It is a common mistake to think reality and fantasy inhabit separate spheres. They don’t. They coexist and intermingle. Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. To embrace dreams and make peace with spectacle doesn’t mean you have to abandon your faith in a politics ruled by reason. It means you acknowledge that it’s only a faith. Perhaps people can, and probably should, study the reality of the world, make reasoned political judgments and act accordingly. But this way of seeing and being doesn’t have any taken-for-granted epistemological foundation. It is, to use academic jargon, a system of discourse that must be (re)created, imagined, operationalized and dramatized to appeal to the public’s imagination.

HILLMAN: Look. Our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we’re going to process, we’re going to grow, and we’re going to level things out so that we don’t have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.

VENTURA: Which is probably not a human possibility.

HILLMAN: But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?

VENTURA: What?

HILLMAN: Could—

VENTURA: —could the consulting room be a cell in which revolution is prepared? Jesus. Could it?

HILLMAN: By revolution I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.

It’s like, you want your father to love you. The desire to be loved by your father is enormously important. But you can’t get that love fulfilled by your father. You don’t want to get rid of the desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he’s the wrong object. So we don’t want to get rid of the feeling of being abused—maybe that’s very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn’t imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of “my job,” “my finances,” “my government”—all the things that we live with. [A personal example of my own.—B.S.] Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, “What is actually abusing me right now?” That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.

VENTURA: Let’s double back a second. You said, “Could analysis have new fantasies about itself?” What do you mean by fantasy? For most people that word’s associated with “unreal.”

HILLMAN: Oh, no, no. Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, “The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy.” Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it.

VENTURA: So any perception, in that sense, is fantasy.

HILLMAN: Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.

VENTURA: But if therapy is to take this new direction, have this new perception or fantasy about itself, it seems we need some basic redefinition of some basic concepts. [p. 38-39]

Labels: ArtPic, Cintv, Lib, Lit, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:31 PM

October 15, 2007

Cultural consumers can speak for themselves, thank you

I know other black women have appeared in Playboy, but the stunning [August] photos make Garcelle [Beauvais-Nilon] stand out. As a young black woman I feel good about my own body when I see another black woman proudly displaying hers.
Codi Bean
Charleston, West Virginia

—“Dear Playboy,” November 2007

My tribute to the “La Belle Beauvais” pictorial started with a racially insensitive pun on the UPS slogan. But at least I’m not guilty of the common academic bigotry that regards consumers of popular culture as helpless blank screens (blank slates, if you will) for the beliefs and attitudes that pop culture would project onto them. Even professors who defend Playboy sometimes appear to think that way. The above letter demonstrates what those academics fail to notice in their condescension: commercial pop culture is always a dialogue between producer and consumer, never a monologue. Not to be anti-intellectual, but if the weather report contradicts what you see through your window, which is more credible?

Technical note: I didn’t know it until I composed this post, but I had deleted photographs recently from three earlier posts (here, here, and here) while screwing around with my web domain file manager. Blogger.com apparently doesn’t republish JPEG pages that have been lost in another domain. Fortunately, correcting the error was simple.

Update, October 19, 2007, 1:38 p.m.: Damn! I forgot about the photos missing from this other post until today. I noticed they were gone when, through SiteMeter, I saw that somebody had found that page through Google Images.

Update, December 5, 2007, 1:28 p.m.: Yesterday, I fixed this post.

Labels: ArtEnt, ArtPic, BlaSla, Celeb, Educ, Lib, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:59 PM

October 11, 2007

Agitating for freedom of choice—now with motion and sound

Explaining the virtues of both personal and economic freedom to friends with high-speed Internet connections has never been easier. Reason.tv, the online video department of the renowned libertarian magazine, has opened up shop.

Their first editors’ pick is this YouTube video of ABC newsman John Stossel sharing his libertarian wisdom with an appreciative crowd at the Blue Velvet in Los Angeles:


Among the videos I don’t know how to embed here, Drew Carey’s upcoming project looks promising. Also, it’s fun to watch Bill O’Reilly shit all over himself defending the war on drugs.

