Daily Archives: June 7, 2017

President Trump dares to question whether globalization is an unmitigated good, and for this he is roundly criticized by the Left. But we should question it.

For people like Tom Friedman it is an article of faith that globalization is going to lead to a utopia in which people of different countries, religions, ethnicities and cultures freely and openly interact. Like the pieces of many-colored glass in a kaleidoscope, theyll create, through their interactions, ever-changing mosaics of beauty and harmony. The pieces will retain their distinctive shapes and colors, but the gestalt they form will be infinitely more interesting than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes that works. All culture is hybrid, and American culture more so than others. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arts. Visit the African-American museum in Washington, D.C., and listen to the music. Youll hear the soul of everything that constitutes America and its history.

Only it doesnt always work out so nicely. Borrowing from other cultures used to be a good thing. Now, its cultural appropriation, a major sin for the moral imbeciles on the left. W.E.B. Du Bois said: I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. But now Shakespeare is supposed to wince, when a person whos not English reads him.

Then theres the way bad ideas get globalized. Consider the cultural boycotts that are organized against Israel by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement. BDS was founded by Qatari-born Omar Barghouti, a liar, a tax dodger, and an outspoken advocate of the destruction of the Jewish state. We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save itI, for one, support euthanasia, he said in 2013.

The very left-leaning rock group Radiohead ran up against BDS, when it scheduled a Tel Aviv gig for next July, and BDS rounded up more than 50 artists to sign an incendiary petition to pressure the group to cancel. The public way in which the artists chose to communicate with one of their peers, who chose not to follow their lead, was meant to name, shame and blame, to create a lynch-mob mentality where rational discourse is bypassed in favor of mass hysteria.

Its deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw sh** at us in public, said Radioheads Thom York in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. But engaging with people who disagree with them is not the way the left operates. Engaging is intellectually difficult, and you might end up changing your mind. Better to bully, intimidate and humiliate. Arouse passions, not minds!

When you try to persuade someone using rational discourse, you are making certain assumptions about them. You assume that they are informed and that they are intelligent and, above all, that they are moral agents. Thats what bothered York so much about the petition signed by his peers. Its deeply disrespectful to assume that were either being misinformed or that were so retarded we cant make these decisions ourselves, he said. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme. Actually, its more than patronizing; its dehumanizing.

In his Genealogy of Morals,Nietzsche describesvaluation making moral choices rather than reason as the trait that defines humanity. But allowing people to make choices is antithetical to the left, because it implies that it doesnt have a monopoly on truth. For the left, people are vessels, limited to receiving truths established by a consensus of elites. Thats how teachers treat their students, and thats how the elites treat everyone else. Witness the climate scientists who anathemize those who wont believe in their consensus truths about the weather.

And heres where globalism presents the greatest danger. In universities across the world, the same tactics are being used, the same messages propounded as absolute truth. Intellectual discussion is a shining artifact of the past. It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? a Yale student shouts at a professor who tries to reason with her. Its about creating a home here! If he disagrees with her, the professor should step down. And step down he was forced to do.

York cant wrap his mind around the idea that diversity of opinion isnt permitted in academia. The university thing is more of a head f**k for me. Its like,really? You cant go talk to other people who want to learn stuff in another country? Really? The one place where you need to be free to express everything you possibly can. You want to tell these people you cant do that? His incredulity is refreshing, as more and more we become inured to this sort of thing.

The globalization is good folks would be more persuasive, if we were all saints and only benign ideas were shared across cultures. Instead, were seeing bad ideas being propagated across borders and cultures on the web, in social media. New internet mobs have arisen to persecute people whose ideas they dont share. Rational discourse has nothing to do with it, but only smash and grab and silence anyone with whom you disagree. Its what we used to see on television, when Muslims across the Middle East rioted when they perceived that Islam had been dissed. Its what we see today in America, at Yale and on other college campuses, and its the dark side of globalization.

President Trump is right, then, to be skeptical about the effects of globalization, when its the wrong values that are being globalized. American openness to new ideas, tolerance for different beliefs, and the rigors of Western scientific inquiry are being discarded. In their place, were importing the third worlds strictures on liberty.

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The Dark Side of Globalization - American Spectator

Spoiler warning: There are spoilers including discussion of the plot of the Wonder Woman movie here in this post.

One of the biggest revelations in Wonder Woman is tucked into the end of the film. Diana confronts Ares, the god of war, about the nature of man and mankinds goodness. The two mythic beings have the character-defining philosophical battle of the movie, and then he slips in a declaration that makes Diana question everything she was ever taught: She is the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods.

Up until this point, Diana believed what her mother had told her that she was made out of clay and Zeus had given her life. By way of magic and myth, Zeus has symbolically been a father to her. But Ares implies something a bit more sordid: that Zeus had a relationship with her mother, Hippolyta, and created a child. And if thats the case, then its not clear what else the Amazons lied to Diana about.

The movie leaves the final interpretation of Dianas origin to its audience, and in doing so reflects a debate over Dianas origin thats been going on in Wonder Woman comic books over the past several years.

The original creator of Wonder Woman is a man named William Moulton Marston, who was, among other things, credited with inventing the lie-detector machine (which brings to light why Diana uses a lasso that compels people to tell the truth). He also had progressive, complex, and intertwining views about gender, relationships, and sex. Marston wrote about women being to be superior to men in some aspects, but was also intrigued by the dynamic between the dominant and submissive hence why so many Wonder Woman comics portrayed the heroine bound and blindfolded.

