The tyranny of Big Abortion

From the bowels of my wingnut e-mail forward folder comes this slightly out of date but delightful Mark Steyn column. I am disappointed, however, that he didn't find a way to work the Muslim Brotherhood or sharia into it.

Is there anything people won't prefix with "Big"?

Big Art?

Big Social Services? Big Education?

Oh wait, those would need to have real money in them....

There is Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, and Big Peace.

Big Society. We have that one.

"Modern liberalism is strikingly illiberal". Wow, and I thought I was a poor writer. I don't remember which comedian it was - though I think Jon Stewart - who said "religious freedom is not the same thing as 'getting your way all the time'"

"This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity" Heh. yeah. all this uproar against a janitor using a condom.

Obfuscate much?

(You would have to tick me off at 8 in the morning, Neb).

It takes a special idiot to write a contradiction like "one-size-fits-all diversity."

You keep saying that, I do not think it means what you think it means.

hum... lol

I think i get it confuzled with "obsticle". cause i keep thinking it means to dodge, send up smoke screens, etc.

Yet to see Big Atheism.

Now you have.

Does "Big Gay" Al count in this?

Oh for fucks...

Yahoo answers. Everytime you think you've hit bottom someone throws you a shovel.

It's pretty hard to shovel through rock.

yahoo answers = dynamite, then?

I've now see everything. May it please the Court, I'd like to strike Big from my vocab. Thank you.

trying to finish reading. it's been a silly morning. So under "revisionist history" "Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness raising” ribbon for breast cancer — as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness raising” ribbons: My current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit."

Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't AIDS the first ribbon?

Yep. Curse those AIDS and breast charities and their postmodernism!

I'm sure a dedicated post-modernist would argue that anything we want to be post-modernist is post-modernist.

I tolerated philo up through the 1900s or so. Modernism, nihilism, and of course the feminists. I can even tolerate new modern writers like Foucault. But Sartre started losing me. Baudrillard fully lost me.

I don't really get "post-modernism.". I registered for a course in 1985ish, called "Post modern feminism", and the first day we started watching Blue Velvet. I didn't get the movie, didn't get the text we were reading, and quite the class in time to get my money back.

someone, please explain on very very simple terms, what teh fuck PM actually is? :-)

If you don't know what it is, you'll never know.

"In b4 'bullshit'" and all that.

Also:

See the main article on this topic: Postmodernism

If this is what post-modernism is: "Postmodernism asserts that the meaning of any text (where the term 'text' is taken to mean any system of meaning of representation) is constructed contextually and is contingent. It emphasizes the fractured and 'heterogeneous' nature of the social, natural and literary worlds. Methodologically, it often focuses on questioning the inherent presumptions and concepts which underlie any ideological system. It is most commonly associated with the work of the French intellectuals: the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It tries to give you methods to implement "question everything!"" Then it seems pretty cool.

see, Foucault and Derrida are sooooo flipping different to me. Perhaps because he's more grounded in history, Foucault stuff isn't word salad. (or what feels like word salad to me). It looks at the human condition and discusses it.

Derrida, Sartre, Boudrillard just make me read, and reread, and read a third time adn say "did you say anything in that sentence". It feels as if it were a giant in joke, with everyone knowing the punch line before you get there, so you skip all the informative stuff.

You got to watch Blue Velvet in class?! /David Lynch fanboy

Also, Sartre was not a postmodernist, he was an existentialist.

he was after modern. therefore "post modern". but really, my point was that is the time frame I start losing philosophy. I will admit i've not read Nietzsche much, just works about his works, so i'm not sure i get him or not. But I will read any of these 1920's and forward philosophiers and there is a good chance I walk away totally lost. I did ok with Bahktin and "othering", and understand "authorship" issues on their own (the individual authors writing about it, not withstanding), but the generic 20th century philo i've tried to read, confuses me.

As for Blue Velvet - that, too confuses me. It's... i sat there and said "huh?" I feel very, hum, intellectually "small" when I attempt to understand much of 20th century pursuits like "modern art", high literary play-writes, even cooking where the goal is to remove expectations and make a strawberry taste like fish. (molecular gastronmy i think is the term). Maybe I'm not abstract or creative enough? I don't know.

Sorry, that ain't how it works -- Sartre was an existentialist. The 20th C. was a great time for philosophy (see Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, Duhem, Dewey, etc.). You philistine! :P

Also, "20th century pursuits...high literary playwrights..." And your username is a Beckett play.

(Yes, I knew it wasn't officially post modernism -- my jokes never go over well. it's good i do not think i should be a comedian).

Do you think I *understand* Godot? Do you think anyone understands Godot? absurdism is named well. But at least it's not meant to be understood (I think). Wittgenstein and Russell I also understand well, cause again, it was / is a very focused philosophy. Of your list though, Popper, Duhem, Dewey all lose me.

As for Camus, i must really not understand literature. I read L'etranger, (several times), and yet it's listed as absurdest by wikipedia. The character is dark, isolated, driven, cold but his actions follow from that isolation. I was with the author the entire time. I read Godot or Rhinoceros and the whole time, I'm saying "is this supposed to have meaning?" "am I supposed to extract something from it, or just go with it". Absurdest to me is a literature that does not follow from character formation. So why is L'etranger absurdest?

I do so much better on things that are more obvious, I guess. or I don't have the right guides to help "get" modern thinking or I don't know(?)

Ahem "comedienne"
/runs