The Culture Wars

Barbarians on the March
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The Times of London reported on September 29 that British town planners have decided that what jewel-box Georgian and Regency towns such as Bath and Cheltenham need—architecturally speaking—is the shock of the new. The planners actually demand that, in exchange for their permission to build, new constructions should "stand out like a sore thumb" instead of "blending into the vernacular" of the serenely classical terraces."

Do Sties Make Pigs?
Summer 1995
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.
First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things Victorian. In Britain this was particularly pronounced after the war because for the first time it was unmistakably clear just how far the country had declined from its Victorian apogee of world power and influence: a decline made somewhat easier to bear, psychologically speaking, by the consistent, unabashed denigration not only of the Victorians themselves but of all their ideas and works as well."

The Dung Hits the Fan
by Stefan Kanfer
"Mayor Rudolph Giuliani expressed outrage over such objets d'art as the corpses of dissected animals suspended in formaldehyde, an indulgent portrait of a child murderer, and, perhaps most significantly, a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines. Noting that the Brooklyn Museum receives an annual $7 million stipend from the New York City budget and leases its building from the city, the mayor announced: 'You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion. And therefore we will do everything that we can to remove funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to his senses and realizes that if you are a government-subsidized enterprise, then you can't do things that desecrate the most personal and deeply held views of people in society.'"

It Hurts, Therefore I Am
Autumn 1995
by Theodore Dalrymple
"I first formulated my viral theory of criminality when I noticed that at least nine out of ten white English prisoners are tattooed, more than three or four times the proportion in the general population. The statistical association of crime with tattooing is stronger, I feel certain, than between crime and any other single factor, with the possible exception of smoking. Virtually all English criminals are smokers, a fact that sociologists have also unaccountably overlooked."

Multiculti Museums—Or Else
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The British government announced in May that it plans to monitor the ethnic composition of visitors to the nation's publicly subsidized museums. Those museums that fail to draw what the government considers a sufficient number of ethnic minorities will lose their subsidies."

Tradition and the Modern City
Autumn 1995
by Robert Adam
"Post-war buildings and planning are the product of the failed modernist ideal that transformed most aspects of twentieth-century life, from politics to painting, and that gave rise to our urban social ills and to urban ugliness. In architecture, modernism—the cult of abstract rationality and change for its own sake—has given us sterility and inhumanity instead of its promised progress and liberation. Utopian ambitions and professional arrogance have left our cities with decay and dereliction, the perfect breeding ground for the alienation and brutality that have undermined community life."

Victimhood Equals Heroism
by Theodore Dalrymple
"With admirable courage, Lapper has overcome her disability to become an artist—with, alas, all the tedious conformism of her professional tribe: it goes almost without saying that she is a single mother sporting ironmongery in her nose. Her own art, according to a eulogistic website, “questions notions of physical normality in a society that considers her deformed because she was born without arms.” The eulogizer, however, does not spot the contradiction or irony here: that Lapper has shrewdly (and, in the circumstances, understandably) commodified her armlessness, turning it to an advantage. If people truly considered her condition either normal or beautiful, it would be disastrous for her career."

Cartoons and Comic Books

No Beheadings, Please, We’re British. Appeasing Muslim extremists means surrendering Western liberties.
February 6, 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists.
Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad (only one of which was remotely funny)."

‘South Park’ and Self-Censorship
April 28, 2010
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
"The decision by Comedy Central, the television channel owned by MTV Networks, to censor an episode of “South Park” that alluded provocatively to the Prophet Muhammad illustrates once again the fear terrorists acting on behalf of Islam have instilled in the Western media."

Superheroes and the Fight for Liberty
May 2001
by Raymond J. Keating
"In recent assessments, conservatives seem split on the direction of comic books. In a 1994 National Review article, for example, Anthony Lejeune praised old-time comics, pointing out: “Political themes, as distinct from simple Americanism, were generally eschewed as being likely to divide than to attract readers.” But he saw a drastic change in longer, grander comics known as “graphic novels”: “What almost all of them have in common is that their vision is dark—like the new Batman—rather than bright, ugly rather than beautiful, bitter rather than optimistic, cruel rather than genial.”
In contrast, in the Weekly Standard (1998), Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote that some people creating comics “are trying to explore the big questions. And they’re doing it in books openly hostile to the moral relativism of modern liberalism.” He concluded that 'conservative moralists could do a lot worse than to follow the latest round of superheroes flying above the streets of Metropolis and Gotham.'”

