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Needed cheering up
Feb. 10th, 2009 09:01 amAfter President Obama's administration's failure to defend civil liberties yesterday, I needed cheering up. Thank goodness for The National Review (can't belive I just said that).
I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain
"Along those ponderous lines, National Review is currently unveiling -- one by one, to keep the suspense level extra-high -- its list of 'the 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years.' One of its writers, S.T. Karnick...
... named the genuinely superb 1985 Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, as #22 on the list. When doing so, Karnick wrote -- and this is really a quote that appears in National Review's Corner (h/t Crust1):
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil portrays a darkly comic dystopia of malfunctioning high-tech equipment and the dreary living conditions common to all totalitarian regimes. Everything in the society is built to serve government plans rather than people.
The film is visually arresting and inventive, with especially evocative use of shots that put the audience in a subservient position, just like the people in the film. Terrorist bombings, national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous elite, perversion of science, and government use of torture evoke the worst aspects of the modern megastate.
Is it even theoretically possible for someone's brain to allow them to write that last sentence in National Review as listing the hallmarks of "a totalitarian regime" and "the worst aspects of the modern megastate" without simultaneously realizing that this is everything that same magazine has cheered on for the last eight years at least? Karnick is a rabid fan of 24 and finds discussions of how the show glorifies torture and "the opinions of ex-military and police officers who argue that torture is never effective and never justified" to be "absurdly tendentious" and "stupendously uninteresting."
I'm genuinely interested in understanding the specific thought process that allows someone like this to write a paragraph like the one above while remaining blissfully unaware of the glaring irony and internal contradictions. Though we all have the capacity for advocating inconsistent ideas in different circumstances, certain instances are so blatant that it's hard to believe the person's brain allows them to remain blind to it. Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, in his probing study of the right-wing authoritarian mind and its capacity to embrace multiple contradictory beliefs at the same time, probably came the closest to shining light on this bizarre syndrome.
I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain
"Along those ponderous lines, National Review is currently unveiling -- one by one, to keep the suspense level extra-high -- its list of 'the 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years.' One of its writers, S.T. Karnick...
... named the genuinely superb 1985 Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, as #22 on the list. When doing so, Karnick wrote -- and this is really a quote that appears in National Review's Corner (h/t Crust1):
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil portrays a darkly comic dystopia of malfunctioning high-tech equipment and the dreary living conditions common to all totalitarian regimes. Everything in the society is built to serve government plans rather than people.
The film is visually arresting and inventive, with especially evocative use of shots that put the audience in a subservient position, just like the people in the film. Terrorist bombings, national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous elite, perversion of science, and government use of torture evoke the worst aspects of the modern megastate.
Is it even theoretically possible for someone's brain to allow them to write that last sentence in National Review as listing the hallmarks of "a totalitarian regime" and "the worst aspects of the modern megastate" without simultaneously realizing that this is everything that same magazine has cheered on for the last eight years at least? Karnick is a rabid fan of 24 and finds discussions of how the show glorifies torture and "the opinions of ex-military and police officers who argue that torture is never effective and never justified" to be "absurdly tendentious" and "stupendously uninteresting."
I'm genuinely interested in understanding the specific thought process that allows someone like this to write a paragraph like the one above while remaining blissfully unaware of the glaring irony and internal contradictions. Though we all have the capacity for advocating inconsistent ideas in different circumstances, certain instances are so blatant that it's hard to believe the person's brain allows them to remain blind to it. Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, in his probing study of the right-wing authoritarian mind and its capacity to embrace multiple contradictory beliefs at the same time, probably came the closest to shining light on this bizarre syndrome.
