Pro-Palestinian Needed (UPDATE: Found)

The plan: a debate, using unpaid volunteers who can get here (that is, Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. on the Lower East Side) under their own power/expense on Wed., Aug. 13 (8pm) on the question “Is Israel Oppressing the Palestinians?”

The need: someone to argue “yes” (against blogger Pamela Geller Hannah Meyers) [UPDATE 8/3/08: It will be writer/director/producer Muhammed Rum, creator of the film Jihad!].

I host, Michel Evanchik moderates, you come up with a mere seven minutes or so of the Palestinian case, followed by about an hour of Q&A and back and forth. Everyone has a good time, suffering in the Middle East notwithstanding. Will you volunteer to be our Palestinian defense force — and preferably let me know before 10pm Sunday?

Jazz for Nerds

Yesterday, I analyzed nerds and mentioned karaoke (since I’m gathering people at Iggy’s Karaoke this Tuesday, Aug. 5, starting at 8pm, for my birthday) — but an even nerdier musical fusion is apparently possible:

New York City’s Kelly Fenton is a jazz composer and band leader with beboppy compositions sometimes inspired by comic books, including an “Infinite Crisis Suite” and a “Lament for Ted Kord” (the late Blue Beetle, for those who didn’t hear the sad news three years ago, though he may already be resurrected via time travel blah blah blah).

Book Selections of the Month: "American Nerd" by Benjamin Nugent and "Being Logical" by D.Q. McInerny

ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (August 2008): American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent and Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking by D.Q. McInerny

Two months ago, I saw a reading by (and bought a book from) Benjamin Nugent, the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. He correctly, I think, identifies the defining nerd attribute as the desire to apply predictable logical axioms to situations in which most normal people are mainly just interested in affirming social bonds and which to the nerd seem fraught with ambiguity.

He points to a Jane Austen character as a classic ur-nerd because she kept going to social events and actually wanting to get to the bottom of the witty propositions and generalizations people threw around, while most people there (unlike her) succeeded in finding friends and mates precisely because they merely touched on certain topics, to show they were all part of the same psycho-social milieu.

Nugent points to nerd favorites like the game Dungeons & Dragons as rational rules-application to (fictional) social situations, heartbreakingly contrasting the orderliness of such endeavors to the chaos in some nerds’ real lives, as with some of his troubled childhood friends. He also notes how recently (surprisingly so, to me) the concept of the “nerd” solidified in popular culture, with the spelling (sometimes rendered “nurd” in the 60s) not even standardized until recent decades.

Interestingly, there was from the beginning of the contemporary nerd phenomenon the potential for self-congratulation (it was at Rensselaer and MIT that the term became commonplace, usually used for humorous ends) and even for a sort of hipness: the “nerd couple” sketches on Saturday Night Live that really thrust nerds into the pop culture spotlight in the 70s were inspired by, of all things, geeky but profoundly cool Elvis Costello’s infamous performance of “Radio, Radio” on that show (making that moment perhaps one of the most exciting crossroads of differing cultural trends since the founders of anarchism, sci-fi, feminism, and Romanticism all came out of the same family back in the days of the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley clan).

Nugent is not overly expansive in claiming all things awesome as offshoots of nerdiness, though. He notes, for instance, that Harry Potter (who returns to theatres in November, along with his profoundly unnerdy but nerd-pleasing countryman James Bond) is not, at root, a true nerd but rather a descendant of Tom Brown, the athletically successful ideal British schoolboy from Tom Brown’s School Days, a precursor to the manliness cult of Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressives, and outdoors-loving late-nineteenth-century proto-fascists.

The Costello example suggests that nerds always had the potential to see themselves not merely as outcasts but as the secretly hip outcasts who deserved instead to be the elite. By contrast, though, Nugent taught me something about the hipsters in plentiful supply in New York City (at fiction readings and in places like Williamsburg) who merely look like nerds (like all those women in the early 90s wearing overly large glasses): Rather than being authentic nerds indifferent to socialization, these people, he argues, have chosen to play at being the-nerd-outcast in the same way their hip predecessors played at being the-peasant-outcast in hippie days or the-Negro-outcast in beatnik days. Damn hipsters!

