Category: Uncategorized

Candace Owens In Minneapolis

It seems that Kanye West is not the only one who loves the way Candace Owens thinks. I and more than 500 other people attended a lecture today put on by the Center Of The American Experiment, a Minneapolis-based think tank. This was a major event, a luncheon that drew a large and energetic crowd at a downtown hotel. The last such event I attended was for a similar topic, also arranged by the Center, when Jason Riley came to discuss his book Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Discussing conservatism from the perspective of black Americans and how it offers a superior alternative to liberal thought and policy has long been an interest of mine, but now it seems like it’s becoming somewhat of a mainstream interest just in the last few weeks, thanks mainly to Kanye for bringing it to light, and to Candace for bringing the issue to his attention.

I only became aware of Candace about six weeks ago, when I saw a profile on her from John Stossel shared on Facebook. I was intrigued, I thought that this is a smart, brave young woman, and she seems like a great voice for black people, for youth, and for conservatives in general. I thought “I bet she has a great future,” and immediately put her existence into the back burner of my political thoughts.

Then April happened.

In case you haven’t been on the internet in the last month, Kanye West broke it a couple weeks ago by tweeting a bit of qualified support for Donald Trump. He even dared to follow it up with a criticism of Saint Obama. Worse yet, another famous black rapper made an equally heretical statement that blacks don’t have to vote for Democrats. The left has spent the last two weeks melting down and trying to discredit both Kanye and Candace. To, how shall we say, put them in their place and teach them when to shut up and what they’re allowed to say and believe. Thankfully, neither is the type to do any such thing, and together they seem to be bringing us to what may be a watershed moment in black American politics.

It was with this backdrop that Candace arrived in Minneapolis. Her arrival would have been an “event” in any instance, but considering the absolute perfect timing, it was even more of a sell-out than I believe the Center originally anticipated. I just checked the date of the first invite I received from them about this event, and it was three days before Kanye burned the internet down in April.

Candace started her talk by discussing some of the things that have been said about her recently as she has come into her share of fame and notoriety. Insults about her personality, vile racial slurs, lies about how she grew up etc. She’s been called a white supremacist, a white supremacy apologist, an Uncle Tom, and Alt-Lite, among others. She said that she started to read these stories so that she could learn more about herself, and even made an alert on her phone so she could learn something she didn’t know about herself every day. From the beginning, it was clear that a large part of her charm is that she has a great sense of humor, even about herself. One very salient fact she mentioned is that not a one of these published reporters who smeared her has ever reached out to ask her about her story, and why she believes what she believes.

After starting with the lies people have been telling about her, she dug a bit into the truth of her story and her life. She said that, for example, some people have criticized her as an out of touch rich girl from Connecticut who doesn’t really know the black community. She made it very clear that she came from humble beginnings: “Some people ask me if it’s really true that most of my family was on welfare. It’s not that they were on welfare or have been on welfare, most of my family is on welfare right now.” She estimated that about 80% of her family is on welfare, and said that part of her experience growing up was going to see uncles in prison. She made a point to re-emphasize this, to make it clear that she’s looking at this from the street-level view, and not as an academic or talking head from an ivory tower.

She also discussed her political “awakening,” explaining that when she was younger and less political, she just sort of assumed she was a Democrat, because it was basically the default for her friends, family, and community. Similar to the experience of other black conservatives I’ve listened to and know, and as happened to me personally, when she started to learn more about economics and some of the failed social policies that have contributed to the difficult and impoverished state of much of the black community, she started to lean towards conservatism. She said she’s not even sure if she quite considers herself a Republican, which indicates to me that she’s a deep and serious political thinker, but she at least knows that the principles that appeal to her are conservative. She actually did not spend too much time relating the details of what led her to become conservative, but the general outline was clear.

She continued to relate the story of how she came to be a political commentator. She said that she felt this burning desire to get out there and be part of the conversation when she had her “awakening,” and to, and I love this phrase, “Start a civil war in the black community” in order to empower people individually, to take back black political autonomy so that one party can’t take them for granted, and to generally fight the war of ideas that she so passionately believes must be waged for the sake of black folks. So she quit her job, and decided to start making YouTube videos. Hilarious as always, she prefaced it by saying “I don’t recommend anyone do this, but I quit my job in order to do this full-time.” She said, predictably, that her friends and family thought she was crazy, and even the black Republicans she knew thought she was crazy. Nevertheless, she persisted.