Toy Story 3 and the Tea Party Movement
How concerns about lost liberty are filtering into mainstream culture.
July 14, 2010
by David Harsanyi
"Is Toy Story 3 a parable for today's deep political discontent?"

Viva Voltaire: In the cartoon controversy, it’s the French who’ve been courageous, the Americans and British spineless.
February 10, 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"This time, the French have put the British and Americans to shame. From the outset of the crisis over the Danish caricatures, they have vigorously defended the right of free expression, unlike the British and Americans, whose pretence that they “understand” Muslim outrage has fooled no one and given the fanatics the (correct) impression of weakness and lack of conviction—and thus encouraged them."

Movies

A Beautiful Movie, Lousy Economics
August 2002
by Sanford Ikeda
"Perhaps someday Hollywood will release a major film about an economist who really did change the course of history for the better (which rules out Keynes), and who also suffered, struggled, and triumphed. As I imagine it, an early scene would be set, circa 1920, in a lively little coffeehouse in Vienna."

Capitalist Excess? A Review of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism”
November 03, 2009
by Jarrett Skorup
"Capitalism is a system that has pulled millions upon millions of people out of poverty, but Michael Moore is profoundly ignorant of that. When pressed in an interview, he said he “doesn’t want to get caught up in titles.” He apparently doesn't want to get caught up in truth either. Yet, condemning a system without understanding its basic principles sells movie tickets—i.e., it makes money—and earns the praise of others who share Moore’s ignorance."

Christianity and Avatar
February 24, 2010
by John J. Dwyer
"Let us criticize those aspects of James Cameron's work – and anyone else's – that fall short of Scriptural precepts. And let us learn from such work when it casts light on our own blindness. We Christians who elect and re-elect warmongering politicians; who sacrifice our sons to serve as hired killers for Caesar; who confuse and terrify a watching world of unbelievers as we baptize our brutal military colossus with Christian symbols, imagery, song, and emotion; who cow our own pulpits into silence when they should be aflame with holy zeal and jealousy for God over such wicked idolatry – we are the villains of Avatar."

Conservatives in Hollywood?!
Autumn 2005
by Brian C. Anderson
"When Hollywood does put its liberal worldview aside to make movies that embody traditional values, it often scores big with the public."

The Coolest Christian Movie Ever
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
A review of I Am Legend.

Forrest Gump: A Subversive Movie
July 1995
by Aeon J. Skoble
"If intelligence and analytic ability are not portrayed in the most popular film of the year as important components of the good life, an intellectually lazy generation will tacitly take this as support for their disengaged condition. The majority of teens cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a world map, or the Civil War by half-century. The fastest growing trend in criminal defense is diminished responsibility. Books are out, MTV is in. Critical reasoning is on the decline not only as a skill but as a desideratum. And now comes Forrest Gump to reinforce the idea that we are not responsible for our destinies, that intelligence is not important, that independent thought will be punished. That's dangerous."

Go for Capitalism or Go for Broke?
October 7, 2009
by Pia Varma
"Two Michaels, two documentaries, and two very different messages, duking it out for dominance in our hearts and minds."

A Great Conservative Filmmaker
Winter 2004
by Julia Magnet
"What Stillman notices in Barcelona is that irresponsible politics and irresponsible sexual behavior spring from the same ideology. The moral relativism that informs post–sexual revolution mores also undergirds European anti-Americanism. To a relativist, there is no difference between Soviet Russia and NATO; the Americans are no better than the fascists—what they all really want is power, which, like judgment, is one of the only postmodern vices."

Hollywood and Isolationism
April 25, 2003
by R. Cort Kirkwood
"Hollywood not only zealously propagandized for the Great Crusade of its own accord, but also gleefully manufactured government propaganda. In 1941, Hollywood went to war with America, and it has stayed on the front ever since. John Wayne, the best friend conservatives ever had in Hollywood, greased more "Krauts" and "Nips" than the 101st Airborne and Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers combined.
But two of Hollywood’s finest pro-war cinematic achievements never showed Americans smiting the Axis in battle. The heroes fired their salvos not at the enemy abroad, but at the enemy at home: the isolationists, also known as America Firsters after the America First Committee, which disbanded four days after Pearl Harbor was left a smoldering ruin."