Labels: BGC, Cintv, DruPo, Educ, Lib, MorPa, OnVi, OthBlo, Ph, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:34 AM

October 8, 2007

Rev. Scott Imler, medical marijuana’s fallen angel

Scott Imler, a United Methodist minister in West Hollywood, would rather regulate herbs in hell than serve liberated health care customers in heaven. He was willing to appreciate the logic of letting people use cannabis as a healing herb at their own discretion—until too many of his sacred cows were slaughtered by the alleged scandal of medicine’s commingling with capitalism at California’s medical marijuana dispensaries. Americans will stop worrying about health care soon after they learn to think calmly and rationally about it. Imler proves that point in the negative.

Morley Safer interviewed Imler for the September 23 60 Minutes:

The Supreme Court has upheld the DEA’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state law might say. And even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.

“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.

Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.

“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.

The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.

“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”

Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.

So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.

“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.

“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.

Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.

Regrettably, Safer doesn’t see through the phony scandal of adult citizens purchasing an amazingly safe herb for the difficult to explain but very real benefits of getting high. I credit Imler with intellectual humility when he says, “We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists.” I wish he would take that reasoning a little further. Why doesn’t Imler notice the alarming discrepancy between the scientific and political processes? Why doesn’t he then apply the same standard of intellectual humility to politicians (and the health care workers they have forcefully deputized) that he does to himself?

If I could, I would deny any doctor or pharmacist the prerogative of vetoing my request for any medicine. Generations of government growth have taught many Americans to think of health care (and education) as things that come down from the government like manna from heaven. But the laws of economics are nearly as dependable as the laws of physics. It always sucks to be relatively poor. It entails relative deprivation in every worldly good and service, including health care. Meanwhile, free markets regulated minimally to avoid coercion, fraud, and gross threats to public safety are the historically proven way to make all goods and services continually better and more available. California’s medically sound Proposition 215 is a model for taking health care in general away from slow-witted bureaucrats and back to the people.

In other words, I am the final authority on whether getting high is beneficial to my health. Rev. Imler prattles onward:

“Most of these cannabis centers are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market,” Imler says.

“Marijuana—what? Coming in from Mexico or wherever?” Safer asks.

“Some of it is,” Imler says. “Some of these places sell hashish, which comes in from the Becca Valley in Lebanon.”

“What you’re suggesting is that the traditional black market or part of the traditional black market is now legal?” Safer asks.

“Yeah. That’s essentially what’s happened,” Imler agrees.

....

And looking back on a decade of controversy, Rev. Scott Imler concedes that good Samaritans with good intentions weren’t enough. He argues it’s time for the federal government to step in and legalize and properly control medical marijuana.

“Until that happens, we’re gonna have what we have now, which is chaos,” he says.

Those are the last words of the 60 Minutes story. For some reason, what Imler calls chaos is supposed to be scary, like a movie presented by Count Floyd. Unless Imler can justify his fear of that kind of chaos without regurgitating hoaxes about marijuana, his newfound hypocrisy ought to diminish his reputation in the medical marijuana community.

Go fuck yourself, Reverend! You’re a Falwell in sheep’s clothing!

Labels: DruPo, Lib, Lit, MorPa, RS, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:16 AM

September 27, 2007

October’s “The Ranch”: the self-righteous despair of an aging hippie

One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys [in their thirties] with kids their age who didn't grow up in [utopian communes]: Not one of them owns an iPod.

—“The Ranch,” Playboy, October 2007, p. 136

In his article on hippie communes, their founders, and the people raised in them, David Black sees no need to finish his thought on what’s so bad about iPods, taking it for granted that his readers oppose “consumerism” as much as he does. I wonder what he thinks of the iPod sported by the October cover girl.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve seen Playboy contributors do the trendy but hypocritical Adbusters thing by laying a guilt trip on somebody else’s material pleasures. Like liars, sanctimonious people have difficulty keeping their stories straight. Watch Black congratulate his own generation for having no anxieties about becoming poor, and then, in the same paragraph, warn of global economic doom:

The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up out of the shadow of the Depression. Since they had no fear of going without, they embraced voluntary poverty. Today this concept has metamorphosed in our new overheated economy into “voluntary simplicity,” a trend bearing a hint of the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit mentality: I’ll reduce my expectations before the bubble pops and we’re all left with enforced simplicity, which used to be called poverty.

A different world from the dream of the 1960s. [p. 133]

Although I wasn’t alive to see that decade, I know that Black’s memories of it are rather selective. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb forecast inevitable global famine in the 1970s and 1980s that would kill hundreds of millions all over the world. This is fairly typical of the many Malthusian predictions that have failed to come true since then. Still, Black needs a reason to sneer at people who shop at Costco and admire Ronald Reagan. The proper term for his attitude may be “voluntary despair.”