She discussed her rise in popularity in wonderfully vivid and personal terms. She wanted to make short, digestible videos that would capture and hold people’s attention, and learned how to for example make jump cuts to keep the videos interesting. Her first video has become a bit of a modern classic among conservatives (I confess to having heard much about it, but not have watched it until now), but it was one of her posts that soon followed that put her on the map. She said that she posted the video, then took a nap (“I highly recommend taking naps”), and when she woke up it had 20,000 hits. The next day it had 80,000 hits. People were starting to notice her.

Soon thereafter, she was hired by the think tank Turning Point USA, and started to expand her audience and the scope of her videos. She thought it would be a fun idea to got to college campuses and challenge people to change her mind on topics like race and socialism, a la Steven Crowder. As we have seen so much of lately, she encountered a lot of venom and hatred, with white women unironically screaming in her face that she’s a white supremacist, and when she asks why, saying it’s because she supports capitalism. Her group encounters student protests against “white supremacy” when they appear on campus, and generally speaking what she calls “blue-haired white women” try to shame her for being black and conservative. “I don’t know why, but they always have blue hair.”

About half of the talk was about her personal story, and the other half was sort of conservative red meat on race, politics, and economics, discussing her encounters with the left and a lot of the data and history that most of the room was probably pretty familiar with. She discussed the role of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” welfare state in financially incentivizing black mothers not to stay with the fathers of their children, the stark jump in fatherless black families in the sixties from just over 20% to over 70% now, the fact that blacks have been voting over 90% Democrat for decades, so that the party no longer has to actually do anything for black people to compete for their votes, and how they can basically show up every four years to fire up black communities over marginal if not imaginary racial issues to bring out the vote, then go home and forget about them until the next election, etc.

Candace Owns is a major voice for our time that is on her way up. She spoke knowledgeably, forcefully, and with great verve and humor. You can’t help but be disarmed by someone who is highly intelligent, funny, and self-deprecating. One thing that I really like about her is that sense of humor, and the way it helps her interact with her critics, both directly and when talking about their criticism of her. This is a major weakness in both mainstream conservative and wonky libertarian personalities and commentary. Typically, commentators on the right come across as stiff, robotic, or needlessly aggressive when dealing with critics in person or discussing criticism in general. Candace has the brains of the best of them, but has the warmth, humor, and personality of an actual human being, something that has been lacking on the right for some time. She is someone who can discuss ideas with a political “opponent,” and still remain friendly and charming to that person, and to the viewer as well. I think she may be the best talent conservatives have in media at the moment, and her freshness and her background only add to her considerable raw talent. I’m looking forward to learning from her for years to come.

I leave you with a photo that brings together the present and the past of poweful black conservative women. Vive la révolution!

Against Empathy

Today I attended a very interesting lecture on the topic of empathy. It may seem strange at first blush: what’s to discuss? What’s to even think about? Empathy is good right? Like being kind, generous, forgiving, and generally a good person who treats others well, empathy seems like something we can and should take for granted as a sort of core tenet of life and human interactions, something that we can just accept as a foundation for how we’re supposed to act in the world, without any sort of examination. In fact, to even examine it might not only seem strange, but a bit grotesque and off-putting when brought up as a topic of inquiry.

But in fact, this seemingly innocuous subject and impulse may actually be at the root of many, if not most, of our most intractable social and political problems, and I am only now starting to appreciate this fact.

The topic was first brought to my attention, as many topics are, by author and intellectual Sam Harris. In this episode of his podcast from 2015, Sam interviews Yale psychologist Paul Bloom about the research that led to his 2016 book Against Empathy. Bloom argues that rather than enhance our moral understanding and decision-making, empathy may actually interfere with it, distort it, and even steer it towards unforeseen if not immoral actions and consequences. I will say more about this podcast in a later essay, but for now, let us return to today’s fascinating lecture by Deborah Nelson.