Hollywood and the Culture of War
January 28, 2003
by Rod Oglesby
"Children of the Baby Boom such as Ron Kovic grew up on a steady diet of these war glorification films, and this primed them to be gun and bomb fodder in Vietnam. Unfortunately for Mr. Kovic and many men like him, by the time they learned the ugly real truth about war it was too late. In retrospect, blind support for war was an objective Hollywood's producers and directors accomplished with great success. It's too bad many of them weren't sent to the front lines instead."

Hollywood's Views of Capitalism
March 1993
by Raymond J. Keating
"The two views of government presented in Wall Street and Tucker are instructive as well. In Wall Street, stock market regulators act as saviors, cleaning up what unbridled capitalism has wrought. In Tucker, the Securities and Exchange Commission does the bidding of powerful politicians and special interests in crushing the entrepreneur."

How Liberals Killed the Western: A Case Study
by Gary North
"The Ox-Bow Incident is usually rated by four stars. The Library of Congress in 1988 designated it as being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically relevant." It should have added 'for liberals.'"

In Defense of “Borat”
November 15, 2006
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
"Borat is simply anarchic—there is no institution, idea, cultural value or government he does not find worthy of being picked apart through humor."

Laughing With/At Michael Moore
August 8, 2003
by James Ostrowski
"In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore tries and fails to explain why America is so violent. I give Bowling for Columbine one thumb down and the other thumb up. (Can I do that?)"

May the Force Not Be With You
August 1999
by Sheldon Richman
In Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace the conflict that is the focus of the movie has to do with trade, and the traders are the bad guys. The opening scroll tells the audience that the Galactic Republic has imposed a tax on trade routes to the outer star systems, but “the greedy Trade Federation” is disputing the tax."

Michael Moore Kills Capitalism with Kool-Aid
October 1, 2009
by Michael W. Covel
"One critic declared that the value of Capitalism: A Love Story was not in the moviemaking, but in its message that hits you in the gut and makes you angry. This film did not make me angry, but it did punch me in the gut. The people in that theater with me, including Moore, were not bad people. They just seem to all have consumed a lethal dose of Kool-Aid."

The Militarization of Hollywood: Unlocking 'The Hurt Locker'
September 11, 2010
by Jack A. Smith
"But what should we think about a German war film dealing with the Warsaw rising and the slaughter of Stalingrad, or a Japanese film about Nanking or the death march, that focused only on the heroism of their bomb-disposal troopers, without any reference to the aggressive wars that situated them in Poland, Russia, China and the Philippines? Most people would characterize such films as "enemy propaganda," particularly while the wars were still going on, as are the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen (as well as Iraq, despite Washington's claim that "combat operations" are now over)."

Movie-Goers Can Think for Themselves
October 1989
by Tibor R. Machan
"Some charge that these films are being used by Hollywood producers to peddle brand-name products. (In Bull Durham it was beer and other products, none of which I remembered after I saw the movie or even noticed as I watched it.)"

An Oscar for America’s Hubris
by Robert Scheer
"According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is “apolitical.” Actually, The Hurt Locker is just the opposite; it’s an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others."

Roger and Me and Free Enterprise
May 1990
by James L. Doti
"Roger and Me documents the impact of General Motors’ decision to relocate automobile production facilities from Flint, Michigan, to lower-cost operations in Mexico. The film’s message is that relocating assembly plants outside the U.S. had a devastating socio-economic impact on the people of Flint. The film’s villain is the free market system that allows G.M.’s supposedly callous CEO, Roger Smith, to undertake reprehensible acts while holding himself and his company above accepted norms of decent behavior."

Silver and Gold, 'Star Trek,' and the Truth About E.T.
by John Bowman
"In fact, there is some pretty credible evidence that the entire sci-fi domain (at least insofar as films are concerned) is nothing if not a gentle, alluring introduction to the monstrous tenets of Karl Marx and his deplorable Communism."

The Sin of Sin City
by Andrew Klavan
"I can’t emphasize this enough: I like sex and violence in stories. But meaning has a moral weight. Here, as with the degraded photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the hateful lyrics of Eminem, we’re being asked to applaud a show of undeniable artistic talent without passing judgment on the vision it conveys. It’s kind of like asking us to appreciate the excellent marksmanship of the boys at Columbine High."

