed up to his first missed deadline, so as you can imagine he could use some help. (This week’s I-Am-A-Moron Confession: It wasn’t until I read the Pelican post that the penny finally dropped and I realized David & Tony Comstock are the same person.)

Philosophy & History

Murali continued his philosophical journeys with a post on Justification and Argumentation.

Christopher and Jason continued mining Hobbes, who is apparently Mr. January and Mr. February in this year’s LOoG Philosophers Swim Suit Calendar based on the posts he’s been racking up.

JL Continued with his series of posts on the Civil War, this week focusing on Meade & McClellan.

League News

Jaybird announced a book-club style group watching of Fringe over at Mindless Diversions; the homework, due Tuesday, will be to watch the pilot.

Burt finalized a group rate at the LVH in Vegas for this May.  League-fest 2012, here we come.

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