“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
If you’re a heterosexual man and you don’t know how to admire small breasts, you need to get a clue already, you ungrateful philistine. In aesthetic terms, those stacks of fatty tissue are essentially jewel cases for the nipples, anyway. Why not build a repertoire of variety of taste? Pretty adjectives like dainty, svelte, and lithe were made to describe beauty like Bai Ling’s as caught by photographer Stephen Wayda for the June 2005 Playboy.
Bai (no condescension here: surnames come first in Chinese) is known as an incorrigible pleasure-seeker, and her life story demonstrates the heroism that a pleasure-seeking disposition is capable of. Her past as a mental patient in the People’s Republic of China reveals intelligence, sensitivity, and self-respect. The Chinese have a great legacy of philosophy and literature, but only a worthless bore could tolerate the repression of that society now. Sometimes, people show valor by going mad. Americans who medicalize madness in all its forms—Dr. Drew Pinsky, anyone?—should look in the mirror and ask themselves how Maoist they are.
Arguably, the entire universe hums constantly with the sound of divine energy. Hinduism symbolizes this as the Sanskrit syllable “Om.” The drone of a didgeridoo has been said to symbolize it. When I’m stoned enough, I’m convinced that the hum of a lightsaber in Star Wars, the invention of sound designer Ben Burtt, serves equally well to symbolize it. Cartoon Network’s run of Star Wars–themed programming these days (the Family Guy tribute, the Robot Chicken tribute, The Clone Wars) encourages me to pay tribute to Bai, a Jedi knight for liberated sensuality.
If you live in the U.S., your tax return is due tomorrow. While the price tag of our overreaching federal government has your attention, please watch these videos on good things that the government wastes money to save us from, respectively immigrants and marijuana.
“Thank you for calling Reason.tv. Please press one for English.” Say, I wonder whose voice that is at the very beginning of this video on immigration. (That reminded me to update my blog post on the women of Reason magazine to include the lovely and talented Virginia Postrel, by the way.)
Republican presidential candidate John McCain is superficially charming, and he showed admirable courage in his ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Other than that, don’t expect to hear a good word about him from me. If you like the military misadventures of George W. Bush, you’d love a McCain presidency. Mr. “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” believes so firmly in preemptive war that this video exaggerates only a little comparing him to the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
The essential problem with McCain’s philosophy of government is that he loves his country fanatically while failing to understand his country’s distinct virtues. He loves the power of the government, through either military force or the force of law, to muscle its way to public virtue and “national greatness.” But individual liberty, the idea that made the United States a truly grand experiment in world political history, is always expendable for the sake of those goals. In 2006, for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Welch did the research on McCain that most journalists have shirked:
Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.” His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the “Eastern swell who became a man of the people,” whose great accomplishment was “to summon the American people to greatness.” In Roosevelt’s code, McCain writes approvingly, it was “absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.” This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain’s departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans’ faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.
“Our greatness,” he wrote in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a “transcendent issue,” requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood’s voluntary movie-rating system? A “smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices.” Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? “Barbaric” and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They “do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue” and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.
If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable.
McCain is arguably even less libertarian than Hillary Clinton. That’s impressive, but not in a good way.
Welch has done it again for today’s LAT, saying, “The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.”
Six degrees of Playboy: One of the Turner TV networks once had a series called Our Favorite Movies. Various celebrities hosted movies, periodically interrupting them to explain what they especially like about them. If I recall correctly, Hugh Hefner hosted Dr. Strangelove (in which one character is seen gazing at a Playboy centerfold). I wish I hadn’t missed that presentation. Does anyone have a video bootleg?
I’ll admit that this is species lookism on my part, but don’t judge me before viewing the CNN video. Beavis and Butt-head never jumped the proverbial shark by turning nice, and even they would have said, “Awww.”
Hypothetical date of a lifetime (in a good way) Katherine Mangu-Ward will eat anything—except for these cuties.