Sixtiesville
Winter 1999
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"Hollywood has always been a steadfast partisan in the culture wars, but recently there have been signs of wavering. The highly acclaimed and potential Oscar nominee Pleasantville captures the feel of this transitional moment."

Those Awards
by Murray N. Rothbard
"The Oscars have increasingly taken on the dimensions of a racket. Since the eligible movies are those that emerge at any point during the calendar year, and since the producers fully understand the minuscule attention span of the typical Academy dimwit, all the Big Pictures, calculated to appeal to said dimwit, are held back until December 30 or 31. As a result, the experts were confidently predicting awards in late December to movies that no one had yet seen. The major studios have always had special previews for Academy members (i.e., Oscar voters) for the pictures they are hyping for the awards; now, that has been supplemented by videocassettes expressed to the homes of each voter."

Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time
September 28, 2007
by Snarkerati
"A dystopia is a fictional society that is the antithesis or complete opposite of a utopia, an ideal world with a perfect social, political and technological infrastructure."

WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity
7/4/2008
by Gennady Stolyarov II
"The Disney-Pixar film WALL-E has been adoringly received by the majority of the theatergoing public. This adoration is unjustified. The film blatantly conveys environmentalist, anticapitalist, and antitechnological propaganda — and aims it at an audience of children, who still lack the critical faculties and intellectual sophistication to evaluate all relevant aspects of the issues presented."

Westerns and Property Rights
March 2004
by Andrew P. Morriss
"There are some powerful lessons from the cattlemen’s experience in the West. Unfortunately, these lessons don’t make as exciting a movie as the typical story of gunslingers and range wars."

What Sicko Left Out
by Humberto Fontova
"As eagerly expected by Michael Moore's Cuban case officers, Sicko's screening was the signal for their other propaganda assets to chime in: "Communist Cuba's universal free health system has achieved low child mortality and high longevity rates on a par with rich nations since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution," wrote Anthony Boadle from Havana's Reuters Bureau last week.
An infant mortality rate that plummeted from 13th lowest in the world (lower than in Germany, France, Japan, Israel among many other first world nations) during the unspeakable Batista era to 40th today, that finds most of the nations behind it in 1958 now ahead of it – this rate qualifies as an "achievement" in the lexicon of news agencies that have earned a Havana bureau."

Novels

Don’t give him the Nobel – he’s right-wing!
October 12, 2010
by Johan Norberg
"People who never voiced any concerns about the politics of other Nobel Prize winners – like Wislawa Szymborska, who wrote poetic celebrations of Lenin and Stalin; Günter Grass, who praised Cuba’s dictatorship; Harold Pinter, who supported Slobodan Miloševic; José Saramago, who purged anti-Stalinists from the revolutionary newspaper he edited – thought that the Swedish Academy had finally crossed a line. Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics apparently should have disqualified him from any prize considerations. He is after all a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith."

The Dystopian Imagination
Autumn 2001
by Theodore Dalrymple
"It is hardly surprising that a century of utopian dreams and coercive social engineering to achieve them should have been a century rich in imaginative dystopias. Indeed, from The Time Machine to Blade Runner, the dystopia became a distinct literary and cinematic genre, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 became so much a part of Western man's mental furniture that even unliterary people invoke them to criticize the present."

Frail, cowardly Winston saved us
by Robert Harris
"George Orwell got many things wrong in his great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he changed the way we see ourselves."

Government regulation: The Truth About "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair
June 8, 2010
by James Leroy Wilson
"The myth of "The Jungle" has had a terrible impact on the American mind. It has led millions of people to believe that regulation by politicians and bureaucrats is superior to regulation by the free market forces of consumers, investors, lenders, insurance companies, and legal liability."

The Grapes of Opportunity
March 1990
by Hannah Lapp
"Just the term “migrant labor” conjures repulsive images in the minds of many people who have heard of or seen only such examples portrayed in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The term is often associated with poverty, shame, desperation, and helplessness. What’s frequently overlooked by those enjoying material ease is the fact that happiness isn’t measured only by standard of living, and that poverty isn’t necessarily unfortunate in the minds of those involved."

The Last Wild Children of Capitalism
August 1990
by William B. Irvine
American futures markets have long played the role of villain in popular economic thinking. In his 1903 novel The Pit, for example, Frank Norris offers his readers the following description of the Chicago Board of Trade:

Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring waters spun and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and out, only to catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.