Two of my own youthful inspirations, much like Potter, defy simple “nerd” labels by being part of an older sound-body-sound-mind, WASPy hero-ethos: Tom Swift and Johnny Quest, both of them athletic blonde boys without any noticeable social awkwardness who happen to be scientific geniuses as well as popular, happy kids with interesting friends. My own downfall as a youth was probably in thinking that if I mastered the brainy part, the benefits of the social/athletic virtues would just accrue to me naturally. (And to continue with the vaguely-eugenic trope for a moment: given how little I’ve exercised all my life, if I came from worse genetic stock, who knows just how truly nerdy I’d look and seem — it’s terrifying to contemplate…)

•••

And speaking of sci-fi — a few bonus nerd notes before moving on to my second Book Selection:

•James Pinkerton had a piece on Reason.com that was a hypothetical looking-back at the evolution of liberty from the vantage point of 2058 A.D., and after taking us in a fairly-academic fashion through imagined/likely developments in Taiwan and the Middle East, he ends — as if in an inadvertent parody of libertarian futility but without humor — by noting that the best (albeit still very slim) hope for freedom probably lies in asteroid or Martian colonies but is not likely to be found much closer to the “core.”

He probably should have just typed the phrase “Give up” over and over about six hundred times.

•Meanwhile, my acquaintance Stephanie Sellars (who will face off against Anna Broadway in our Sept. 28 Debate at Lolita Bar on sex) is acting in the erotic online sci-fi series The Fold, I kid you not.

•And non-sci-fi-geek Diana Fleischman from last month’s Lolita panel informs me of some cool steampunk gadgetry (and some rare graph humor, also suitable for nerds). I’ve long been fond of this steampunk site, BigRedHair, by two comic book creators, myself.

•••

Ali Kokmen (visible here giving a rousing speech at the recent Comic-Con in San Diego) gave me Being Logical by D.Q. McInerny. Everyone, even those who fancy themselves logical, would benefit from reading it, just as a reminder and refresher — however, I must say, much like observing nerds, reading this book’s very methodical description of logic is a reminder of the weirdness that sometimes results when the brain over-examines things normally done by “instinct.” Many rules become alien once they become conscious — like the odd idea of “the excluded middle,” fundamental to rational thought (something either exists or doesn’t) but which seems less plausible the more I think about it. Or take McInerny’s curious passage about how one might deductively conclude one’s cat was responsible for a milk carton being knocked over if other animals in the area are too small, something perfectly reasonable that starts to sound almost paranoid schizophrenic when spelled out in detail.

Nonetheless, we need this book, since some very bad, illogical arguments clearly carry great weight in most people’s brains, such as (to take one I constantly have to deal with):

1. You say free markets are good and that government should spend less.

2. George Bush also said that.

3. However, he defied free markets on occasion for protectionist purposes — and oversaw vast increases in government spending, including for wars, leading to economic problems.

4. Therefore…free markets and government spending cuts are bad.

Damn it, does one really need to be a libertarian to see why step 4 in that argument in no way follows from 3?

Apparently one does need to be a libertarian, given how often I hear this argument — and similarly-constructed ones (on topics from war to abortion) — from liberals.

(Therefore I suggest everyone become a libertarian immediately. QED.)

Let me add that I wish people (usually conservatives) would also avoid the all-too-tempting argument “Gore says we should worry about global warming, but Gore produces lots of CO2, therefore we need not worry about global warming.” Worth knowing Gore’s a hypocrite, certainly, but if (like me) you think global warming is overhyped, it doesn’t help to run around saying, in effect, “Oh no! Even Gore isn’t fighting CO2 enough!” That still makes it sound as if the fearful people in the global warming debate have the moral high ground and as if Gore should be trying even harder to be green, the opposite of the intended message from his opponents and warming-skeptical critics (but more on that particular issue in my November Book Selection — and in September, read about the sexy latest book from Pagan Kennedy, though the aforementioned Sellars and Broadway, it turns out, will be the ones to broach sexual topics at Lolita that month; in the interim, why not join me at Iggy’s Karaoke on Second at 76th from 8pm-on this Tuesday, August 5, for a nerdy but happy celebration of my thirty-ninth nerd birthday?).

