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Archive for 2018
April 1, 2018
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Social media firms want us addicted to approval. So much for WiFi making us smarter.
RIP: STEVEN BOCHCO, CREATIVE FORCE BEHIND HILL STREET BLUES, L.A. LAW AND NYPD BLUE, DIES AT 74.
In a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, Bochco explained how he and Michael Kozoll, both working for MTM Enterprises, came to Hill Street Blues, which debuted on last-place NBC in January 1981 and amassed 98 Emmy Awards during its remarkable 146-episode run.
“We agreed that we would do it, on one condition, which we assumed would kill the deal right there,” he said. “I said to [NBC entertainment exec] Brandon [Tartikoff], ‘We’ll do this pilot for you on the condition that you leave us completely alone to do whatever we want.’ And he said OK.
“I began to hear words about myself: He’s arrogant, he’s this, he’s that. My attitude was, call me what you will, but I know I have a great project here. I don’t know how many great projects there are going to be in my life, and I’m not going to screw this one up. I’d rather not do it. And they folded. They virtually folded on everything.”
In 1987, CBS legend William S. Paley offered Bochco, then 44, the job of president of the network’s entertainment division. He turned that down to sign an unprecedented six-year, 10-series deal worth in the neighborhood of $10 million at ABC, which had just ended its contract with another legendary producer, Aaron Spelling. The pact gave Bochco ownership of the series he developed.
That’s really eerie — I was just watching the clip with Bochco discussing Paley yesterday, as YouTube’s “Watch this next” algorithm had pulled up for me for some reason.
WOULD YOU LIKE BACON WITH THAT? Happy Passover from the Manitoba New Democratic Party Caucus!
More here: Manitoba NDP runs into trouble over Passover pic that shows family baking bread.
OPEN THREAD: Yep, really.
REMEMBER, THEY’VE PICKED A SIDE: Facebook Eyes The Midterms.
LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: The New York Times Book Review’s “Long View column on March 18 misstated the circumstances surrounding the Trojan horse in Greek legend. It was the Trojans who allowed the horse within the gates; it was not the Greeks, whose soldiers were inside the horse.”
Read on; it gets worse.
IT’S SAFER FOR A CONSERVATIVE TO COME OUT AS GAY, THAN FOR A GAY TO COME OUT AS CONSERVATIVE: Gay conservative claims gay bar kicked him out over politics.
BETTER DOX ‘EM BOTH CNN, JUST TO MAKE CERTAIN: David Hogg Poses With GOP Candidate Wearing A T-Shirt Featuring Trump Pissing On CNN.
HARRY STEIN: More Deplorable, Please:
All of which makes the new Roseanne, for all its apparent success, a major opportunity missed—the first and maybe only chance to tell the other side of the story on a major network, with laughs. Sure, for people like the Conners, the bread-and-butter issues are vital. But millions of us also care passionately about the Left’s unrelenting assault on the culture—its undermining of free speech and religious liberty, its poisonous identity and victimhood politics, its elite colleges that proselytize instead of educate, and all the rest, most of which, seen from the proper perspective, has always been laughable anyway. It shouldn’t be Jackie demanding “How could you?!” in reaction to Roseanne’s vote, but the other way around.
Roseanne Barr is surely the only showbiz Trump supporter who has that kind of clout, which is why it’s a shame to see it wasted on an enterprise that could have been so much more.
Republicans are forever starving for validation from celebrities. They get so little of it that when someone sympathetic to them in entertainment scores a major success, they rush in to bear-hug them. Hannity in particular has proved, per his treatment of Julian Assange, that there’s nothing he won’t forgive and forget about an influential person if that person can serve his current agenda. But before we crown Roseanne the new queen of conservatism because she voted for Trump and makes no bones about it, a gentle reminder: She’s a crank.
She ran for the Green Party nomination for president in 2012, touting herself as “a tireless advocate of Occupy Wall Street.” Now she’s a Trump booster. Odds are no worse than 50/50 that he’ll do something over the next two years that’ll alienate her and she’ll be backing the Socialist Party candidate in 2020. Proceed with caution in embracing her. That goes quadruple for POTUS.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: These therapists help uptight New Yorkers relax their vaginas.
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SALENA ZITO: THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE.
Earlier this year, Bill Kristol, editor at large at the Weekly Standard, tweeted ahead of the Super Bowl that it was too bad two Acela Corridor teams, the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, had to play their matchup “in the middle of nowhere.”