Professor Nelson is a professor of English and chair of the English department at the University of Chicago, where she studies late 20th-century US culture and politics. The local University of Chicago Alumni Association in Minneapolis brought her in to speak about her latest book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, which “focuses on six women whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that challenges the preeminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain.” The lecture was advertised as such:

TWIN CITIES HARPER LECTURE: AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

Empathy has been receiving a lot of attention recently, its importance urged not only in national politics but also in the workplace, schools, between friends, and among strangers.
But what if we are wrong? What if empathy isn’t what we need, but unsentimentality? This talk by Deborah Nelson describes the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality as practiced by some of the late 20th century’s most notable women artists and intellectuals: Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Simone Weil. Drawing upon her recent book, Tough Enough, Nelson will consider what it would mean to have an ethics without empathy even in the face of extreme suffering.

Needless to say, I would find this topic fascinating even if I had not previously discovered it in a podcast. It has a wonderful sense of counter-intuitiveness that seems ripe to make one examine previously unquestioned premises.

Professor Nelson began her lecture with a discussion of the recent popularity of empathy in our news, business, and politics. She showed us a few recent headlines, including an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled Empathy: The Most Valuable Thing They Teach at HBS. A quick search of the HBR turns up a plethora of articles on empathy. Next, she showed a headline from the New York Times addressing president Trump’s first attack on Syria in retaliation for the regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians entitled On Syria Attack, Trump’s Heart Came First. [Searching for this, you find that, perhaps a topic worthy of its own discussion, that the New York Times has changed the title of that article, although you can still find the original title here, and a scathing critique of that article here, which I guess indicates some blowback from left wing political circles. Thank you, Internet.] Finally, she showed a headline discussing what is starting to be understood as “empathy fatigue,” a term and analysis I am unfamiliar with, but which makes intuitive sense when you take a few moments to think about the sorts of issues that have dominated our news in the last few years, including but not limited to the refugee crisis, police shootings and Black Lives Matter, and the MeToo movement. Upon reflection, it is apparent how empathy as an analytical tool has taken off as a means to understand our world, and, for better or worse, to reach policy decisions.

Professor Nelson then discussed the genesis of her book, which was to analyze 20th century historical and intellectual figures in the context of an ethic of unsentimentality and their own public controversies with the subject of empathy. She did not set out to write a book solely about women, but she found that it was almost impossible to find a male public intellectual who had been through such a controversy, yet another topic worthy of its own discussion. She weaves the various writings and analyses of these intellectuals with their own personal stories, perhaps ironically drawing our interest in these figures through our own empathy with them.

One extremely interesting foundation of this discussion is the origin of the concept of empathy as an analytical tool and part of our lexicon. Surprisingly, the origins of the word have nothing at all to do with feeling the perspective of another human being. Contrary to intuition, empathy has not always existed as a concept for how to interact charitably with other human beings. Historically, moral philosophers tended to use the words “sympathy” and “compassion” for how to approach treating others with kindness. The term empathy itself came into existence in the 19th century as a scientific term, intended to express literal mirroring of physical states in the natural sciences. As the 20th century emerged, it evolved into yet another meaning with which most of us are probably not familiar, as an aesthetic term used to analyze the quality of art. I’m not quite sure that I understand the exact nature of this use of the word, but from what I gather it was meant to express not a subject-object sensation where the observer feels the perspective of say another person represented artistically, but rather that the art expressed a reality of the object. My understanding is that the word was used as a measure of the quality and truthful representation of the art. In any case, the modern sense of the word “empathy” did not evolve until well after the second world war, taking hold sometime in the 1960s. This historical understanding alone is somewhat revelatory if not revolutionary for our modern understanding, as it demonstrates that empathy is not a fixed and eternal element of our moral understanding and landscape. In fact, not even a very long-existing one. I expect to chew on that alone for some hours in the coming weeks.

In the meat of her discussion, Professor Nelson examined the historical trajectory of our modern concept of empathy, partly by analyzing that modern concept, and partly through exploring some of the details of the lives and work of the women in her book. The overall theme was that these women, each in their own way, took what was probably an unconventional view about moral analysis, in the sense that this sort of work should be done with an ethic of unsentimentality, rather than empathy, for several reasons.

One reason is that empathy, rather than guiding us to proper moral actions and conclusions, can do just the opposite, because the reality of human hard wiring is that we are designed to be empathetic to people who look like us, who are near us, who we find more physically or personally attractive, etc., so that rather than decrease tribalism, it can, and perhaps most often does, increase it. An example would be that one might feel great empathy for the dead and wounded soldiers of one’s own army or country, but little to none for the injured and suffering of one’s enemy, and in fact one’s empathetic intuitions may lead in the opposite direction to antipathy or contempt.

