Bueller

Most people appreciate that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a great movie. Some people don't get that.
Much of the objection to the movie is fueled by anger at its supposed conservatism. But it isn't really a conservative movie and it is important to note why.

Bueller is a movie that mocks the moral authority of adults from beginning to end. No conservative movie would do that.

And it wasn't just that movie, there was a strong current of that sort of mockery running through the late 1980s and well into the 1990s. I rewatched the pilot of Dawson's Creek made twelve years after Bueller and the same moral unreliability of adults prevails. Any true conservative would bemoan this and a lot of them do.

As a Crypto-Catholic Libertine, I am under no such obligation and I'd suggest that there is something important indicated here. An awful lot of the generation born roughly between between the last half of the 1960s and first half of the 1980s concluded that their parents generation weren't morally serious. I think they reached the correct conclusion.

What he said (Bumped)

Glenn Reynolds on the supposed moral superiority of women:

There’s been a lot of men-are-pigs talk about the Schwarzenegger and Weiner scandals, but it’s worth noting that in both women were willing participants in wrongdoing. In Schwarzenegger’s case, the woman was cheating on her own spouse, and deceiving him into believing that someone else’s child was his. In Weiner’s plenty of women were carrying on with a man they knew to be married. Not much real grist for the female-superiority mill there, really.

 Remember that the supposed moral superiority of women rests on their complexity.

But women are complicated creatures: their sexual health is determined as much by their emotions as by their physical state, which might help explain why as many as 50 percent of women have trouble getting aroused.

The emotions don't have to be noble, justifiable or even real you understand. They don't even have to exist outside of the minds of the women themselves.

ADDED: Driving around doing errands this morning, it hit me that it is far more likely that the process goes the other way. That is that women and men will tend to develop emotional bonds with those people who succeed in exciting them sexually. Thus the tendency of young women to enter into relationships on a casual basis and get very hurt when the men actually treat the relationship as casual. Even with, as in this case, relationships that were so casual as to be ridiculous.

Because it's summer: smooth song(s) of the day #6

I'm not in love by 10CC and At Seventeen by Janis Ian
The temptation to change history to something more like you wish it was is always a strong one and that goes quadruple with casual history like this. These are the first tunes I'd rather leave out. I think I actually liked them the very first time I heard they but they wore thin really quickly. But the smooth clean girls in Indian cotton I'm talking about loved them

And the very first record smooth, clean girls in Indian cotton of my generation actually bought was more than likely one of these two. Most of the time, they didn't buy music they liked but counted on the radio to play it as often as they wanted to hear it, which hope was usually fulfilled. Typically their entire record collection might run to 15 albums and often they'd own only two or three.

In any case, these two were very often first purchases. They saved up their money at age thirteen to fifteen and bought one or the other. If they got the 10CC tune, they bought the 45 RPM version and carried it on their thumb to parties with their friends. I think the irony was lost on them and that is okay. Missing this sort of irony is an essential stage of growing up.



If they bought the Janis Ian song they generally got the LP and sat in their rooms playing it over and over again while thinking about and luxuriating over the tragedy that awaited them when they would turn seventeen. And that too is okay.

The series starts here.

The next song is here.

Because it's summer: a detail that may need explaining

Why clean?
It occurs to me that some might look at my because it's summer series of smooth songs and wonder why the heck I'm labeling these girls as clean. I mean, with the exception of obvious freaks like Emo girls and Goth girls aren't all girls clean?

Well, if you have to ask, be thankful you didn't live in the 1970s the decade that taste forgot. If you were in high school in the late 1970s as I was, neither girls nor boys were very clean. A neat, clean-scrubbed girl with clean clothes that didn't look worn and drab was  a real exception in those days.

The series starts here.

The next song is here.

Because it's summer: smooth song of the day #5

It's Too Late by Carole King
One thing about those smooth, clean girls in Indian cotton was that they always left you; a lesson I learned the hard way too often. And you can hear the logic in this song. This is not the way someone who suddenly realizes it isn't working anymore talks. This is the way a woman who has had an exit strategy in the back of her head all along thinks.

This is, of course, another song left behind by the older sister when she moved out. For the next tune, I'll move away from these for a while.



The series starts here.

The next song is here.

There is an important explanation about "clean" here.

Comments again

I've opened up comments again but changed the settings so I will get notification of anything new quicker.