Dark Knight vs. X-Files: Nerd Without Pity

•Like most people, I loved Dark Knight (despite the troubling fact that Batman-loving six-year-olds probably shouldn’t see it).  It may well come to be regarded as the definitive depiction of two familiar characters (not necessarily Batman himself).  One of many brilliant moments that may not have gotten much attention yet: despite all that darkness, there was still, I think, an homage to the 60s show in the form of that slowly-rotating camera angle on the Joker during his final conversation with Batman.  Made sense in context, made sense psychologically, and made sense as a geek hat-tip.

•As for X-Files: I Want to Believe: I’m left feeling that Chris Carter wasted the last six years if this is the best he can do, much as George Lucas wasted sixteen coming up with Phantom Menace.  I take no joy in saying this — I just feel sad for the people whose careers were quietly dying in front of me while I watched the X-Files movie.

Where’s the humor?  Where are the genuinely awe- and terror-inspiring scenes, like the scene on TV in which lights suddenly appeared over the bridge in that alien abduction two-part episode?  Where’s the weird, surprising thing right near the beginning that makes you love the story from the get-go?

It’s unbelievable that this film takes two hours and accomplishes less than the average ten-minute segment of the original series.  And there’s a bonus shot at the end of the surprisingly low-budget-seeming end credits that might as well be a placard reading “You don’t want to see any more of this ever again, do you?”  So lame.

It doesn’t even rise to the level of fun-but-ridiculous B-movie, since it’s downbeat and drab and has almost nothing in it more mindbending than an episode of Law and Order with a crime-solving psychic thrown in.  I don’t know why this movie was made, and I question the intelligence of everyone involved.

It is in some sense worse than a disaster.  True disasters — like Phantom Menace or Chronicles of Riddick or even Dune — are something you can take a certain amount of pleasure in condemning.  They are glorious failures in that at least they have enough moments of audacity and spectacle to leave you feeling that you can insult them and be assured that they have the strength to fight back, as it were — sort of like telling a Viking that his oil painting is terrible but knowing he will soldier on regardless.

X-Files: I Want to Believe, by contrast, is such a feeble, ineffectual film that it is more like a quietly expiring old woman who must be politely but awkwardly told that she is too smelly to remain seated in the common room.  Just depressing.

In short: I didn’t hate X-Files: I Want to Believe.  I felt sorry for it.

•I stress the fact that I don’t enjoy rendering that verdict on the X-Files movie because I know that we nerds can be merciless in our negative judgments — a side effect of us liking clear-cut rules, as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s review of the book American Nerd.

In another reminder nerds can be harsh, here’s an anti-religion cartoon some nerd did, depicting Doctor Who, forwarded to me by Michel Evanchik.  You see what I mean — and I say that as an atheist and Doctor Who fan.

Newton, MA vs. the Fixx

As if the Fixx were not already one of the most important rock bands (this is the sixteenth time I’ve mentioned them, and this entry will mark sixteen amazing songs of theirs I’ve linked to, without even delving into the great ones for which there’s no serious video of which I’m aware, such as the eerie, elegant, and somewhat ABC-like “Liner” [“All aboard before the storm/ Crossing swords before the dawn...”]), now they’re at the center of a legal battle in Newton, MA.

My friend Jake Harrison (married, as it happens, to one of my libertarian, alternative-rock-loving college friends, Holly Caldwell, herself now a lawyer but still arguably hip enough to get along with their skateboarding son) informs me that Newton, a Boston suburb not far from where he dwells, was barraged with complaints when Hotel Indigo celebrated its grand opening there last month with a concert by the Fixx. Representatives of the hotel will meet with the town’s Board of License Commissioners on August 19 to try and stave off suggestions that the Indigo be denied a license for further outdoor entertainment.