Another reason is simply the fixed limits of our understanding and ability to process the information required to understand the world in an empathetic way. Professor Nelson spoke for some time about the attempt for the world to process the events of World War II, to even find language and concepts for it, let alone to actually understand what had happened. I was not aware, but even going into the 1960s, there was not a robust published body of analysis of the Holocaust, and in fact it was not until the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 that such work began on any scale. Hannah Arendt was not even able to find a publisher for her groundbreaking  work Eichmann In Jerusalem for some time because of a perceived lack of interest. Looking back, it seems almost appalling that the world could go more than a decade without seriously examining the Holocaust, but perhaps this expectation that we would have now of an immediate dissection of this issue reflects how hard it is for us to understand the enormity of this catastrophe for those living in that time. How do you process the scale of the deaths of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands dying in a single day or in one attack, let alone tens of millions dying in the totality of the war? Which brings us back to the limits of empathy, even in its best case, its best use, its best outcomes, and its best intentions. We simply do not have the mental machinery to process empathy on a scale of more than a handful of people, let alone for any truly important and tragic event. Or, as someone once said: “One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.”

In light of the problems with and limits of empathy, it’s a compelling point that perhaps our moral philosophy should be guided by unsentimentality rather than empathy. Professor Nelson examined how her subjects strove to understand the world and morality through an understanding of facts that we can know with our senses and analyze abstractly, rather than with emotional connections to the people we wish to help or wish we could have helped. In doing so, these women received their share of criticism, which I suspect would very likely happen to anyone making such an argument today, whatever their gender or identity.

This was an excellent lecture, and I can’t wait to buy the book. One quote that I found interesting at the end of the lecture was from one of Professor Nelson’s subjects saying something along the lines that “Pain shows us the limits of ourselves.” In other words, pain tells us that we are not the world, that reality and other people exist beyond us, and that there are limits to not only our selves, but our impact on the world. I can’t imagine a more unsentimental note to end on, and I encourage you to find a copy of her book and see what it can teach you for your own understanding of morality.

 

Black Panther: The Politics

So I’m a little late in posting something about this, the movie has been out for awhile now. But on the other hand, maybe that means that most people who wanted to see it in the theater have had a chance to, and so there’s less chance of me spoiling something for a movie fan. If you have not seen the movie, I suggest reading this after you have, although I actually am not going to reveal any major plot points or spoilers, except one that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s been awake in the last two years watching electoral politics.

As someone whose politics lean sliiiiightly to the right of Hollywood, the blatant preaching and overt, ham-fisted messaging present in what seems to be an ever-increasing number of movies and television shows is a major nuisance to my viewing pleasure, and often detracts greatly from my ability to enjoy watching. It’s hard to lose yourself in the story and suspend disbelief when you can see a blatant, staunchly partisan message coming across in the dialogue or action like a banner behind an airplane, and always from the same point of view, of course. It doesn’t make it less odious to realize that most others who view it will not even notice, quite the opposite. It’s only extra aggravating to know that most of the viewing public will not consciously register it, and rather mentally bathe in it unnoticed, as a sort of background radiation of the social and political universe, the unspoken, unremarkable, universal facts, if you will. Which, of course, makes entertainment propaganda and indoctrination the most insidious of all. That propaganda works best which is not known as propaganda at all. At least in the 20th century, the propaganda had the “honor” and “transparency” of being out in the open, and publicly advertised. Now we pay lip service to opposing it, while it runs under, through, and out of literally the entirety of all entertainment we consume.

And quite quickly, just in case anyone’s wondering, no, I’m not wishing for the remedy of overt or covert political propaganda from “the other side” to balance it out. Frankly, I’m not even wishing it out of existence entirely, I’m not that much of a magical thinker. I just wish it was rare rather than common, good-humored rather than hissing, subtle rather than transparent, and maybe just once in a while only moderately to the left rather than from the dankest corners of the Social Justice Warrior cellar.

