Dean's World

I've vacillated back and forth on this for a while, but Julia Gorin's sold me.

There are certain words I don't like to use casually. One of them is "liberal," since such a perfectly nice word is too often used as either a club (by blowhards like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh) or as a self-important badge by closed minded reactionaries (like Paul Krugman and Janeane Garafalo). I only use "liberal" in its original definition: a person not limited to established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, favoring proposals for reform, and open to new ideas for progress. Such a term could easily apply to many people who lean left or right on a variety of issues, and that's the sense I try to restrict myself to when using it.

Real liberals want to discuss things, search for the truth, and keep an open mind. Maybe that open-mindedness is what disturbs some people on the right, but there are plenty of ideologues on the left with pretensions to liberalism who are no less rigid than their ideological enemies.

A word I use even less often than "liberal," though, is "neocon." I've long recognized that, while it may have had benign origins, it's become the property of sneering-and-smearing bigots now. As Julia Gorin says so well:

Others have gotten in trouble for pointing this out, but let's give up the charade. When a member of the enlightened classes, or Pat Buchanan, makes reference to a "neocon," what he's saying is "yid." That's right, "neoconservative," particularly in its shortened form ["neocon"], when employed by a non-conservative (or by Buchananites) and therefore meant derogatorily, is the modern, albeit more specific, word for "kike" that the left can say--and it has been doing so liberally (no pun intended) ever since American conservatism became yet something else that Jews have managed to benefit from--the conquered, final frontier of that famous Jewish manipulation.

By "neocons," the left means the Jewish subset of neocons. Witness Maureen Dowd's column last year, titled "Neocon Coup at the Department d'Etat": "The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy. The audacious ones have saddled up their pre-emptive steeds and headed off to force a regime change at Foggy Bottom. . . . The president is not always privy to the start of a grandiose neocon scheme. . . . When the neocons want something done, they'll get it done, no matter what Mr. Bush thinks. And they think Mr. Powell has downgraded the top cabinet post into a human resources job, making nicey-nice with the U.N. and assorted bad guys instead of pursuing the neocon blueprint for world domination."

At first, Ms. Dowd's neocon list of last names included only Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Libby and their "Likudnik friends," but later, as blogger "Silver Surfer" writes on IsraPundit.com, she amended the list to include Cheney, Woolsey and Gingrich. "In Ms. Dowd's view," he writes, "adding a few non-Jewish names to her 'neo-cons' list makes her conspiratorial story-line kosher. But it doesn't. The result is a classical portrait of 'neo-con' (read: Jewish) advisors, who drip poison in the ears of their hapless gentile bosses, while they advance their global plot to subvert true American interests and take over the world--and, as Ms. Dowd is always quick to point out . . . thereby 'advance the strategic goals of Israel.'"

Gorin doesn't even mention the absurdity of hastily attaching the prefix "neo" to lifelong conservatives like Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, James Woolsey, or Donald Rumsfeld, who are no more "neo" in their rock-ribbed conservatism than Phyllis Schlafley. Furthermore, most of the people doing this clumsy retro-fit damn well know it.

Mind you, I'm sure some decent people can use the term "neocon" without meaning it in a sinister, evil, sneering, smearing, bigoted fashion. Just like I fully recognize that someone could refer to an Arab as a "towel head" and simply be a little clueless, be using it as a joke among friends who know they don't mean anything by it. The way to respond to people who use such a term carelessly is to gently remind them that it's most often an epithet used by bigots and that they shouldn't use it too casually 'lest they hurt feelings or be misinterpreted. I would never refer to my doctor, a fine Muslim gentleman of Palestinian descent, in such a way. Neither would I use such a term for our family veteranarian, a gentle, incredibly decent man who literally does wear a turban. I hope none of you would either.

So sure, someone could say "neocon" innocently enough. But let's recognize what it means most of the time: it means "sinister Jew," and is an all-too-reliable marker for conspiracy-minded bigots who are different from the cretins at Stormfront only in their more friendly demeanor and their more sophisticated attitudes.

We should all recognize that these people are also not without their friends, the oblivious and/or self-hating Jews. You know, guys like Al Franken, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher.

By the way, do you remember when Bill Maher was funny? Me neither. But I do remember when Stewart and Franken were. I was younger then, and more shallow. We're all older now, but alas, they're no less shallow.

Anyway, you can read the rest of Ms. Gorin's essay here in the selfish, scheming-Neocon dominated Wall Street Journal.

I wrote yesterday about predictions markets and why they work so well. Well (via The Pamphleteer) I found a somewhat better description of how and why they work right here. Although my less technical explanation still seems to cover it: when you people put even a small wager on a proposition, they're more likely to tell you what they honestly think vs. what they want to believe, and, while the intuition of one person may be suspect, the intuition of hundreds or thousands of people, taken as a gestalt, is usually pretty on the money. At least when it comes to predicting certain events.

The most respected of the predictions markets is the University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Market. There's also Intrade, which, unlike the non-profit, university-funded Iowa market, is a private business. There's also the Strategypage Market, which asks a surprisingly diverse (and sometimes silly but interesting) set of questions.