In related news, an endangered wild rabbit of Florida, Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, was named after you-know-who.
Obviously, and for the same reasons, my question makes no more sense than Noam Chomsky’s inspired sentence-as-thought-experiment Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. But the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 forces me to think about it seriously as a U.S. citizen and a human being.
Christianity, Islam, and (by interpretation) the Bhagavad Gita have all sometimes made philosophically sophisticated cases for the possibility of just warfare. But let’s face something unpleasant about that: Whenever said possibility is conceded, the untangling of the legitimate moral questions surrounding a given act of war can sometimes last for generations on both sides of the conflict. Worse yet, the questions can arise over a massive range of military, political, technological, and diplomatic circumstances. Much of my earlier respect for Abraham Lincoln has been lost to the fact that he authorized the federal government’s first draft, which is slavery whether anyone dare call it that. And if President Truman can be grilled for lack of imagination and integrity in fighting the bloodthirsty Japanese, why not hold Lincoln to the same standard in fighting slavery?
Absolute pacifism is not the only answer, but difficult questions are the only alternative to absolute pacifism.
These excerpts from a 2005 BBC documentary series on World War II make the Hiroshima question as philosophically bewildering as anything, which probably means they answer my question about as well as anything:
The big day is April 23, but the partial blogging hiatus starts now and may continue for another month after that date. I want to emphasize some other areas of my life besides this blog for a little while. Tonight, my stream of consciousness runs quickly from one Playboy-related April birthday to another:
Hugh Hefner turns 81 on April 9. Congratulations and best wishes in advance.
“This is a good birthday present for Playboy,” said Erwin Arnada, speaking of an Indonesian court’s decision to throw out charges of indecency against that country’s year-old version of the magazine, which Arnada edits. (Hat tip.) I’m happy to see Islamic fundamentalism lose some of its coercive power over the people of Indonesia—for all the same reasons I like to see Christian fundamentalism lose power in my country. Even without nudity, Indonesian Playboy symbolizes more freedom and pleasure than some wish to allow. Personally, I think God appreciates those who lighten up and mind their own business.
I’m not talking about the remarks attributed to him in emails, either. I’m talking about what he said last night on 60 Minutes. He’s come out in favor of the draft, which means he wants slavery for those born at the wrong time in history.
I don’t know that for a fact, but the case of love-crazed astronaut Lisa Nowak has me thinking about it.
The perfectly lurid way it all came unraveled is a tale that doesn’t require much telling—not that it won’t be told and told and told again by cable, tabs and blogs. The truly meaningful question is why that unraveling happened at all. Annapolis grads and shuttle jocks aren’t supposed to come unglued. And NASA, a brutally Darwinian place that has been screening astronauts for almost 50 years, is not supposed to let loose screws through. Is NASA not as good at this as we thought? Are astronauts more destructible souls than they seem? And what does all this say about the weight-bearing ability of any human mind when the load grows too great?
The U.S. government’s psychiatric screening of astronauts is presumably about as good as that of its personnel in charge of nuclear weapons. With apologies for my national chauvinism, I’d guess that the U.S. does at least as good a job of this as Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, or Iran. It’s time for everybody to watch Dr. Strangelove again. If you have the guts, also try the BBC’s Threads, certainly one of the bleakest films ever made.
(Do you like this post? Please vote for it in the Philosophy Blog War. One competing post is on the same subject, so I appreciate your vote more than ever. [False. Sorry.] Thanks!)
“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” says Congressman Charles Rangel of New York.
I very much doubt it. As Thomas DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com has observed, the saddest irony of Rangel’s endorsement of involuntary servitude is that he happens to be black. Considering the misery-loves-company mentality by which parents rationalize the time-wasting, humiliating drudgery of high school for their own teenagers, I don’t believe the older generation can be trusted with the power to force the younger generation to pay for its geopolitical fuck-ups.