All that being said, I have to admit that Black Panther, despite its very existence having perhaps the most portentous and loaded political undertone of any movie I can remember, fulfills the requirements of my last sentence, if indeed political messaging must exist in a movie at all. It is rare, mild, good-humored, and subtle. In fact, the quiet politics of the movie only pop up all of three times that I can count. The first and most transparent time is when our hero is chatting with a close friend, and they are discussing whether or not to reveal the true nature of Wakanda’s existence to the world, which would necessarily entail putting themselves on the radar of some assumedly poorer and less developed African neighbors. King T’Challa’s friend warns him that if they do so, they will be sure to have refugees soon arriving at their door, and “Refugees bring their problems with them.” Before he even finished the sentence, I knew that this character was going to turn out to be a bad guy. And when a plot point like this is so easy to discern from one line of dialogue, you start to get an idea of how pervasive and blatant Hollywood’s messaging problem is.

But, this scene and dialogue flowed nicely and evenly after that line, so I was only happy that they didn’t belabor the point, only a trite cliché that “We must decide what kind of country we are to become.” Likewise, when the king’s love interest, who from the start has probably the highest moral position of the movie and is most likely the character that is supposed to be the vessel for the audience, says that indeed they must decide what kind of country they are to be, and they must be an open country that welcomes refugees, you know that she is the moral voice of the filmmakers and the moral anchor of the story. But again, the dialogue, while no Shakespeare, is good-humored enough and flows easily enough past this point that it does not grate much, if at all. It feels more like “Ok ok, I know you had to get it in there, whatever, not even mad.”

Finally, there is a scene at the end where the King is addressing the United Nations, and says that rather than continue their traditional isolationism, they want to open themselves up to the world. I cringed a little when an old white man says “But King T’Challa, what does Wakanda have to offer the world?”, because that’s a little obvious, but it’s not, how shall I say, more coarse or blunt than this boilerplate superhero movie is anyways.

I should step back and say the aggravation of political messaging in a movie seems to have an inverse relationship to the quality of the movie itself. In a movie that is really high quality, even of the superhero genre, moments like this might detract from otherwise high-level, subtle, even exquisite writing. Think about moments like this if they happened in The Dark Knight, or the original Avengers movie. It would have been jarring and taken me out of a movie that I was lost in. Here, I never felt elevated beyond the popcorn-level experience, so a handful of political messages of a subtlety on par with the rest of the movie is not very shocking, nor is it ruining what otherwise could have been a delicate artistic experience. That’s not to disparage this movie as a bad movie, but it’s not a great movie either, not even a great superhero movie. So there’s less to lose or spoil with these little pieces of the writers’ politics.

There is another reason I was pleasantly relieved at the manner in which the politics of this movie were displayed, and I’m not sure if it’s an objective measure, or simply a barometer of low expectations and how far we have sunk. But to me, the politics of this movie were, astoundingly, fairly moderately liberal, and better yet, fairly timeless. Should I confess multiple sighs of relief that this movie, near as I can tell, took no direct jabs at our current president, in any manner, on any topic? Is it objectively good, or simply that I expect so little, that there were no messages related to any of the polarizing identity politics topics that have been the focus of moral panic over the last few years, regarding race, gender, or trans-anythingism? Is it right to almost feel like I should applaud Hollywood movie writers, and, dare I say it, black Hollywood movie writers, producers and directors, for not throwing some dreary, obvious stones at Donald Trump or firing some quivers from the bag of racial identity politics arrows that have been filled to capacity recently?

Is there some kind of award for that? Maybe there should be…

razzie-award1

To restate it, I felt like the relatively mild and unobtrusive political messages in this movie could have, and very likely would have, existed and had meaning ten or twenty years ago, or twenty years in the future. They felt like very universal campfire feel-good sentiments that could be part of any movie Hollywood might have ever made. Again, context matters, and considering the political baggage around the very fact that this movie happened, not even to mention the time it happened in, I have to say I’m genuinely very, very pleasantly surprised with how the creators of this movie handled the politics contained in the story, and honestly very impressed that they did not succumb to inserting obvious, boring political messages that would no doubt have been hailed and huzzahed as “brave” and “resistance” to…..whatever.

So frankly I think that this speaks very highly of their artistic integrity, if not their business sense. I suppose there is some cynical possibility that they were chomping at the bit to do just that, but refrained for fear of alienating potential audience members, but I think this would have just as likely rallied those inclined to see this movie anyways, certainly the critics, and certainly would have given them some free media buzz and soundbite attention. And then there’s the fact that they did insert some politics anyways, so if there were cynical business motives involved, you would think they’d have the sense to scrub those as well. No, my sense is they handled this just the way they wanted to, and all-in-all, with the entirety of the context considered, including the social and creative world they live in, I think they handled it pretty impressively and with an admirable amount of restraint from where you can be virtually certain their political views lie.

