New Layout

Obviously I’m trying a new layout. I like the layout better (it allows wider pictures among other things), but not really the colors. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Ooh.

I like both the web comics Bunny by Lem and xkcd by Randall Munroe, so a Bunny comic by guest artist Munroe has got to be good, right? I think so:

David Mamet: Braindead

Luckily I can separate art and the artist, because I like much of what David Mamet has done but it turns out, in some ways, he’s an idiot. He has an essay in the Village Voice ‘Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’ which has such stupidities as:

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

…

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

…

For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

So, let’s see, when he was a liberal he believed that all of government was corrupt and thought some people in government were perfect? Umm. I don’t know what type of people he talked with, but the liberals I know believe that the US is a good place but with some problems and that it’s possible to make the US better. And:

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

…

And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

…

(William Allen) White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “

Umm, so we need checks and balances for government because people are bad, but when it comes to corporations and individuals, we should have no checks or balances because … umm …ok I don’t get it. He goes from ‘people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement’ to ‘Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.’ Is he bipolar? Actually, I kind of like the ” and yet” as a phrase for a liberal, as in ‘things are good and yet they could be even better’.

Mamet also asks some really stupid questions:

Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”?

Yes, David you are a member of the privileged class. If you don’t think so, you really are very stupid.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

Ok, this is really a statement, but he has trouble of thinking of an instance where government intervention helped? Wow. Not in WWII, not in the Depression, not Social Security, not in public schools, not in police or fire departments, not in highways, not in civil rights? None? Just wow.

It’s pretty obvious that he was never a liberal and doesn’t even know what a liberal is. First and foremost, a liberal is pragmatic even though they might be idealistic. The quintessential liberal is FDR, who, when faced with the Great Depression, tried lots of things and if they didn’t work, tried other things. A liberal may or may not trust corporations or governments, but believes in checks and balances: government is a check on corporations, the different branches of government check each other, the press checks all of them, …. 

Here’s a summary of his former and current beliefs: He used to believe that people are good, but when put in any group they would end up doing bad things. He now believes that people are swine, but when put together in any group except government will end up acting in a way that is ok for everyone. Both of those are stupid.