Labels: ArtPic, Educ, Lib, Lit, MorPa, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:24 PM

September 12, 2007

Make Terri Lynn Farrow a Playmate!

This student at Louisiana State University is pictured much more candidly on page 112 of the October Playboy, for its “Girls of the Southeastern [Athletic] Conference” pictorial. In her shot for the current issue, I see self-confident good taste. It’s a cliché to call Playboy’s nudes “tasteful,” but I choose my written words with care.

Virtually every image Playboy has ever published is less shocking and disgusting than some other representation of the naked female form that most men and women could easily imagine (or even create and have displayed in an art gallery somewhere). Playboy Enterprises’ workshops of model recruitment, photography, and photo editing work so consistently well that tastefulness is embarrassingly consistent in the product. (Even so, the allegedly ruthless corporate machine frightens away women whose hearts aren’t really set on it.) Embarrassingly, I say, because some seem to think that Playboy must earn its status as art rather than mere entertainment by shocking the bourgeoisie. But my political tribe, libertarianism, begs to differ. We’ve been building a consensus that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and to a lesser extent, professional sports, Playboy may be a victim of its own success in bringing sensual pleasures to the masses within reliable—but perhaps aging—perimeters of good taste. Since sports seems to be the least hated of the four institutions by those who would dismiss Playboy centerfolds as kitsch, I’ll try to explain Terri Lynn Farrow as something like a Joe DiMaggio or Muhammad Ali: one who can express beautiful individuality through a medium of mass entertainment with conventions and clichés already familiar to millions through decades of exposure. Whatever the medium under discussion, not everyone can do that!

To follow my argument completely, you’ll need a paid subscription to the Playboy Cyber Club. That link is not work-safe, of course, and neither are many that follow in this post. I first noticed her in the fall 2001 College Girls newsstand special. But later on, I was thrilled to find six minutes of video of her tryout for the New Orleans “Casting Call” (QuickTime, RealVideo). This woman is charming, quirky, polite, daring, and gritty. Unless you hold to the rigid formulas of some (not all) feminists for how a self-respecting woman behaves toward men, you’ll notice this combination of traits, remember it, and love it. She satisfies almost every possible definition of all-American by claiming Swedish, German, French, Jewish, and African-American blood. The headshot in this post comes from her January 27, 2003, Cyber Girl of the Week gig. But in light of the aesthetic choices she made in presenting her body again more recently, she deserves to go all the way to Playmate of the Month at least.

I don’t dislike breast implants for the sanctimonious reasons that some others do. If you can’t agree with me on this, please have the integrity to say “I hate saline!” instead of “I hate silicone!” The former compound deserves the blame for the balloon look of visual adult entertainment in the 1990s. The American silicone market was largely destroyed by pseudoscientific lawsuits that feminists, among others, widely supported out of moral panic. Those lawsuits arguably did more to restrict women’s individual choices than that Marxist demon of good intentions, Catharine MacKinnon, ever can.

But for purely aesthetic reasons, I want a greater variety of sizes and shapes of breasts on the centerfold proper. As it happens, Farrow impresses me by still not having implants of any kind—if the photo on newsstands now is a reliable indicator. The long hair that falls over her petite breasts is an obviously dyed, platinum shade of blond. The October 2007 Playboy won’t tell you this, but her modestly trimmed pubic hair is that darker shade of blond naturally, according to the video. Farrow must have figured that guys would notice the juxtaposition: hair dyed a nature-defying color over nature’s own breasts. In the twenty-first century, Farrow has something in common with the men who ogle her Playboy picture. She can have the complex, Rabelaisian pleasure of understanding the quirky nuances of her own sexual behavior in light of evolutionary psychology. Like the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo and the evolutionary biology of Darwin and Wallace, this paradigm shift frightens and disturbs even as it opens up new possibilities for dialogue on perennial human issues like entertainment and the arts.

If Farrow can be anybody’s muse in any such indirect manner (with all due modesty!), she deserves a centerfold.