So why do I write this? Because I think art matters, both when it’s political and when it is not, both when it’s intentionally or overtly political, and when it’s political only as an unavoidable consequence of context, such as the first virtually all-black blockbuster popcorn movie. (Isn’t it funny, by the way, that it took us ten years after the first black president to get such a movie? Perhaps a subject for another essay…) Regardless, I view art as meaningful and essential to the human condition (Rubinstein plays Chopin in the background as I write this), and how it gets created and what it conveys, overtly and indirectly, matters. It is important whether overt politics has taken over the fictional getaways of our storytelling, and whether and when it has not, or has not much. Thankfully, this movie, as well as the other comparable popcorn movie Wonder Woman, handled this pressure well, handled it with grace, and did not succumb to easy virtue and cheap praise for cheap shots in the midst of what is, after all, supposed to be entertainment. And I applaud all involved for that. I can only pray they manage to keep it up and resist the temptation to “be brave” and “resist” by scoring easy applause and points in their creations going forward.

But so far, as of now, we can say: so far so good.

Black Panther: Movie Review

As those who know me personally are aware, I am mixed race, half white and half black. There are some ways in which this matters a lot and brings some important meaning to who I am, how I feel, and to my views in life, and there are some ways in which this means nothing. My feelings about this movie are a mixture of both.

Another aspect of my identity and personality, probably far more significant to me than my race, is that I am a lifelong comic book geek, specifically a Marvel fan. As such, I have a heightened interest in and affection for Marvel movies and the Marvel universe, and a pretty solid understanding of the stories, characters, and themes of the comics on which these movies are based.

So for me, this movie connects two important aspects of my life in very exciting ways, and every since it was announced, I’ve been cautiously optimistic and hopeful that this movie would deliver.

So to get started, let me say this up front: this movie delivers.

It is exciting.

It is dramatic.

It is action-packed.

The characters are interesting and compelling.

And most of all: it’s just fun, which really should be the goal of any comic book movie.

The central theme of the movie is the internal struggle of the Black Panther, who is the king of the fictional Wakanda, over what kind of king to be, and what kind of kingdom he wants his homeland to be. It’s the ancient theme of the struggle to rule, both internally and externally. These themes are recognizable from Shakespeare and Machiavelli to Braveheart and Troy: what it means to be a just or effective ruler (can you be both?), what it takes to protect your people, how to defend your power within your kingdom, and the struggle between being a philosopher and a king. For a philosopher’s domain is Truth, and a king’s domain is Power. A philosopher can wax poetic about abstract, universal principles, while a king has the much more earthly concern with the welfare of his people, how they can sustain themselves, how they can perpetuate their culture, and how he can prevent or repel foreign invasion. The movie explores these themes on various levels, and it makes the viewer understand that these are not simple problems with easy solutions. It explores both king T’Challa’s internal struggles and his struggles with his enemies, within the kingdom and without.

But let’s not get too serious here. It is, after all, a comic book movie. While it does explore the themes I’ve mentioned, it is far more a comic book movie than a philosophical treatment of leadership. The characters are all fun, cool, and kick a lot of you-know-what. One thing that mildly and surprisingly pleased me was the scope of the powerful female characters in the movie. As a friend told me today, “I was expecting the movie to have strong black characters and to feel a sense of black empowerment, but I didn’t expect it to be so full of awesome female characters and have so much female empowerment!” And this is true. In fact, while I’ve only seen the movie one time, my sense is that there are actually more important female characters than male characters in this movie. And they are really cool characters that are fun to watch.

