New Domain Chronic Murmuring is moving to Chattablogs, thanks to the kindness of Josiah. Please make changes to your URLs, if my blog is listed among your list of links, as I will eventually delete this page. The new domain is: http://chattablogs.com/scott.

 
What Makes me Excited about Capitalism is... (before I say, have you noticed my inconsistent capitalization in the titles? I don't ever remember the rules of grammar anymore. Which of the words in a title do you capitalize, and which do you not?) space travel. Space travel makes me enthusiastic about capitalism. It makes so much sense - privatize space travel, and we'll start making the gains in space exploration that all of us dream about. Leave it to the government, and it'll stall, and the best we'll have is that giant turkey in the sky, the International Space Station. Foreign Policy has a great article (I just linked to it there) on how rich, thrill-seekers hold the key to expanding space exploration. The last couple of years show the legitimacy of this. Hollywood directors, gameshow creators, and boybands everywhere are lining up to pop down $20 million to go into outer space. It's just a matter of unraveling the gordian knot of beaurecratic regulation and letting entrepeneurs provide services to get them there.

 
Marxism Infiltrates Film Theory Arts and Letters pointed to an interesting article at the Los Angeles Times (registration is free, but required to read the article) about how marxist critical theory has infiltrated film theory at leading film schools. Reading this reminded me of my experience as an undergraduate majoring in English at the University of Tennessee. Towards the end, I was dying to get away from the theory, and ended up spending the last two years taking classes in creative writing and poetry, mainly because the least ideological professors taught those subjects. My knee-jerk allegiance to anarchy and libertarian political thought is honestly entirely due to that experience. I hated that crap so much. It was all just blather and indoctrination, from day one. Now it's going into film studies, apparently. Roger Ebert pointedly says that "film theory has nothing to do with film." The same goes for literary theory, honestly. Literary theory has nothing to do with literature. Literary theory is merely one of the current hosts for parasitic marxist theory which has, since the fall of the Soviet Union, gone into hiding and moves around in academia, looking for tenured faculty and departments to infect. The article discusses briefly the similar effect that - for lack of a better term - New Left theories had on English departments. The frustration expressed in the article more or less mirrors the kind of frustration I had as an English major. I often feel like I got jipped by that education, and that's probably why I was so entranced by New St. Andrews College for a while there. While I was reading epistolary novels by Hispanic Lesbians, the kids at New St. Andrews were reading Dante, Flannery O'Connor, and T.S. Eliot. It just seemed like dreamy from my perspective. I did finally try to write this Christian defense of authorial intent for one independant study on 20th century literary theory. E.D. Hirsch struck me as being the most Christian option available among all the people I'd read. Mainly, because he emphasized that "meaning" was bound up in what the author intended at the time. While new insights could be gathered from reading the text in light of changes in language and culture and history, one should always strive to study the text in light of the time in which the text was written, and specifically attempt to draw out what the author intended at the time of writing. This, I felt like, was nearly identical to the common sense approach to studying Scripture that I had. When I finished that independant study, I was so turned off by literary theory - and any class that used the books we read as merely one avenue of indoctrinating the students with a Marxist worldview - that I switched over to poetry. Anyway, here's a couple of quotations from the article. Read the entire article, though, if you are interested in these kinds of things.

"Hershel Parker, respected author of a two-volume biography of writer Herman Melville, says the transformation of film studies mirrored that in many college English departments. "There's no room for anyone in English departments who wants to talk about author intention," says Parker, who goes into Old Testament rage at the mention of the subject. When the New Left theories invaded American English departments, Parker believes it all but wiped out serious scholarship. "I was a freak for wanting to go into the library manuscript collections." Since authors no longer matter, Parker says, many researchers believe they no longer need to go back and read the author's correspondence and working manuscripts, or study the events that shaped his or her sensibility. "It's naïve New Criticism, where all you do is submit yourself to the text," says Parker. "These people have no clue about going to do research. They don't know you can find out about a person's life or work. They have not, and their teachers have not done real research."

 
American History X I saw one of my favorite movies last night for the first time in a long time. American History X, starring Ed Norton and Eddie Furlong, and co-starring Beverly D'Angelo and Elliot Gould, is a powerful exploration of the psycho-social dynamics surrounding ideological membership. In this case, Ed Norton plays a brilliant, articulate, neo-nazi skinhead. This movie is painful to watch at times, and contains one sexually explicit scene, as well as several extremely violent scenes - including one rape scene. So I recommend it with some caveats that "viewing discretion is advised." Still, I think it is one of the more powerful films I've seen, and from the Christian perspective, it illustrates the impotency of argumentation in the face of a committed ideologue. In the end, what succeeds in bringing Norton's character out of the neo-nazi paradigm is experiencing the love and friendship of two black characters - one a longtime mentor and former teacher, the other a savior-of-sorts who befriends him when he needs it while serving time for manslaughter in Chino - as well as experiencing the contradictions of the ideology itself when several of his colleagues betray him, and the ideology they claim to serve so faithfully. The script is a very brave one, and Norton does not shirk away from some of the more difficult scenes in which he must give a convincing intellectual and emotional defense of fascism. This is actually one of the more powerful elements of the movie - it does not present a straw man of fascism, but rather, attempts to muster as much of a defense for the ideology with the beautiful Norton as its spokesman. I urge discerning Christians to watch it.

 
Walter Block's Libertarian Autobiographies Walter Block, an anarco-capitalist/Austrian economist at Loyola college in New Orleans, has been requesting and collecting essays by various prominent libertarians on the influence of Austrian economics, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, in their intellectual development. The entire list can be seen here. His most recent addition is University of Chicago legal scholar, Richard Epstein.

 
Amputee Wannabes "Amputee Wannabes" are people who seek to have healthy limbs amputated for reasons inexplicable. A new documentary entitled Whole is about this strange group of body modifiers. An article on this phenomenon appeared in Slate this morning.