Perhaps it would help if I showed up to speak as a character witness on behalf of the Fixx, saying something like:

“Inherently ambiguous though noise pollution conflicts are from a libertarian perspective — or indeed, for any political philosophy, even one compatible in spirit with rocking out — I think awesome tunes like ‘Red Skies’ and ‘Sunshine in the Shade’ are clearly beneficial to the community, and if the Hotel Indigo is not yet a pillar of this community, I ask you to consider the possibility that though it doesn’t mean much now, it’s built for the future. Without the Indigo and its shuttered rooms, you would be engaged in mere phantom living, and if it’s foolish for me to say so, well: here stands the fool. If this community cannot embrace public art like a Fixx performance, I ask you, are we ourselves? I say, don’t let people like the Fixx be driven out. Rather, let at least some people perform…outside.”

But I’m sure Fixx singer Cy Curnin could be perfectly articulate if called as a witness. Despite his flagrant greenness — the near-opposite of my own pro-industry, pro-progress, pro-homo-sapiens philosophy in many ways — he sounds intelligent in interviews like this one. (Actually, he sounds a bit like a few vegetarians, vegans, or organic types I know, including my green friend Pagan Kennedy, who lives not far from Newton and who should perhaps be one of the people I try visiting when I head that way for an August 31 political conference that the libertarian quarterly Critical Review is holding in Boston — and she won’t be one of our September debaters here, despite what I said in a previous entry, so that would perhaps be my only dose of Pagan for a while.)

He also mentions in the interview that the band may play the song “Big Wall” in future concerts but hasn’t performed it since it was recorded circa 1987. I can’t imagine having a song that cool in my repertoire and not performing it for two decades. I can’t even resist looking for Fixx songs to perform in karaoke — and indeed, that’s what I plan to do at 9pm next Tuesday (August 5) at Iggy’s on Second Ave. between 75th and 76th, so join me if you will. No noise ordinance problems there, as far as I know.

P.S. While I recalled Fixx songs being used in Fletch (“Letter to Both Sides”), Streets of Fire (“Deeper and Deeper”), and a great Miami Vice opening segment in which a voodoo-cursed funeral was revealed to have a casket containing a goat head instead of a human corpse (“Phantom Living”), I was unaware that “I’m Life” was used in a late, fifth-season Miami Vice episode, “Over the Line” — but here’s the scene. My favorite late Vice moment, though, remains the exchange between Crockett and Tubbs about Crockett becoming an evil drug dealer while suffering from amnesia, which went almost verbatim like this:

TUBBS: You tried to shoot me. Twice.

CROCKETT: I know, Rico.

TUBBS: (Pause.) That’s a problem, Sonny.

HuffingtonPost vs. Debates at Lolita Bar

Melissa Lafsky of HuffingtonPost found our panel of egg-sellers a bit too flippant, apparently.

I’m just pleased panelist Valerie Bronte’s reference to meeting her farflung offspring someday as “summoning my dark army” is now immortalized.

Who Watches the Watch-Nerds?

After criticizing the literary establishment yesterday and planning to review a book on nerds this Friday, I should note for clarity that I was (a) a nerd and (b) an English major (or at least, half an English major — I double-majored in that and philosophy), but I was never an English major nerd, which is to say, someone who thought people were fools if they weren’t fascinated by Tennyson, etc.

On the contrary, as yesterday’s entry hinted, I retain my sympathy for the average-American reaction to a lot of highbrow artsy stuff, precisely because I was the sort of nerd who (quietly, humbly, and without imperiling my grades) sat through English classes thinking “Isn’t the sci-fi novel Ringworld arguably better than Thomas Hardy?”