Labels: ArtEnt, CC, CosSur, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, NSS, OnVi, OthBlo, PM, Sc, Sp, TaoGlam, Theme, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 5:39 PM

July 31, 2007

Amanda Marcotte’s road to hell paved with empathy

While researching my previous post, I browsed left-wing feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s recent work. It reminded me of why I get so angry at people who seem to think they own the patent on compassion while they support policies that unintentionally hurt the less fortunate.

I discovered Marcotte when she publicly called me a loser because I write a libertarian blog about Playboy. Still, she implicitly claims to feel sorry for me in this passage from a more recent post:

Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.

I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.

[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]

By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.

Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:

1.) As time goes on, every wise and honest person will eventually recognize Judith Rich Harris as the Copernicus of child development. To the degree that misogyny among American men is the problem Marcotte says it is, it must be because of the way American boys children* socialize each other—and not a direct consequence of the way American parents treat their boys.

2.) Jokes about schoolyard bullying, even as presented in entertainments like The Simpsons and A Christmas Story, may become even more ambiguously funny after a study of Harris. After all, jokes about prison rape aren’t necessarily funny, either. It’s obviously not the moral equivalent, but the difference is only a matter of degree.

3.) In light of Harris’ scholarship, my seemingly endless guilt over my failure to stand up to my father when he was alive is certainly the effect, not the cause, of having such a horrible time with the brutal machismo of the public junior high school locker room. The only way I knew to preserve my self-respect in the face of the assault on it was to feel superior by being the biggest goody two-shoes in the room. Unfortunately, the ruse corrupted me until I was too sheepish in the face of authority, and too lacking in personal ambition, to grow up gracefully and become an unbitter adult. In principle, Marcotte surely hates that locker-room culture as much as I did. But since public-school gym class is too stupid and cruel to survive the rigors of a free market in education—especially if I had my way and teenagers weren’t the new niggers—she aids in the oppression of millions of young people of both sexes.

4.) Alarmingly, Marcotte doesn’t seem to worry about the creep-up in legal age of majority that has taken place for the last few generations of Americans. Compulsory high school is an historical aberration (like marijuana prohibition, cough). It shouldn’t be such a sacred cow across the political spectrum. Andrew Sullivan has made the mistake of supporting it, but somehow I wouldn’t expect him to play the more-empathic-than-thou game in debate about it that Marcotte does about feminism. (For the record, I support Playboy’s good-faith effort to ensure a minimum employee age of 18.) Five days out of every week are a needless sorority initiation for millions of girls during the difficult early years of puberty. Meanwhile, the heart of the teacher’s pet bleeds for 18-year-olds who get drunk and expose their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. The child is father to the man—and to the woman, too. (Sorry, ghost of Emily Dickinson, but you were right about long dashes being so much fun.)

5.) My credibility gap between Marcotte and Sullivan lies in the respective presence and absence of the Blank Slate doctrine in the mind of each. Between the two, Sullivan shows more respect for the influence of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics on our policy debates. Nineteenth-century racists and sexists thought those sciences were on their side; twentieth-century racists and other dangerous idealists (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson) are exposed as fools by them. (And yes, the sexual revolution which Playboy heralded has sometimes had Blank Slate conceits of its own, although I still don’t think that that revolution has always been wrong.)

Marcotte’s compassion for me as a man is at best the compassion of the elephant for the merchandise in a china shop. Her intellectual clumsiness makes the analogy fair. I already know that I can’t trust her to see my fascination with Playboy as something other than a kind of brainwashing. I don’t need her “empathetic” missionary work to save my tribe from devil worship. If that’s her agenda, can anyone blame me for resenting it?

By the way, the Playmate mentioned in the blog post that Marcotte favorably links to in her anti-GGW rant is Miss March 1987, Marina Baker (her Playboy Cyber Club [workers of the world, beware of breasts] headshot):

Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.

More dirt on Marcotte

*Update, 2:57 p.m.: I’m truly embarrassed by the sexism of my original draft.

Update, December 4, 2007, 8:38 p.m.: For a few months, the Baker JPEG was missing. Now it’s back.

Labels: AgeMaj, BlaSla, Educ, Femi, Lib, Lit, OthBlo, PM, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:23 PM

June 14, 2007

A new Playboy article believes the meth scare; the Playboy Advisor believes in storks

Obviously, I made up the second half of the post title. I only wish I could say the same for the first. The July issue’s “The Dark Side of the Summer of Love” by Frank Owen should have been called “The Journalistic Dark Side of Frank Owen.” His account of Dr. David E. Smith’s experiences founding and running the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 40 years ago misses the real story with a pattern of thinking doomed to repeat drug-war history.

