Too Close to Home

Socialism And the Hollywood Elites



 

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Lord of Karma

You Reap What You Sow

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

As the old saying goes, if they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

We should begin by recognizing that the sinful heart of man is everywhere, and affects everything we do. No one gets a pass—conservatives, liberals, and all in-betweeners. The Church is not excluded because the Church is charged to welcome sinners, and part of the price of this is that sinners actually come.

No institution or movement should be charged on the basis of sinful or scandalous behavior that appears there. Were we to start doing that, everybody would be vulnerable to accusation. The issue is rather the problem of being two-faced—demanding that others deal with what you won’t deal with.

Contrary to popular misunderstanding, the Lord did not require us to “judge not.” His teaching on this was not to judge with unequal balances, not to judge with a double standard. The judgment you apply to others will be applied to you.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Catechisms)

The Rats of Moria

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

You cannot successfully deny in real time what you robustly affirm in the catechism.

For the Christian, because his basic catechetical truths are noble and upright (about how we are supposed to live), the gap between his profession and experience is uphill. Hypocrisy is naturally an embarrassment because it represents a failure to attain.

But because the catechetical truths affirmed by the sexual revolution are suspended over a great abyss, like Wil E Coyote holding an anvil, their hypocrisy problem is entirely different. Their catechism affirms that obedience to every random sexual impulse will be totally great, self-actualizing, fulfilling, natural, life-affirming, and helpful in the process of self-discovery. You know—as the eager ego goes spelunking down in the caverns of chthonic desire, in order to search out the wonders and complexities of orgasmic genderlusts. But it turns out the Rats of Moria live down there.

And so this explains the reaction to the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. Anybody who knows anything about the septic system of Hollywood knows that he was living in fulfillment of the catechism. They have these great massive pumps so that they can have the septic tanks installed at the very highest levels, up where the top talents and power producers live.

So the problem was not that he failed to live up to a high and lofty standard. The problem was that obedience to the catechism is a lot creepier in real life than was promised by the catechism.

Deja-Vu All Over Again

The A-Listers' Ball

Harvey Weinstein is Hollywood's newest blockbuster production.  It garners breathless shock and horror headlines every day.  The rating agencies are claiming that this particular soap opera has metrics which are off the scale. 

Forgive us if we stifle yawns.  This is a rerun of an old B-grade soapie we have seen countless times.  In one corner is a cluster of Hollywood A-listers surrounded by a gaggle of wannabes.  In the other corner are ordinary rubes.  The celebs, surrounded by their corner attendants who fawn, adulate, and hang on every word, proclaim the evils of every kind of pop cause: sexism, Trumpism, anti-abortionism, along with really serious, momentous evils like Global Warming.  They point the finger.  They hector.  They lecture.  They pontificate and declaim from the heights of Mount Sinai.  They are the high priests and priestesses of Baal worship.  The media ooh and aaah at every rehearsed word and gestured artifice.

The lesser mortals in the other corner weave with the jibes and duck with the haymakers.  The arrogant energy of the A-listers is relentless.  We start to feel our shame.  We hang our heads.  We are on the verge of capitulation, throwing in the towel.  Maybe we really are dumb rubes.  Maybe that dumb blond A-lister really is an authority on climate change and nuclear war. 

Well, yes she is.  But not as we were led to expect.

It Pays To Take the Log Out of One's Own Eye First

Not All Bullies And Their Victims Are Equal 

. . . In Meryl Streep’s Eyes

Dana
Patterico

Meryl Streep’s unloading on Donald Trump was pretty rich, on a number of levels. Was anyone surprised by her rant? If you were, then you haven’t been paying attention and shame on you. What else would you expect during a self-congratulatory show where a liberal icon has a captive audience full of fellow believers still collectively trying to figure out how the gods turned against them. Don’t they know who we are?!! To me, Streep’s tired tirade was about as surprising as Trump’s complete inability to resist taking the bait and keep his yap shut. Both utterly predictable. Both absurd.

I don’t really want to take too much time examining the stunningly insular arrogance of a multi-millionaire, but hey, she got on the soapbox, so just for kicks, let’s look at a few of her comments. Be careful not to step in the puddle of dripping condescension:

So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

Oh boy, those Tinsel Town Saviors are ready to save you from suffering through a pedestrian sport where 70% of the players are black, and another one that has been described as the “most racially and internationally diverse sporting organization in the world.” Instead, Streep believes you prefer a steady diet from Tinsel Town’s visual buffet of glorified gun violence or objectification of women. You choose. It’s a rich irony, don’t you think, that a wealthy, lily-white Patrician beauty seems wholly oblivious to her condescending dismissal of a segment of the population who have, in large part, found their way out of generational poverty and gone on to great success through these chosen sports? Oh well, high-brow, low-brow…

Hollywood Bigotry

Cutting In One Direction Only

OK--it's confession time.  We confess to being greatly entertained when the hypocrisy and self-serving cant of Hollywood gets exposed.  Someone observed recently that Hollywood, the media, and their collective product have long been the greatest export of the United States.  It has made the United States "plastic fantastic".  Who would criticise such a starlit vista, such an orgy of self-congratulation?

Hollywood has a great deal of self-respect.  It sees itself as the conscience of the nation.  Like the USS Enterprise it goes boldly, where no man has gone before.  It pushes the boundaries.  It confronts the nation's ills.  It starts conversations we all apparently need to have.  It shames the wicked and bolsters the weak, the outcast, and the minorities.  The Entertainment Complex sees itself as a Saviour, a Messiah, the guardian of the nation.

Of course all this is self-inflated rubbish, but it feeds gigantic insatiable egos--and so goes Tinsel Town.  Thus it never fails to be deliciously ironic when the cant, the narrow mindedness, the self-reinforcing, perverse echo chamber is exposed--as it has been a thousand times, and likely will be a thousand times more.

The most recent example was the thumbs down given to a movie made about Dr Gosnell and his Abortion House of Horrors.