Link Banana

On the topic of equality in America… Ross Douthat, on the heels of McCain’s attacking Obama for trying to speard the wealth around, agrues that it’s silly for conservatives to oppose all redistribution. 

In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth - that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other. 

I’m not sure what to think about this article. A part of me is made a little queasy by the idea, while another part agrees with the woman that no relationship should be forbidden so long as it is free of coercion:

There’s no comparison between siblings close in age having sexual feelings and contact and an adult forcing a younger member of the family to do something they neither understand nor want to be involved in.

(via Ross Douthat)

This is the most troubling art project I think I’ve ever heard about:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

(via Ross Douthat, in whose comments I expressed my opinion)

EDIT (4/17/2008): The NY Sun is reporting this is a ruse.

EDIT (4/18/2008): I feel obligated to note that Ms. Svarts is still insisting that she may have done it.

You don’t have to agree with Ross Douthat’s politics to agree with his assessment of War, Inc..

Ross Douthat tackles how and why modern Hollywood pictures look relatively similar to those of the Vietnam era.

This doesn’t mean that the current paranoid, doom-ridden mood in cinema and television was manufactured in Hollywood and foisted on an unwilling public. Up to a point, at least, Hollywood is meeting Americans where they are. Mistrust of government and disquiet about the country’s future have risen to Vietnam-era levels, and reviving ’70s-style paranoia and pessimism is a natural way for the culture industry to connect with a public coping, once again, with a military quagmire, rising oil prices, prophecies of ecological doom, and corruption in high places.

Ross Douthat engages in what I must admit is one of my favorite acts: attacking out of touch political elites. Although he may not be completely correct, this does resonate:

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.