It was a reference to the host city of Minneapolis’ location in the Midwest, far from the “civilized worlds” of Boston and Philadelphia – the assumption being that unless you are on the East Coast, your town’s sophistication and glamour could not live up to the modern amenities of a cosmopolitan city.
In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the “middle of nowhere.” This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.
Read the whole thing.
TUNKU VARADARAJAN INTERVIEWS HARVEY MANSFIELD ON TRUMP AND MASCULINITY:
In 2016, Mr. Mansfield continues, Mr. Trump won “a majority of white women—and women are attracted to manly men, I think.” He agrees that there’s a connection between the campaign for gender-neutrality in the U.S.—seeking, as he sees it, to erase all differences between the sexes—and the “hunger” that made Mr. Trump’s political rise possible.
In Mr. Mansfield’s view, Mr. Trump’s success wasn’t a racial reaction to President Obama as much as a backlash in favor of masculinity. Mr. Obama “had the scolding demeanor of a schoolmarm—very much, I think, following the temper of today’s feminists. It’s all a matter of correcting the behavior of misbehaving juveniles, and of condescension.” Here, he checks himself, allowing that this observation “is a little unfair to Obama, because some of his speeches were pretty good, and he did have a vision of America and the way America ought to be.” But it was not an America that “throws its weight around. That’s precisely what he wanted to avoid. So, in his foreign policy, and in his domestic role as condescender-in-chief, he showed his hostility to manliness.”
Mr. Trump saw the electoral opportunity. “Trump’s not a clever man,” Mr. Mansfield says, by which he means that the president has little propensity for abstraction or intellectual complication. “But he’s shrewd. He saw that there was a way to be appealing, and to knock off the competition of his rivals in the Republican Party, by a display of manliness and an attack on political correctness.” Mr. Trump is “really the first American politician to use that, to see that there was a political opening there.”
Indeed.
JUST NBC THE SHARK JUMPING! On Easter Sunday, Christians must remember how easily and often our faith is used defend white supremacy.
That’s pretty rich coming from the network that employs Al Sharpton, a Louis Farrakhan supporter with decades of racist and anti-Semitic baggage all his own.
Related: NBC’s Chuck Todd slammed on Twitter for Good Friday comments.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Crew remotely lands jet on carrier using ATARI joystick.
ALL THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT. CBS News: Could March For Our Lives Protests Set Back Gun Control?
(Link safe; goes to Bearing Arms.com.)
Shades of the classic Onion headline from 2001: Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Actually Easter Is Not A #MeToo Story.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Fahrenheit 451 updated: On the Amy Wax controversy surrounding the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Roger Kimball writes:
At some point in March, a social justice vigilante came across an internet video of a conversation between Glenn Loury, a black, anti–affirmative action economics professor at Brown University, and Professor Wax. Titled “The Downside to Social Uplift,” the conversation, which was posted in September, revolved around some of the issues that Professor Wax had raised in her op-ed for the Inquirer. Towards the end of the interview, the painful subject of unintended consequences came up. The very practice of affirmative action, Professor Loury pointed out, entails that those benefitting from its dispensation will be, in aggregate, less qualified than those who do not qualify for special treatment. That’s what the practice of affirmative action means: that people who are less qualified will be given preference over people who are more qualified because of some extrinsic consideration—race, say, or sex or ethnic origin.
Professor Wax agreed and noted that one consequence of this was that those admitted to academic programs through affirmative action often struggle to compete. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class,” Professor Wax said, “and rarely, rarely in the top half.” Professor Wax also observed that the Penn Law Review had an unpublicized racial diversity mandate.
Uh-oh.
Read the whole thing.
(Found via Scott Johnson of Power Line, who also has some thoughts on Wax’s thoughtcrimes.)
THE NEW INSTRUMENT OF GNOSTICISM: A review of When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson.
The Princeton philosopher Robert George, notes Anderson, “detects the scent of ancient Gnosticism” in transgender ideology. The Gnostic mystery cults of the early Roman empire saw an essential schism between humanity’s spirit and the material cosmos; the world is corrupt, flesh is wrong, but knowledge and the will can free us from our imprisonment in it. The comparison is a good one, but as Anderson observes, only up to a point. There’s a tension to it: “On the one hand, they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social construct, while asserting that a person can be ‘trapped’ in the wrong body.” So, in our creatorless and spiritless cosmos we find a comparison of transgenderism to ancient Gnosticism is inexact. But gnosticism has other forms, and transgender rhetoric’s power comes from its participation in a less doctrinal gnosticism, technological modernity’s response to nihilism.
What part of the left isn’t a form of modern-day gnosticism?