I’m not sure I still think that, but my point is that I think it’s a perfectly “permissible” thought, and the cool kids don’t — whether cool for current purposes means black-clad rockers or just assistant professors of literature. The two types exhibit similar pack mentalities, I fear. Nerds can be just as bad as the cool kids and the elites, even worse, but at least nerds are often blissfully unconcerned about the social repercussions of their aesthetic judgments, which in some sense makes them more objective, or at least honest (though a consistent social-democrat might argue that “objective” taste simply is whatever is decreed by the masses — whom Edward Bulwer-Lytton called “the great unwashed,” by the way, another bit of genius from that ostensible idiot).

•••

Our intellectuals like to think they’ve created an open-minded culture, yet it takes some courage to rattle off a list like the following without pausing to ask oneself which parts are acceptable to the various cultural elites and which aren’t:

I like white socks with black shoes, Shakespeare, comic books, the theme song from the animated series Starblazers, the Fixx (about whom much more tomorrow), Fozzie Bear, cows more than horses, watching robots but not being around children, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine far more than Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Ewoks (yes, the Ewoks), canned ravioli, cold weather rather than summer or beaches, avoiding travel and unnecessary exercise (aside from walking), Dadaism but not ballet, Road Warrior but not figure skating, and the absence of tattoos no matter how hip. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about any of it, even if you’re an art critic at the New York Times — and even if you have an army on your side, and it’s quite likely you don’t, so there, if you see what I mean.

Or to put it less combatively: in these matters of taste, it seems a shame simply to import other people’s and spend a lifetime stifling your own. The award the cool people give you for thinking like them — even if it’s a Pulitzer — probably won’t be as much fun as living your own life would have been.

On a related note: Where were all these adoring Dark Knight fans ten years ago when the film’s co-writer created the wonderful sci-fi film Dark City and no one but Roger Ebert seemed to care? (He called it the best film of 1998, which means a year later, he may have reacted to The Matrix much the way that Scott Nybakken and I did: “That was good, but it felt sort of derivative of Dark City.” And indeed, The Matrix re-used some of Dark City’s actual sets, not just some of its reality-altering tropes.)

In short: we all know the herd mentality exists in aesthetic judgments, but I think we could still do more to resist it.

It Was a Smug and Phony Elite...

Who coined the poetic and widely-beloved phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword”?  Why, none other than Edward Bulwer-Lytton, widely reviled as, ironically, the quintessential bad writer — for starting novels with florid lines like “It was a dark and stormy night.”

This strikes me as a great little example of how flexible people’s perceptions are when subjected to peer pressure — we’ve all been told repeatedly that EBL is, in essence, an idiot, but if you were told often enough that “It was a dark and stormy night” is a pithy, emphatic phrase worthy of Hemingway, you’d probably believe it (but then, are you sure you’d think highly of Hemingway’s short, pithy phrases if you weren’t repeatedly told to?).  Most adults are little better than high school students when it comes to looking over their shoulders to make sure that their reactions square with everyone else’s reactions — or rather, with the reactions of everyone cool (but then, why is “cool” good in the first place, really?).

I’m sure most people could be convinced that “The pen is mightier than the sword” comes straight from Shakespeare, and I for one wouldn’t begrudge EBL the resultant, perhaps overdue, admiration.

And let’s not even get started on the topic of modern visual art.  Or literary fiction.  Or moody art films.  Or fashion.  Or “newsworthiness.”  Or politics.  Or religion.  Or poetry (poetry — oh, man, poetry, sheesh…).

IQ Studies, Retardation, and Robots

Can people accurately predict others’ IQs on sight?

I sure feel as though I can spot stupid young women at a glance sometimes, without even hearing them speak, and I can’t claim to know exactly what cues I’m responding to.  There’s just a young, helpless, wide-eyed, often overly-fashion-conscious look common to the stupid, at least on the streets of NYC, I think.  Overhearing snippets of their conversation (often conducted in overly youthful-sounding, chirpy, questioning tones) seems to bear out my (very crude) judgments.