Money and Politics in the Land of Oz
by Quentin P. Taylor
"L. Frank Baum claimed to have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “solely to pleasure the children” of his day, but scholars have found enough parallels between Dorothy’s yellow-brick odyssey and the politics of 1890s Populism to suggest otherwise. Did Baum intend to pen a subtle political satire on monetary reform or merely an entertaining fantasy?"

Murray Rothbard’s Favorite Books
by David Gordon
"From all the books he read, Rothbard singled out a few that had most influenced him. His list, together with brief comments, is contained in a letter, dated January 24, 1994, with the heading "Books That Formed Me." The list tells us much about this remarkable mind."

Our Future
by Murray N. Rothbard
"George Orwell's collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no hope at all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect on the reader is devastating."

The Poetics of Spontaneous Order: Austrian Economics and Literary Criticism
by Paul A. Cantor
"In short, instead of constantly revising and refining Marxist paradigms — often beyond recognition — critics in literary and cultural studies need to free themselves from the spell of Marxism and realize that other forms of economics offer them what they are really seeking — a way of understanding how producers and consumers freely and complexly interact in any market activity and hence a way of understanding how the literary and cultural marketplace can actually work to foster artistic creativity."

Ready for Her Close-Up" Re-examining Ayn Rand's place in American intellectual and cultural life
October 7, 2009
by Nick Gillespie
"Contempt has long been the standard literati response to Rand. Like Jack Kerouac, Rand is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those of us who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes."

Starship Troopers
April 9, 2003
by Karen Kwiatkowski
"For the rest of us citizens, denizens, residents and lovers of liberty, Heinlein’s fascistic fantasy can help explain the present, and possibly the future."

We Can Do Better than Government Inspection of Meat
by E. C. Pasour, Jr.
May 1998
"Sinclair wrote The Jungle to ignite a socialist movement on behalf of America’s workers. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed or verified the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packing houses. Instead, he relied heavily on both his own imagination and hearsay. Indeed, a congressional investigation at the time found little substance in Sinclair’s allegations."

Plays

Short Stories

Ebenezer Scrooge: In His Own Defense
December 2002
by Ted Roberts
"The Dickens with Dickens."

In Defense of Scrooge
December 24, 2002
by Michael Levin
"No doubt Cratchit needs - i.e., wants - more, to support his family and care for Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment?"

Songs and Poems

How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back
by John H. McWhorter
"Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success."

Puffing Puff Daddy
Summer 2001
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Genuflection to popular culture’s worst products is today a sign both of enlightenment and of a properly generous democratic sentiment."

Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: A Libertarian View
by Andrew Ian Dodge
"The religious and the straight-laced in the world have always looked upon rock & roll as a shining example of libertinism. I would posit that, on the contrary, rock & roll, more specifically, hard rock and heavy metal, are libertarianism in action."

The Star Spangled Banner: A Flag and Song For a Warrior Nation
March 7, 2010
by Russell D. Longcore
"Is The Star Spangled Banner a proper song for a nation desirous of peace, or is it only fit for a warlike nation? Let's look together and you be the judge."

TV Shows

The Economic Fantasy of Star Trek
December 2004
by P. Gardner Goldsmith
"If one looks closely at Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry's United-Nations-based concept of the "Federation" and the military life of his space travelers, one concludes that he adhered strongly to the fanciful ideas of utopian socialism."

Lessons From Star Trek or What is Good for Business?
by Dmitry Chernikov
"It seems beyond doubt that the economic system of the Trek Federation is socialism of some variant, which, oddly enough, has resulted not in social suicide but in unprecedented, if not clearly shown to the viewers, prosperity."

On Sesame Street, It's All Show
Autmun 1995
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"While it teaches the alphabet and supposedly prepares children for school, it actually instructs them in the conventions of an anti-intellectual pop culture and thus makes common cause with the vast contemporary forces arrayed against literacy. While it asserts its purity from commercial taint, it wields the most sophisticated marketing strategies to sell its products to keep the show in business. Like the television commercial on which it is modeled, Sesame Street is a triumph of appearance over substance."

PBS Continues Probe into Biased Film
December 7, 2005
by Wendy McElroy
"The documentary ["Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories."], which addressed domestic violence and children, is accused of being anti-father, factually inaccurate and politically motivated."

Public Broadcasting Subsidy: Unnecessary and Irrational
December 10, 2010
by William F. Shughart II
"If NPR and public television cannot survive in such an environment without taxpayer subsidies, they should be allowed to go the way of the dodo bird."