As a thought experiment, consider what would have happened if the crowned heads of Europe had been politically incapable of conscripting their subjects in 1914 or thereafter. Some unfortunate young men might still have been swept up in early war mania and volunteered for service in the trenches, but their leaders would have had so much trouble replacing them that peace would soon become the only option. Almost certainly, the madness of war wouldn’t have lasted long enough to beget the madness of the Treaty of Versailles, which begot the madness of Hitler and another war. The twentieth century would have been much happier.
Thanks to LiveBlogStats, I know that someone in the southeast Asian nation of Brunei Darussalam visited my site yesterday morning. I like to think of that hit as a microscopic footnote in the difficult, sometimes bloody, dialogue between the Islamic world and the liberal-democratic West. The Playboy Philosophy[not work-safe] is certainly not compatible with the officially Islamic, absolute-monarchist “national philosophy” of Brunei (although it may appeal to some members of the royal family). But if I were a guest—hypothetically speaking—of His Majesty the Sultan, I would take sincere, guiltless pleasure in the rituals of deference to his throne. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I believe that literal and figurative monarchies and dynasties yield subtle psychic rewards for the “subject” as well as the “ruler.” The examples of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands prove that monarchy per se does not prevent the development of a liberal, open society.
Also yesterday morning, I was graced by a visit from someone in the Netherlands Antilles. Wow, those people are both Dutch and Caribbean. How do they cut through the fog to type my URL in? (I can tell that joke, because I’m mocking my own group—if you know what I mean.)
This is “TV Turnoff Week 2006” according to the leftist crypto-puritans at Adbusters Ballbusters. The other night, Jimmy Kimmel rightly congratulated his viewers for ignoring it.
In my journey from liberalism (in the distinctly American sense of the term) to libertarianism, I’ve learned to my frustration that crypto-puritanism abounds on the left. While many on the right are prone to moral panics about issues like same-sex marriage, emergency contraception, and medical marijuana, various subgroups of the left are prone to moral panics about television, consumerism, fast food, tobacco, biotechnology, cosmetic surgery, alternatives to public school, ethnic humor, or sexual speech in the workplace. All these panics exhibit faulty scientific or political reasoning, and they’re all potentially dangerous. If you’re against genetically modified food, please explain why, on at least one occasion, activists on your side would have preferred to see victims of a natural disaster starve to death rather than receive emergency food shipments.
Since many, perhaps most, of these left-wing moralists aren’t traditionally religious, religion doesn’t deserve all the blame for the human tendency to let moral reasoning degenerate into crude moralism of one kind or another. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in the chapter titled “The Sanctimonious Animal” in his book The Blank Slate, makes an eye-opening argument that humans have a natural tendency to moralize—and that they should make some effort to resist this tendency in themselves. I credit Playboy with encouraging this effort on some fronts, although its justification for the effort has sometimes been flawed by the influence of 1960s romanticism.
In my last post, I answered the first of Alan’s two lengthy comments. Here, I take on the second. You may need to read this earlier post to follow the discussion.
Playboy and pornography does [sic] objectify women and men.
It commercialises human bodies for profit. Here is the object. Desire it. Now masturbate and move on. It's consumption. Capitalism must be fed by endless consumption.
Capitalism enables more and more people to have more and more of what they want. The rich get richer; the poor also get richer. In the immortal words of Austin Powers, “Yay, capitalism!”
That is the truth of the adult industry, whether individually we think it is immoral or not. It's the nature of any industry and job. You sell what skills you have to survive.
If this is true of all industries, why is porn singled out as a target of outrage?
In the wider world, it's much tougher for women because they have to be talented AND beautiful. As of yet, that double demand is not made of men. But it is slowly developing.
Men and women are harsh judges of women whether the women are 'beautiful' or 'ugly'. Society has conditioned us to judge women by their looks.
Beautiful women (and men) have a natural advantage in life, so it has been and always will be. Looks or the lack of them, are nothing to be ashamed of. Nor are any of the gifts given to us by God/Nature.