Here's how it works: Let's say you want to see if John Kerry will win the election in November. That is what you create a bidding war on: Kerry wins.

The question of whether Bush will win is separate. So if you test whether Bush will win, you create a contract that says "Bush wins." Then people can bid on that.

You can also create contracts on "Nader wins" and "Badnarik wins" and so on.

Standard practice is that a winning contract is worth $100 at closing. So if you think Bush will win, you buy shares in "Bush wins," on the theory that you'll collect $100/share when he wins. But if Bush loses, you get zero. So how much are you willing to gamble on Bush winning?

At the moment, the Iowa market is selling shares in "Bush Wins" at about $62 each. Shares in "Kerry wins" are selling at about $39 each. On Intrade, shares in "Bush wins" are selling at about $69, and Kerry's selling at around $30.

It's important to note that these are not predictions of vote totals. They're just predictions on the "Yes/No" of whether the candidate will win or not.

What those prices indicate at the moment is that both markets are predicting a Bush win. However, these contracts are still trading. It's very possible that something could change to cause people to start selling their shares in Bush and trying to buy shares in Kerry, causing the prices to shift. Trading won't stop until election day.

Mind you, these tools are not used merely to predict elections. If you look at these markets they ask dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of questions. They run bids on sports teams, on economic events, and many other things. Historically, these predictions markets are right far more often than they are wrong.

It appears from all this that human beings in the aggregate are far more intelligent than most elitists want to give them credit for. But then, that's an observation I've made many times.

I love women. I do. I view them as fundamentally the same creatures as men, and yet ineffably and wonderfully different. Having a pregnant wife knocking about the house probably contributes to this view.

If you look at ancient Greek culture, they tended to be quite beauty-obsessed. They also treated their women as less than property. Indeed, if they were property, this would have implied a certain status: if you own something, you value it in some way, whereas women were not quite so valued. So while they revered beauty, it was male beauty they tended to revere. You could see it in their art, quite obviously.

Here is how they tended to view female beauty:

Not bad. But here is how they tended to view male beauty:

Notice how much more well-defined the male form is. How much more dramatic, less draped, more vibrant. The Greeks were obsessed with male beauty--and the status of their women was quite low.

Modern American culture tends to revere female beauty, and women have greater status in this society than they have in almost any culture in human history. And yet, have a look at the type of woman we have come to uphold as beautiful, such as Sarah Jessica Parker:

Now, I do not think that Miss Parker is an ugly woman. But just look at her. She is thin. Ridiculously thin. Stick legs, tiny arms, almost no waist to speak of. How many adult women really look like this? 5% of the female population? 2%? 1%?

I don't mind that our culture worships female beauty. Indeed, I think you could make a good case that the status of women, and the healthiness of society in general, has gone up at the exact same time as worship of female beauty has gone up. Yet somehow, I think we've gone wrong somewhere.

I can point to it just by pointing to this picture of another icon of female beauty, Marilyn Monroe. Just have a look at this photo of Marilyn in her heyday:

Just look at her. What a mess! Big, gigantic feet. Short, stubby legs with big thighs. Chunky upper arms. Could such a beast find a job in today's Hollywood?

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. But just look at Marilyn next to Sarah. Isn't it ridiculous?

But let me ask you a simple question: who looks more like a real, everyday woman? I submit that it is (size 12) Marilyn, and not (size zero) Sarah.

I love women. I love their grace and their beauty and their chattering and their silliness and their strength. Yet somehow, it seems that our culture went wrong somewhere. Somehow we decided that hollow cheeks, tiny little arms, long stick legs, no waist, no hips, tiny little feet, but unnaturally enormous breasts, are the epitome of female beauty. How did we come to this point?

We missed something somewhere, methinks.

Back in the late 1800s, there was an artist who I believe truly captured the beauty of the female form. In my mind, he should be revered as much as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and maybe even Da Vinci. He was a truly great artist. Perhaps he is forgotten because his work came just before the explosion of the expressionists, the cubists, the dadaists, the abstractionists, and so on. Perhaps he was just too old-fashioned, for he was completely overshadowed by the modern artists. But he should be remembered.

Who was he? His name was William Bouguereau.

He drew in the classical style, yet about 2/3rds of his work was based on the feminine form. He was truly great at it. He drew men, he drew children, he drew many things. But most especially he was without peer, before or since, when it came to drawing women.

He seems to me to have captured the essence of feminine grace. Yes, a somewhat romanticized view of the feminine, yet still a realistic depiction of it.

Indeed, here is an odd observation about him: I love the way he drew women's feet. He seemed to capture women's feet better than anyone. I am no foot fetishist by any means, but when you look at how he drew them, they were almost hyper-realistic.

Regardless of all that, just look at the way he drew women. Isn't it breathtaking?

He understood what real women looked like. He truly did.

I see two things when I see William Bouguereau's work. First, I see a man who drew in the classical style at a time when it was out of fashion, archaic, and underapreciated. This is tragic enough. Yet I also see an artist who, more than any other, appreciated the grace, the beauty, and the poetry of the feminine form, the true feminine form.

Women--real women--aren't they beautiful?

You can see more William Bouguereau right here.