The Orwellian Ideology of 24
January 29, 2007
by Matt McCaffrey
"As enjoyable as 24 is on the surface, a more than cursory glance makes it obvious that the show is attempting to justify and even celebrate an ever-expanding Orwellian state. It almost makes me want to root for the bad guys."

Sex, Sadness, and the City
Autumn 1999
by Wendy Shalit
"Despite the hype, Sex and the City is not about girls who just want to have fun, flaunting their sexual appetites. While promoters offer the show as one more brave step in the sexual liberation of women, leading to ever greater fulfillment, in fact it is a lament for all the things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked, in this city and beyond. If Candace Bushnell were a practicing Catholic, she couldn't have produced a more effective proselytizing tool for continence and modesty."

Softening Us Up for Torture, 24 Hours at a Time
by Dave Trotter
"They contrive a perfectly worst-case scenario to demonstrate Bush administration logic: namely, that because it’s theoretically possible that a single man, woman, or child, if tortured, could reveal information about a terrorist plot which could potentially save innocent lives, then any amount of coercion is therefore justified to compel that individual to surrender whatever useful information that he might be hoarding."

The Starship Private Enterprise
May 2000
by Timothy Sandefur
"Star Trek’s vision of futuristic bureaucracy is certainly unrealistic, as Star Trek’s own success testifies: the franchise has succeeded through decentralized marketing, not central planning. So can space exploration."

Thoughts on Creativity While Watching The Twilight Zone
September 1992
by Thomas A. Giovanetti "But no matter how advanced technology becomes, it is doubtful that machines will ever possess creativity. The idea of a computer performing a task with creativity or inspiration seems best left to the imagination of science fiction writers."

We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore
Autumn 2003
by Brian C. Anderson
"The “fair and balanced” approach that Fox trumpets in its slogan is part of this iconoclastic tone, too. Sure, the anchor is almost always a conservative, but it’s clear he is striving to tell the truth, and there’s always a liberal on hand, too. By contrast, political consultant and Fox contributor Dick Morris notes, “The other networks offer just one point of view, which they claim is objective.” Not only does the Fox approach make clear that there is always more than one point of view, but it also puts the network’s liberal guests in the position of having to defend their views—something that almost never happens on other networks."

Why Jon Stewart Is All the Rage
Spring 2005
by Harry Stein
"It is safe to say that the vast majority of Stewart’s young fans have no more a coherent political philosophy than they do a sense of history. What they do tend to have, in the contemporary vernacular, is attitude: a set of poses, ranging from an easy familiarity with drug culture to a bemused contempt for religion, that define one as hip. Jon Stewart confirms that view of themselves in every broadcast."

Islamophobia

Fear: The only reason anyone cares about Terry Jones’s Koran-burning
September 13, 2010
by Bruce Bawer
"American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that’s apparently hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the president on down begs him to reconsider. Obama to the contrary, this isn’t about “our values as Americans”; it’s not about “freedom and religious tolerance.” It’s about fear. Nine years after jihadists murdered 2,977 people on American soil, the sight of American leaders quaking in their boots at the thought of some clown’s offending the Muslim world is nothing less than obscene."

Name-Calling: “Islamophobia”: the latest charge to try to stifle legitimate debate
August 27, 2010
by Andrew Klavan
"Recently, in defending an imam’s proposal to build a triumphalist “Muslim Cultural Center” near Manhattan’s Ground Zero—where, we may remember, so many innocents were slaughtered in the name of Allah—the Left has outdone itself. Rather than engage in serious debate with the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans who oppose the project, the mosque’s defenders have simply dubbed the opposing viewpoint “Islamophobia.” As ever when this naming device is used, the left-wing media seem to rally as one. Within the space of a single week, Time put the word on its cover, Maureen Dowd accused the entire nation of it in her column, and CBS News trotted out the charge in reporting on mosque opposition."

Unveiling the Truth About Burqa Bans
In a free society, no one should be forced to integrate
May 24, 2010
by Steve Chapman
"Contrary to the prohibitionists, being deprived of an option is not liberation, and choosing your own clothing is not aggression. The few Muslims who take cover behind the burqa should be tolerated as long as they observe the first axiom of a free society: Live and let live. Maybe someday their opponents will learn to do the same."

Jihad