Neither Owen nor Smith takes any care in distinguishing behavioral cause and effect when describing the hustlers, thugs, and con men who destroyed that San Francisco utopia—and who also, for some reason, tended to like crystal meth a lot more than the general square or hippie population. If he won’t try meth, can Owen at least do math? Crunching his numbers from page 128—“Today 10.4 million people have used crystal meth at least once in their life. There are an estimated 257,000 addicts.”—reveals that more than 97% of those who dare to try the stuff don’t have the irresistible urge to try it again. Hmm. Could it be that the dangers of a substance associated with certain unsavory people (accurately or inaccurately, it shouldn’t matter in terms of good civic logic) have been overstated in a spirit of moral panic? Does that ever happen? Unless you’re seriously worried about the public threat of, say, chocolate addiction, you have to admit that addictive potential does not justify prohibition of any drug, anyway. If you don’t respect the difference between correlation and causation, you deserve to drown by leaving your mouth open in a rainstorm and you just might be dumb enough to do it.

Immediately after undermining his own point of view with those stats, Owen places the blame for meth’s “exploding labs, ...overdoses, [and] ...battles with law enforcement” on what happened way back in 1967. The fact that prohibition itself causes or exacerbates all those problems in 2007 is completely overlooked. The article can’t even keep its story straight on the kind of person that crystal meth turns you into. Dangerous sociopaths preying on the innocent during the Summer of Love aren’t the only meth lovers. It’s also “a substance we know today as the favorite high of hillbillies, right-wing preachers and suburban moms.” (p. 58) Fortunately for Owen, most citizens don’t notice when the official story about a drug suddenly changes—or when groups of other citizens presumably out of earshot are demonized.

The annual benefit parties for the Marijuana Policy Project that I’ve had the pleasure of attending are consistent with the best of Playboy’s socially libertarian legacy. The top-billed article of July, on the other hand, depresses me with its intellectual laziness. I need to light up my bong and sip some Peruvian coca tea.

Labels: ArtPic, DruPo, MorPa, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:53 AM

April 29, 2007

Microfinance comes to Naboo

Ross Geller of Friends loves Princess Leia in the “gold bikini thing.” But between the two of them, I prefer Jabba’s other slave girl, who looks like Gwen Stefani (although Stefani would have danced the Rancor to death and made the shirtless, fat dungeon master cry). I also appreciate the many scantily-clad moods of Natalie Portman in Attack of the Clones. I recently endorsed a microfinance organization called ACCION International. Meanwhile, Portman has endorsed a similar one called FINCA.

Now, if only landspeeder liberals like Queen Amidala didn’t support the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems—and the overreaching government that makes new taxes necessary—the cross-dressing catfish of the Trade Federation couldn’t have been so easily manipulated by Darth Sidious. If some sentient beings display greed, it’s more realistic to try to make greed work for as many people as possible, as libertarianism does, than to give secular sermons on the sin of avarice, as the left does.

Any chance Pink Five will pose for Playboy? Nobody needs to see her identification, all right?

Labels: Cintv, Lib, NPH, OnVi, Ph, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:10 PM

April 2, 2007

On teenage sexuality, Bill Maher can’t keep his story, um, straight

For the second time in a day, I get to smack down an age-of-majority hypocrite. If you hurry, you can still get Maher’s April Playboy interview from newsstands. This excerpt is for every nerd joke that every Reason subscriber has ever endured at the expense of an unclassical pseudoliberal:

Playboy: Would you support [Bill] Clinton [for president again if you could]?

Maher: Sure. He has a reputation as a party animal because of the Monica Lewinsky situation, but basically he’s a wonk. He can do Monica and run the country. He’s a multitasker. If he had been president when Katrina hit, he would have been in New Orleans three days before the storm. He wouldn’t have slept. Yes, he would have been getting blown—come on, Slick Willie in the Big Easy? He would have had some excellent étouffée. But he would have been working the whole time. I think the country has learned a lesson: If he can do the job, let the guy be who he is. People don’t care about sex.

Playboy: They cared about Mark Foley.

