Some Art

 

 

Here are some pictures of some art I saw in New York City.

 

 

Greek Vase
Showing Orestes murder of Clytemnestra

Journalism as It Should Not Be

Janet Malcolm and Jeffrey MacDonald

Janet Malcolm


The following is an expansion of a comment I made of an article I founded at the Los Angles Review of Books website by  Jess Cotton.1

In the review Mr. Cotton examines several books by Janet Malcolm that touch on legal matters and shows a starry eyed, fan worship of Ms. Malcolm. Here I will only discuss Mr. Cotton’s treatment of the case of Joseph McGinniss and Jeffrey MacDonald. 2

Maleficent

&

Frozen

Two Stories of Sismance1

Movie Poster

Spoilers!!

Recently Disney gave us two different stories based on classic fairy tales. In the case of Maleficent it is the Disney retelling the tale of its own Sleeping Beauty. This time from the point of view of the central villain, Maleficent. In the case of Frozen we get the story of the Snow Queen suitably and quite thoroughly disneyfied and turned into a tale of two sisters.

Sex

&

Puritanism

A few thoughts

One of the annoying things about our society is the way it deals with sex. Frankly it is both repulsive and annoying how our society overtly sexualizes so much.

Since our society at least in the west is obsessed with sex in the sense of sexualizing so much, waning interest is frequently viewed has some sort of calamity, a disaster to be thwarted, retarded and reversed. Even societies that make much of a premium on female modesty and repress overt sexuality in fact obsess over sex.

Responses to a Book Review

Map of China

In a previous posting I put up a slightly modified brief review of a book by the ideologue Thomas Sowell, Conquest and Cultures.1 Which I had posted at Amazon.com. In that book Thomas Sowell regurgitated a basic late 19^th century Whig interpretation of History view of the development of various societies. The book was in my opinion seriously flawed and basically danced over the fact, and it is fact, that Western Dominance was not just the result of the accumulation of “Cultural Capital”, (Thomas Sowell’s use of this phrase is an excellent example of the tendency of such ideologues to commodify things that are not commodities. In other words an excellent example of the commodity fetish.), but also of exploitation of others through coercive violence, fraud and exploitation. In other words straight forward imperialism. Instead Sowell argues that it was largely the result of what amounts to moral superiority. That is pure hogwash. Some people responded to my opinions of this book. Here are their comments with my responses, here expanded.