Overall, this movie really makes the grade, and I have to highly recommend that everyone watch it. There is a fair amount of politics and fanfare surrounding this movie, but I have to say it’s been handled pretty well and much more tastefully than I would have expected. I think there’s really no way to get around it, it is SUPER cool to see a movie comprised almost exclusively of black characters, and, but here’s the important part: a movie that’s NOT “about” black people, “about” black culture, “about” black struggles or history, or “about” black families and communities. It’s just a plain old super hero movie, about a hero who just *happens* to be black, in a kingdom that just *happens* to be in Africa. It’s just a story folks, it’s not about black people, and it’s not about being black. It’s just a cool, kick-ass story about heroes, villains, sword fights, cool hair, cool cars, and cool costumes. The black people in this movie aren’t one-dimensional. The hero is black. The villain is black, and he’s an evil S.O.B. (while also having a nuanced, understandable back story, “yay Marvel!”). The morally ambiguous spoiler is black. The people who support the hero are black. The people who betray the hero are black. Black people are good, bad, and everything in between in this movie. And that’s important. If a movie is going to be “for” black people in the marketplace, it has to represent black people as people, with every greatness, evil, virtue, and flaw of people. And this movie does that.

I was going to write a bit at the end about the politics contained in the movie, but I think I’ve said enough here about whether I recommend the movie or not, and that I should save that for a separate post.

The only thing that needs be said here is: go see Black Panther, as soon as you can!

Why can’t we all just get along?

I’m about to do something I won’t do very often on my blog. I’m going to post commentary from someone else. This is a rarity, because I’m using my blog as a means to share my thoughts with the world. But sometimes, someone else’s thoughts or words so closely overlap my own, or convey something I’ve been thinking about and trying to say so well, that I just have to share what they’re saying and help spread their ideas.

This is one such case.

I will say, right off the bat, that I am not generally a big fan of Van Jones. I’ve seen a lot of him on CNN, and I saw a lot LOT of him during the 2016 election season. As a rule, he is a reliable one-note partisan instrument, or, to put it another way, the tritone of the left.

However, it seems that since the last time I heard from him, he has done a some soul searching, and some empathetic thinking, going a bit deeper into what happened in 2016 than his histrionic “Whitelash” comment in the immediate aftermath. I applaud him for thinking about a difficult subject that is obviously painful for him in a deep and empathetic manner, and in trying to sincerely understand why people may have different beliefs or vote differently than him.

The first few minutes of this video are essential listening for anyone on the left who wants to understand the 2016 election, or what average American conservatives are thinking and feeling lately. In the last few minutes he talks about some ways that conservatives appear to many people, and I think he’s right that they come off this way not only to people on the left, but to many people in the middle. He also discusses a few things that conservatives can do better, or should be able to do better regarding reaching out to minority voters. I disagree with some of his assumptions and some of the details, but all in all, I think he’s expressing several things that are deeply true, that we need to sort out in order to heal this country. Things that both liberals and conservatives can do better.

Again, I must applaud him for his effort, and while I have not been a fan of his punditry historically, I must be able to forgive and be empathetic to him, if I want people to forgive and be empathetic to me.

Please watch this when you can, and share with as many people as you can. I think this dialogue, and trying to do more of this with each other, will do us all some good.

Here it is:

First article on my Facebook page

Hello everyone. I have started a Facebook page to share articles and invite discussion about the issues they raise. I am using my blog for my writing, and my Facebook page to encourage and engage in discussion about these issues, and also share some shorter ideas or sayings I come up with myself that would be fun to discuss. Here is the first such article, one that is as hilarious as it is insightful and telling about the human condition.

Enjoy!

How can you be a marxist and a relativist at the same time?

It seems pretty clear that the same people who buy into cultural and moral relativism, who see no moral difference between Saudi Arabia and the United States, between Iran and Israel, who claim that you can’t judge any culture as inferior or superior, who direct post-modern deconstruction at nearly or literally every social norm or value, also nearly or exactly overlap 100% on a ven diagram of people who believe in the modern redefinition of the marxist social constructs of oppressor vs. oppressed, which is as clearly a black and white notion of categorical good and evil as you can get.

How do they manage to hold both in their minds at the same time? Is it simply cognitive dissonance? Or do they experience no cognitive dissonance because there is no cognitive awareness of what should be dissonant, to believe both A and -A at the same time?

It just occurred to me reading Icarus Fallen (as it has before, but less clearly) that these  two groups are the same people, and the way Chantel Delsol describes it really shines a light on this contradiction:

“We are here in the realm of a ‘black market’ moral code, one that operates without clearly declaring itself, hiding behind the mask of the philosophy of values. It proposes an objective good while at the same time rejecting the objectivity of the good. It ostracizes those who contest it even while it proclaims subjectivism.”

How is this philosophically possible? Or is it not, and it is simply humanly possible because we are so easily self-deluded?