Is it simply that dumb people have no qualms about, say, trying to look like Paris Hilton, whereas smart people would never in a million years want to be mistaken for her — or worse, just for someone who’s trying to look like her — given that she’s an idiot?  Then again, one intern at work tells me even the Ivy League women these days are aiming aesthetically for Hilton more than Bohemia, a further sign I’m out of touch (and more on that this coming Friday, in my discussion of the book American Nerd).

On a non-IQ-related note, I’m also told that at the University of Austin, the women often dress in sloppy, hyper-casual sweatpants and the like while being carefully and artfully made up, creating the illusion that their faces look great even when they’ve just rolled out of bed to take out the garbage, thus luring unwary, awed UT males to their dooms, or at least to their dorms.

Isn’t human intelligence important enough that there should be a vast literature on questions like this, though — as well as on questions such as which professions and political groups have the highest IQs?  But I’ll bet there isn’t all that much research on such questions and instead elaborate taboos arrayed against such research as there is.

Wouldn’t we benefit from being able to spot morons on sight more easily, though?

•••

On a related note, those who attended last week’s egg-sellers panel should know that yet more genetic analysis reveals that the seller who feared she might have a low probability of passing on Fragile X (great band name) and thus causing mentally retarded children is in fact arguably within the “normal” range after all, depending what criteria different genetic testers use, so her already very-low odds of causing future generations to have problems are not even worth worrying about, it now appears (I knew she’d do better on those genetic tests if she studied hard and tried again).

Luckily for us, her brief brush with retardation-anxiety fell during our panel discussion, though, to add a little drama.

And it made me realize that with all sufficiently low-probability inherited disorders these days, one could plausibly gamble that biotech and cybernetic progress will be able to cope with the problem by the distant future time when the genetic slot machine comes up “disease” — assuming pinhead politicians (so to speak) and green/religious activists don’t outlaw biotech (nor outlaw cybernetics, despite the alarming future depicted in that Terminator: Salvation teaser trailer running before Dark Knight).

More on such matters in April, though, when my planned Book Selection of the Month, suggested by Dan Greenberg, will be the stories of Cyril Kornbluth, a possible inspiration for the movie Idiocracy.  You might as well mark your calendars now, since that’s only nine months away, like a newly-conceived baby.

Morrison, India, and Lovecraft

So, if all goes according to plan, at almost the same time that Grant Morrison is depicting the birth of the Fifth World (with inspiration from Jack Kirby, Hopi mythology, and elsewhere) in Final Crisis comic books this fall, he will also be depicting the story of the birth of the (Hindu) Fourth World, the violent age of Kali Yuga in which we have supposedly lived for the past 5,000 years.  Morrison’s recently-revamped website says he’s writing an animated series based on the Indian epic Mahabharata, about a war between two clans that climaxes with the death of Krishna, an embodiment of the god Vishnu.

But what about the Third World, you say?

Well, in the DC Comics mythos, at least, “Third World” seems to refer to the pagan pantheons (Norse, Greek, etc.) and to the giant gods who were precursors to Darkseid and other Kirby-created Fourth World/Fifth World characters — with one of those giants, Gog, now making waves in the monthly Justice Society of America comic book.

And if they’re sticking at all to the cosmology that comics writer John Byrne worked out in the 90s, mortals are the “Second World,” while the First is composed of all the primordial, Lovecraftian beings that existed in the dark times before we arose (like that tentacled space-thing in the Lovecraft-influenced first Hellboy movie).  I wouldn’t mind seeing them work with that First World idea a bit more, when (inevitably) even a revamped Gog and Darkseid have become too familiar to be creepy enough.

Of course, dread Cthulhu himself might not seem too creepy if he were fighting Green Lantern.

X-Files-o-phile

I should have stopped watching the show in the middle of season six, when a major conspiratorial cabal was exterminated, but like a dwindling handful of suckers (who wanted to believe Chris Carter had a coherent master plan, even though his characters’ basic motivations would sometimes change between episodes in two-parters), I kept watching for a full nine seasons — and yeah, I figure I may as well go see the movie that’s out today.

