The slap stick Batman of the 1960s is difficult for many to appreciate unless they’re signalling a blasé millennial irony, but as a boy I loved it. I also liked Keaton’s eccentric, deranged, yet god-like Batman. But the omni-competent, James Bond like, self-absorbed to the point of egomania, and utterly goofy Batman of Adam West was simply a joy for me. In honor of Adam West, here are a few favorite clips:
In the essay compilation Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper quizzically wrote:
Consider what is lost when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It is true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club. But no woman should be encouraged by this fact. For it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile, and in the long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlight walking with significant, caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs. Mature masculinity will not be reduced to raw desire in sexual relations. It remains alert to the deeper personal needs of a woman and mingles strength and tenderness to make her joy complete. (RECOVERING BIBLICAL MANHOOD & WOMANHOOD, 40-41)A lot could be said. Suffice to say, I've learned a lot from John Piper through the years and when you write that much you're bound to say strange things (I revel in saying strange things) but this is just weird.
Briefly, I know many women who lift weights. None of them are attempting to be more masculine (I’m sure there’s some of that in Crossfit circles). Most of them are staving off ageing, death, injury, weakness, and so-on. They’re also adding a degree of controllable trauma to their lives in order to avoid an overly plush life.
Extreme discouragement, continuing doubt, hypersensitivity, impatience, exaggerated emotion, and phenomena of retreat, and physical and psychic disturbances showing the signs of weakness and need for support are always evidence that a neurotic patient has not yet abandoned his early-acquired pampered life style. These show that a patient endowed with a comparatively small degree of activity, and not possessing sufficient social interest, has pictured to himself a world in which he is entitled to be first in everything.Later, when such a favorable situation does not obtain for him, he is not prepared to render any response other than a more or less spiteful accusation of other people, of life, of his parents. This limitation of his activity to a small circle results in his leaving important questions unanswered, and when he is brought face to face with a problem which he is not prepared to cope with, he suffers a shock and responds with a shock reaction. (Superiority and Social Interest 98)
In almost any commentary from the last century, the Cain and Abel story in Genesis 4 is typically explained as a justification for/explanation of the conflict between agricultural and nomadic life. There’s something to this, but it’s not merely about two modes of food production. The distinction is between two approaches to ethics.
Hazony goes on to observe that while God did not command shepherding, God did make man to be good. God told downcast Cain, "If you do well, won't you be lifted up? (108)" Meaning, "If you have a problem with the world, make the best of it, bucko!"The life of the farmer.
Cain has piously accepted the curse on the soil, and God's having sent Adam to work the soil, as unchallengeable. His response is to submit, as his father did before him. And within the framework of this submission, he initiates ways of giving up what little he has as an offer of thanksgiving. In the eyes of the biblical author, Cain represents the life of the farmer, the life of pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down, which alone provides bread so that man may live.The life of the shepherd.
Abel takes the curse on the soil as a fact, but not as one that possesses any intrinsic merit, so that it should command his allegiance. The fact that God has decreed it, and that his father has submitted to it, does not make it good. His response is the opposite of submission: He resists with ingenuity and daring, risking the anger of man and God to secure the improvement for himself and for his children. Abel represents the life of the shepherd, which is a life of dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for man, which is presumed to be God's true will. (108)
I try to stay off Twitter except for brief times I'll allow myself to play on it a few days in a row. The temptation to troll is too great for me and the medium has become less fun as people only tend to interact with you if you're famous or to humiliate you. But I do follw a few feeds as a part of my morning reading. Geoffrey Miller, author of Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior and The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature is an entertaining and informative part of that ritual. A few days weeks back he produced this tweet:
One of the most hilarious results of the last two years of ridiculous media antics was the rise of the word “cuck”* as an insult. But why was it so effective? From an evo-psych point of view (evo-psych may be false in theoretical foundation…but it’s observations are pretty good) one might say that your soul is your consciousness. Your consciousness is the feedback loop for responding to phenomena in a fashion that makes bodily life efficient, pleasant, and reproductively successful. In other words, your soul/existence is deeply connected to your need to reproduce. And your immorality, as an organism, is dependent upon your reproduction. And so from a purely naturalistic point of view (which is incomplete but not untrue) a man’s existential import, sense of meaning, and immorality is found in his allocation of resources for his family. And so the biggest blow to a man would be the person he trusts most to give him immortality (a woman) deceptively diverting his resources to another man’s immortality (soul). With that in mind, read this tragedy:
Here’s a repost from my old blog:
Before we go on, below is the story of the creation of man in Genesis 1. Go ahead and read it in full as a refresher.
Gen 1:26-31 ESV Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." (27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (28) And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." (29) And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. (30) And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. (31) And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.When we read the Bible, it's important to remember that the stories, while not always portraying morality or exemplary character, are meant to train us in good works. The stories try to give a picture of the good life as well as the internal and external threats to it. By the time the Old Testament as a whole became known as "the law and prophets" four virtues were recognized as paramount for a life of human excellence and character: courage, justice, temperance, and prudence (see Wisdom of Solomon 8:7).[1]
Why wouldn’t you want to?
Well aside from the Biblical commands against returning to Egyptian morality and idolatry, but otherwise, how better to walk than to:
Slide your feet up the street, bend your back Shift your arm, then you pull it back
Socialism has a problem:
What? Sanders? He’s a nice guy. What problem? It’s a totalitarianism problem.
Over at CapX (an obviously biased website), this observation was made:
Obviously, not everyone feels that dictatorship and mass murder are too high a price to pay for equality. Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian, for example, was once asked whether, if Communism had achieved its aims, but at the cost of, say, 15 to 20 million people – as opposed to the 100 million it actually killed in Russia and China – would he have supported it? His answer was a single word: Yes. Even today, many people, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau among them, fawn over Cuban dictatorship, because of its delivery of supposedly free health and education to the masses.It is true that left-wing authoritarianism is a major problem on the level of social harm caused. This can be seen in the current state of eastern European countries and the association of communist ideology and authoritarianism despite the negative results of that worldview within living memory:
The aim of this article was twofold. First we aimed to contribute to the ongoing discussion on left-wing authoritarianism. Using representative samples the relationship between authoritarianism and political preferences was examined in 13 ex-communist Eastern European countries. Employing six different indicators of left-wing/communist political orientations made clear that, despite cross-national differences, left-wing authoritarianism is definitely not a myth in Eastern Europe. Secondly, it was aimed to survey whether authoritarian individuals in Eastern European countries might be a possible threat to transition to democratic political systems. It was demonstrated that in general the Eastern European population seems to hold a positive opinion on democracy. It becomes also clear however that the authoritarian persons in the ex-communist countries do not hold a positive perspective on the democratic political system (305).My thought is that western liberalism (Classical Liberalism) in its left and right wing instantiations leads to two negative results in the absence of Christian theology and Christian symbolic representations in the mind:
In an article which must be satire but isn’t, a woman asks:
Never.When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color?
If a film review says something like, “When will the movie (good or bad) deviate from the outdated source material?” rather than “Is this deviation from the source faithful to it while still creating a good film?” then the reviewer doesn’t care about the movie or the source.