The comment from yesterday spooked me a bit. The worst part was that I couldn't tell whether it was written by an actual nutcase or by someone who wanted to merely look like a nutcase and thereby discredit the comment above. I suspect the latter for reasons I won't go into.

Sort of political Monday

Political ideas Pt 1
Last Tuesday, William Watson had a good column about a presentation he'd seen given at the annual meeting of the Canadian Economics Association by University of Toronto labour economist Michael Baker. The presentation was about the evidence used to justify government funding of early childhood education such as daycare. The point of the presentation and the column was that, this evidence doesn't actually tell us what it is reported to tell us.

What the evidence does tell us is that early childhood education is highly effective when targeted at kids who are risk. Give these kids daycare and their chances of growing up to be convicted of crimes or dependent on drugs go down significantly.

What the evidence does not tell us is that universal daycare would have much benefit. To the contrary, and as most people could have correctly guessed, most parents are very good at identifying and correcting social pathologies in their children.

And yet, here in Canada, Liberals are very determined to provide universal daycare. How did this happen? How does a series of inputs that clearly justifies targeted assistance for kids at risk go into the policy-developing machine on one end and a universal program that is not justified by the evidence comes out the other end?

I mean that as a serious question. The Liberal party is full of intelligent people and I believe there is an intelligent reason for this. (Taking it that being smart doesn't make you right; that intelligent does not necessarily mean correct.) And I think that intelligent thinking is part of the explanation of what has started to go wrong for big centrists parties such as the Liberal Party here, The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in many European countries. Labour in Britain and the Netherlands, and the Socialists in Spain and France. 

For while the support of universal daycare is puzzling as I put it above, it isn't puzzling at all if you know anything at all about the Liberal Party of Canada. Why? Because support for universal social programs is one of the defining aspects of the party. If you asked ten different liberals the reason why a particular universal social program was justified, however, you'd get ten different answers, some of which would directly contradict one another.

And the big centrist parties now in decline all have this in common. They are parties that have a solid, well-defined positions on policy while they are flexible on ideology. They tell voters, you don't have to be scared of us because we don't have an ideology.

The parties that are now defeating them at elections are the opposite. These parties have well-defined ideological positions but tend to be flexible on policy. They tell voters you don't have to be scared of us because, even though we have an ideology, we're willing to be flexible on policy.

Both parties acknowledge that voters are likely to be frightened by a party that with firm ideological convictions they do not share but they then go on to reassure voters in different ways.

Okay, but why is this a problem for the big centrist parties? It's a problem because they do have an ideology. It's not an accident that the Canadian Liberals always come out in support of universal programs. But the ideology they have is an ideology in the sense that they have a set of ideas that are characteristic of a certain group. What they don't have is a consciously thought through political philosophy.

They are quite proud of this. When Liberals attack other parties for being ideologically driven, what they really mean is that these other parties do have consciously thought through political philosophies. Corner a Liberal about this and they will insist that they don't need such a thing because their views are driven by common sense and basic decency.

Now I could say a lot about that but I want to zero in on two.

The first is that historically this was not the case. When the party was in deep trouble after a shattering defeat in 1958, they rethought and changed their basic political philosophy and, as a consequence, changed the policies they supported. If they had clung to the ideology of the previous era and insisted that it was just common sense and basic decency, they would have never regained power.

Today's Liberal party  will not do what the Pearson Liberals were willing to do. They are willing to have meetings where people talk about ideas but those ideas will only be acceptable to the extent that they support the already existing policy positions of the party. Not surprisingly, the attempts to discuss ideas have fizzled.

The second is that any political position that claims to based on common sense and basic decency will necessarily have to argue that their opponents views are not. Think of Jon Stewart's march to restore sanity. If I honestly believe my position is based on common sense and basic decency and Joe disagrees with me, then I can have only three possible explanations of Joe's behaviour:

1. Joe is stupid
2. Joe is evil
3. Joe is both stupid and evil

The big centrist parties are very much anger-driven as a consequence.

Now it has to be admitted that this sort of anger-driven attack can be very effective. But only for a while. Eventually people will figure out that the sky isn't falling; they will figure out that I and Joe are both politicians seeking power and of equal intelligence and moral stature.

At the same time, this anger-driven style of politics makes it even harder for the centrist parties to reconsider their own ideas and policies.