(Of course, I’m worried it’ll do little or nothing to tie up the loose threads from the lame ending of the series, about an impending alien invasion and Mulder and Scully being framed for murder by the government — especially since David Duchovny told me when I saw him in a bar once that the film will have nothing to do with aliens.)

Just before I lost my faith, I wrote an article for HealthFactsAndFears (the blog I edit at work) about X-Files being good TV but bad science. Check it out, and you’ll see I appended a footnote thousands of words long summarizing the entire nine-year conspiracy up to just prior to the show’s end.

And if you think that’s nerdy, you’re absolutely right — and I’ll say more about nerds in general one week from today, when my Book Selections of the Month for August will be American Nerd and Being Logical. Be there or get probed.

I Ain't Got Time to Lead!

So far, Jesse Ventura has said he’s not running for Senate against his fellow Minnesotans Norm Coleman (R) and Al Franken (D), but Scott Nybakken informs me that one of his co-stars from the movie Predator, Sonny Landham (Libertarian, porn star), is running for what is now Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat. That makes three (somewhat libertarian) politicians that have emerged from that film, oddly enough — and I’m pictured above with one of them, Arnold Schwarzenegger, at an event at Mayor Bloomberg’s apartment (Ventura and Alex Trebek also played Men in Black in my favorite X-Files episode, and I can only hope this Friday’s X-Files film will be a third as good).

As a libertarian, I have some natural sympathy for politicians who try to escape the usual right-left categories, but all too often centrism is an excuse to be even more mushy and unreliable than regular, ostensibly ideological politicians. Both Ventura and Schwarzenegger — much like former New York governor Pataki — started out sounding fairly libertarian but were soon cowed into behaving more or less like fiscal Democrats as their administrations progressed.

A related thought, on Ventura’s old Reform Party allies and their kind: If anything positive is ever to come from the populist impulse to distrust both big business and big government — which all too often just leads to demagoguery and ever more byzantine regulations passed in the name of the little guy — it will have to be wedded to a much more analytical understanding of business-government collusion, like that you’ll get from anarcho-capitalist law prof Butler Shaffer in his book In Restraint of Trade (about how regulations and taxes, thought of as means to help the poor, are in fact routinely pushed for by some businesses to hinder their rivals).

Not even the businessmen believe in free trade, and we are all worse off for it. Only consistent crusaders for strict property rights (in office and out) can remedy the situation. Let us hope Sonny Landham will be one.

Leggo My Eggo, But Aliens Can Take the Sperm

If last night’s discussion at Lolita Bar about women who’ve sold their eggs did nothing else, it should have served to remind the audience that eggs (and thus, on a subconscious level, women) are rare and valuable compared to sperm, which flows cheaply and plentifully.  No one would pay me $10,000 for sperm (not that I’d want my offspring wandering around even if I didn’t have to raise them, though I suppose that’d be a slight improvement, by my standards, over having to interact with children).

As sociobiology popularizer Robert Wright explains in The Moral Animal, one of evolutionary psychology’s most valuable insights into everyday life is its account of some of the differences between male and female attitudes toward sex, particularly the “double standards” so often blamed on patriarchal culture.  Put simply, females can only make reproductive use of about one egg every nine months and therefore have an incentive to be choosy, while males can in principle make reproductive use of sperm multiple times in a single day and therefore have an incentive to desire multiple partners.

Not surprisingly, women tend — tend, I say — to be more squeamish and men more eager about sex.  Women tend to seek long-term commitments (and good father-material), while men are said to fear long-term commitments.  Culture alters these tendencies, as do vast variations in individual psychology, but the general pattern is confirmed by countless surveys as well as most people’s everyday experience — and sociobiologists note that the pattern holds for the males and females of virtually all species as well, not just humans.  Exceptions to the rule — such as seahorses — tend to be ones in which biology has radically reversed other male/female roles as well (male seahorses carry the fertilized eggs around, so making baby seahorses becomes as time-consuming for them as for a human female).