Maher: Monica Lewinsky was an adult. Foley went after boys. [sic: The 16-year-old in question was above the age of consent in the District of Columbia.] Actually, I wasn’t terribly taken aback by Foley. He was like a college professor, in a job where every year there’s a new wave of fresh meat. He would look over the field and decide. He probably had pretty good radar to know which kids were amenable. From the evidence we have, he tried to do something only after they were out of the page program. If a 19-year-old gay kid wants to go out with an older guy, why not? The guys his own age are probably dumb doofuses [sic: doofi].

Playboy: But even after leaving their jobs as pages, they were far younger than Foley.

Maher: Look, I’m a 51-year-old man, and I go out with girls in their early 20s. I’d be hypocritical if I said it’s ridiculous for a gay man to do that. I’m very libertarian about love. I’m the only guy I’ve ever heard who defends Mary Kay Letourneau.

Playboy: Are you saying teachers should be allowed to have sex with their 13-year-old students, as she did, and not go to jail?

Maher: I think it’s a little offbeat, but you know, I believe in the double standard. If a 28-year-old male teacher is screwing a 13-year-old girl, that’s a crime. But with Debra Lafave [another teacher who had sex with a student] screwing her 14-year-old boy student, the crime is that we didn’t get it on videotape. Was he being taken advantage of? I wish I had been taken advantage of like that. What a memory she gave him! I would think he’s a champion among his friends. Are you kidding? Even with Michael Jackson—

Playboy: You’re being remarkably open-minded.

Maher: Woody Allen is the one we might have been wrong about. I was pretty hard on him on my show, but how many years has his relationship continued? Maybe that, like Letourneau’s, was true love. If you look at him or Letourneau, who is still with the guy after her time in jail—they have two kids—the lesson is love will take the form it’s going to take. Sometimes it’s at great variance with the mainstream. I don’t think teachers should be allowed to do that. I think they should be fired. But to send that woman to jail and separate them all those years?

Libertarian about love? Bullshit, Bill. In context, your exception for teenage men and their older women is reverse puritanism at best.

Labels: AgeMaj, ArtPic, Lib, MorPa, MR, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:03 PM

February 28, 2007

The Great Prude War of February 2007

Who can predict the outcome when two logically challenged, self-righteous bigots go to war? Thanks to the intrepid correspondence of Hit & Run, this epic struggle has been thoroughly documented.

Orthodox feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who hates Catholicism and men, was fired from John Edwards’ presidential campaign, thanks in some significant part to Catholic League president William A. Donohue, who hates Judaism and gays. In hindsight, I think I see why Donohue was more likely to win. His Catholic education, complete with the seven deadly sins, probably gave him an edge in worldly wisdom over Marcotte and her doctrine of the noble savage. Not enough of an edge to actually know what he’s talking about, of course. Just enough to win between the two of them. (To be fair, Andrew M. Greeley has been rather well served by his Catholic upbringing.)

As I’ve said recently, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money. Just as sex scandals encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t to talk about sex, any corporate malfeasance (no matter how small the consequences in comparison to government malfeasance) encourages some of us in the free, developed world to make a big show of feeling guilty about the relative misfortune of other parts of the world. As a libertarian, I strongly support the right to self-flagellate. (I should; I’ve done it.) But I resent the implication—as in this elaborate guilt trip from one of Marcotte’s colleagues at Pandagon—that libertarians simply don’t know or don’t care about the children who work in factories to make our clothes. We’re just pure evil, aren’t we?

My earlier skirmishes with Amanda Marcotte:
Libertarianism as Pandagon misunderstands it
Playboy can no longer tell friend from foe
File this under “No such thing as bad publicity”

Labels: BGC, BlaSla, Femi, Lib, MorPa, MR, OthBlo, RS, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:08 PM

February 19, 2007

Ironically, The Playboy Blog hates “consumer culture”

To be more specific, at least one contributor to that blog admires artwork that he considers “parody of vapid consumer culture.” Has David Pfister ever browsed Adbusters magazine? If so, hasn’t he noticed that true-believing anti-consumerists love to hate us Playboy fans with the same moralistic zeal with which we’re supposed to hate the shoe-loving transvestite in the video [audio not work-safe]? For another layer of irony, Pfister titled his post “Cult Behavior.”

The irony comes as no surprise to me, unfortunately. To oversimplify just a little, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money.

Labels: Lib, MorPa, OnVi, OthBlo,