Marstons origin story reflected these ideas. In his version, Diana was born on a paradise island that was home to Amazons, women who were enslaved by mankind they were kept in chains but eventually broke free. On their island, they developed physical and mental strength and raised Diana, who was born out of clay and did not need a father. Diana, in Marstons eyes, was raised in this perfect world, on this perfect island, inhabited solely by women a deliberate decision.

Marston borrowed Wonder Womans origin story from feminist utopian fiction, which always involved women living on an island, and what happens when a man or a group of men is shipwrecked there, Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor and author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, told me over email. It was a thought experiment, designed to ask readers to think about how all political orders are man-made. The point was that there werent men. Marston hitched this tale to the legend of the Amazons.

There is no Zeus in Marstons story, and its strictly a world without men. Men were the source of pain and evil for the Amazons, and Marston wanted to explore what it would be like to have a hero like Diana, a woman raised solely by women, completely aware of what men are capable of at their worst. Philosophically, Marston believed that women were capable of showing humanity a different way of life, a peaceful and loving one, in contrast to the ways of man and the patriarchy. Diana was the embodiment of this philosophy.

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power, Marston wrote in a 1943 issue of The American Scholar. Womens strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

Marstons story was tweaked in 1959 in Wonder Woman No. 105 (written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru), where Diana is given gifts from the gods and goddesses, like Athenas wisdom, Aphrodites beauty, strength from Demeter that rivals Herculess, and Hermess speed.

This wasnt the first tweak to Dianas origin, or the last: Some stories rewrote and reinterpreted the reason Diana came to the world of man, or how she got her name, or why she carries a sword. But its really the change that came to the comics in 2011, the Zeus-you-are-the-father reveal we see in the movie, that fundamentally redefines Wonder Woman.

In 2011, DC Comics instituted a relaunch of 52 of its titles called the The New 52, which essentially undid those titles previous storylines and reset them at a new starting point; it was characterized at the time as a way to make the comics more accessible to new readers. In writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiangs New 52 run, Wonder Womans origin is changed: Diana learns she was never made out of clay, and like what the movie implies with Ares the clay story was used as a cover by Wonder Womans mother to hide that she and Zeus had had a relationship. Further, Ares teaches Diana how to fight.

Along with all this, the new origin credits men with how powerful and formidable Diana is, Alan Kistler wrote for the Mary Sue in 2014. Whereas before she had learned all her training from the Amazon women, her greatest teacher is now Ares.

The Azzarello-Chiang run also includes a story in which the Amazons reproduce by finding sailors, raping them, killing them, and then selling male babies into Hephaestuss slavery in exchange for weapons (this editorial decision was critically maligned, despite general praise for the book).

Adding Zeus to the story, and in particular adding Zeus as Dianas father, undermines the basic plot, Lepore told me. It turns the story of Wonder Woman into something much closer to the story of Thor it makes her story less distinctive.

Essentially, the New 52 reboot inserts men into Marstons story and significantly alters the territory Marston wanted to explore by having Diana raised in a female utopia. In the new telling, Wonder Womans powers dont come from goddesses or other Amazons, but rather from Zeus and Ares. Her mother, the woman who loves her most in life and the epitome of Amazon glory, is refashioned as a betrayer and deceiver. Paradise Island, instead of being a place that lives separately and peacefully from the world of man, now becomes a place where men like Zeus wield power and Amazons are vindictive.

Its hard to reconcile this new origin story with Marstons vision and intent for the character. It also changes the way one might interpret the origin story presented in the movie.

To be clear, Im not here to bury the Azzarello-Chiang run there have been plenty of articles written about how good their story was. Im a fan of how the two explored Dianas psychology and interiority, and how the comic really felt like her own. Furthermore, Marstons view of women and feminism wasnt entirely pristine: As Lepore wrote in her book, Marstons portrayal often veers into feminism as fetish territory.

Marston, as near as I can tell, from reading his letters and diaries, wanted kids to see her as a hero, a very strong woman, who would do whatever she set her mind to do, Lepore told me. He liked that adult men might find her especially alluring, and the scenes of her emancipation (from bondage) thrilling. He didnt think there was a contradiction there.

Essentially, Wonder Woman is a figure of feminism that has been historically written and drawn by men (like a lot of the characters who exist in the comic book universe). So perhaps its better to think of the character as someone who, throughout the years, has reflected what men believe powerful women to be.

The Wonder Woman film made me want to reread Azzarello and Chiangs issues again, and explore the relationships they portray between love and violence, between physical strength and gender, and between Diana and her family. It doesnt feel like a search for answers, but more of an appreciation for where authors, writers, and artists have taken the character in both the comic books and the movie.

To its credit, Wonder Woman slyly doesnt pick one view of Dianas origin, and what it means for the character, over the other. Ares is an unreliable character, and he could be deceiving Diana, but its also clear that Hippolyta kept secrets from her daughter in an attempt to protect her.

The finales portrayal of Wonder Woman finding strength in love seems closer to Marstons ideal, while the annihilation of Ares seems more in line with her New 52 characterization. But the film, and those who worked on it, seems to understand that perhaps the greatest thing you can do for a character like Diana and those mighty Amazons isnt to choose Marston over Azzarello, but rather to inspire fans to form their own ideas about what strong women mean to them.

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Wonder Woman's dueling origin stories, and their effect on the hero's feminism, explained - Vox