•••

Needless to say, wild animals are neither radical ideologues nor traditionalists, so the existence of this pattern tends to undermine the nurture-over-nature, it’s-all-a-social-construct views on which feminism is largely built (if I understand what “feminism” means, which countless commenters on a prior entry have assured me I do not).

Furthermore, it may explain why both traditional chivalry and feminism (despite their purported opposition to each other) have such an easy time of convincing humans that women are precious and most men are scum, unworthies, and expendable spearcarriers.  Male strength and the larger number of male than female geniuses (so say the stats) may sometimes be able to foster patriarchy, but our instincts nonetheless incline toward matriarchy.

That’s also why the aliens in shows like X-Files — the reportedly alien-free movie sequel to which premieres Friday — are always plotting to steal and impregnate our women in order to genetically conquer the world.  Would any of us instinctively worry if they were just filching sperm, I ask you?

Yo Gabba Gabba (Hey)

At least one person has e-mailed me to note the irony that I’m hosting a panel tonight (Tue., July 22) about fertility issues even though I don’t ever want to have kids myself. Nonetheless, as a fan of comic books, Muppets, and Star Wars, I can still appreciate some things created for kids.

The kids’ show Yo Gabba Gabba, for instance, apparently sometimes has cool alternative rock bands as guests. Thus, Shiny Toy Guns, whose ominous “Le Disko” I’ve praised before (a song that has more than one video and that was used to good effect in a sexy, Matrix-like ad for Raza cellphones), appeared on the show (p.c.-ishly referred to simply as the Shinys) looking and sounding decidedly different from their usual intense, serious New Wave/Stefani-like selves.

Of course, Shiny Toy Guns have varied their sound before, as shown by their cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

And speaking of New Wave-ish performers varying their sound, Michael Grace, formerly a member of My Favorite (and once a debater at Lolita Bar himself), performs this Thursday, the 24th, 9pm at Galapagos (North 6th St. in Williamsburg), with his new band, Secret History, which he says sounds more like early Roxy Music — which is fine by me, given one entry in my recent list of my six favorite songs. I don’t know if they’ll be as good as the Lou Reed Berlin documentary now playing at Film Forum, but I bet they’ll be more melodic.

Genetics Isn't Just for Fascists

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of our audience members at tomorrow night’s panel discussion with women who’ve sold their eggs are somehow morally discomfited by the whole business without being able to explain why. It sometimes seems as though anything involving genetics or conscious alterations to biology has that effect on people (even on hip, urbane Manhattanites like the ones who may well have heard about the panel because TimeOut New York wrote about us).

I interviewed several prominent evolutionary psychology/sociobiology experts (with some help from one of tomorrow’s panelists, Diana Fleischman) years ago and one day yet really ought to publish the still-unused majority of the material somewhere, but one tiny passage from the material strikes me, years later, as capturing (in a very brief, cursory way) the fact that, all data aside, it is largely a matter of choice whether one sees the Darwinian universe as a brutal one in which only Nazis and velociraptors can excel or as the familiar world we know — with room in it for love and kindness and happiness. Here’s that two-paragraph bit from the old interview:

Biologist Robert Trivers at Rutgers says that perhaps his own greatest contribution to the field “was to show how cooperation and altruistic behavior find a ready home in evolutionary biology…[We] provided biology with a foundation for a sense of justice. So, instead of seeing our sense of fairness and justice as being just cultural artifacts, which might in principle disappear with a different upbringing, you saw that there was quite a biological substratum for why we feel that way.”

Trivers’ view of evolution is upbeat enough that he even incorporated Darwinian themes into a marriage ceremony he officiated in California for two biologists, noting how their love was the end product of billions of years of creatures seeking one another out, intermingling to create something new, and feeling devotion to their offspring and kin. He concluded with Darwin’s comment that “there is grandeur in this view of life.”