Yet the increasing Hollywoodisation/pornification of the culture around us has reduced our ability to accept people for who they are and for the total skills they bring to the party of life. "Yeuch! Look at that slob!" "Eeew! can you believe she has the nerve to go out AT ALL!?"
Riss, why should the choice be between beautiful and objectified and their opposites? Surely it's time we all did a lot of growing-up and started to appreciate more than just the surface?
Do you have social-science data to back up the claim that we’re getting shallower? Or is this just another unquestioned assumption of fashionable dime-store social criticism?
As a woman, you know you are more than your looks. Society often doesn't. That's where the objectification arises. Women are often used and seen as decoration. Playboy is the text-book case for this process. Get the Stereo, get the swinging pad, get the sports car, and get the girl. And replace them all in a few months. Consume and move on. How potent are you? You still stuck with THAT old model?
You’re leaping to conclusions about what I think of the women in Playboy—and women in general. If you read my blog carefully, you’ll see that I’m obsessed with the psychology of women’s choice to pose. This must mean that I regard them as people, not things. Things don’t have psyches.
And BTW, feminists have long-campaigned against the oppression of women (and men) in EVERY country in the World, whether it be Saudi Arabia or the States.
Alan
Many Western feminists turn a blind eye to woman-hating policies and practices in non-Western societies, as a prominent feminist has recently admitted in Playboy. See this earlier post of mine. That episode of American Dad is satirically truthful, I’m afraid.
On last night’s episode of the animated sitcom American Dad, Stan Smith’s left-wing feminist daughter is delighted when the family has to move to Saudi Arabia. “Saudi women aren’t objectified like women in Western cultures,” she says approvingly. “The Beauty Myth doesn’t exist here.” Of course, she’s in for a shock. A few screen minutes later, two Saudi police see her committing the crime of appearing in public unaccompanied by a man and start chasing her through the streets of Riyadh. Desperately hoping to appease them, she shouts, “I appreciate your culture!”
Women who claim to feel oppressed by the pervasive images of feminine glamour and sex appeal in Western society ought to explain why they wouldn’t trade places with the women of Saudi Arabia, where the Beauty Myth doesn’t exist. “[C]ountries today with no pornography, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, do not boast strong women’s rights records,” observes the website of Feminists for Free Expression. This is because the same Western respect for individual liberty that makes Playboy legal also allows women to vote, drive cars, and walk down the street alone. All feminists should at least grudgingly acknowledge the inseparability of these freedoms. Indeed, some of Playboy’s models, such as Miss September 1979, Vicki McCarty, have described themselves as feminists in the magazine’s pages. Objectification, shmobjectification.
“In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal; formerly colonized cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people—Muslims as well as Christians, Jews and Hindus—to the forces of Islamism,” says feminist author Phyllis Chesler in an essay for the current (November) issue of Playboy. With palpable sorrow, she denounces the feminist establishment’s coddling of woman-hating thugs in the Islamic world.
Those feminists who would benefit most from pondering this article might have a problem with what they would see opposite its first page: a full-page ad for Playboy merchandise showing scantily-clad women flirting with the camera. But there is absolutely no hypocrisy here on Playboy’s part. Properly understood, equality of the sexes means that men and women have an equal claim to individual liberty. The ad is one splendid example of the liberty that Western women enjoy. Another, I hasten to add, is the head scarf worn by many Muslim women in the West, where they do so out of personal conviction rather than legal compulsion.
If you’re a heterosexual man and you don’t know how to admire small breasts, you need to get a clue already, you ungrateful philistine. In aesthetic terms, those stacks of fatty tissue are essentially jewel cases for the nipples, anyway. Why not build a repertoire of variety of taste? Pretty adjectives like dainty, svelte, and lithe were made to describe beauty like Bai Ling’s as caught by photographer Stephen Wayda for the June 2005 Playboy.
