On Golden Calves, Goya, and the Banality of Evil

A few links from around the web on TV, art, housing, and blasphemy.

Michael Rose On War and Art:

Here’s the thread that connects Homer and Goya and Britten, and it matters for how we think about war and how we form the people who will have to deal with it.

Art about war — great art about war — refuses the two most common failures of response to armed conflict. The first failure is glorification: the reduction of war to a narrative of heroism and sacrifice that makes it legible, purposeful, even attractive. The second failure is pure horror: the reduction of war to an undifferentiated atrocity that makes it simply unbearable, beyond meaning, beyond response. Both of these fail because they simplify. They let the audience off the hook — either by making war feel ennobling or by making it feel simply monstrous, in either case something other than a human reality that human beings made and that human beings must understand.

A wonderful article. Read the whole thing.

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Apple’s new show Pluribus is the second-best new show on TV. Vince Gilligan has done it again. The show is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but with a twist. Read my thoughts at Civitas (no paywall!).

An excerpt.

It would be easy to read Pluribus as a simple warning about socialism, but this is not a show about economics. Gilligan is doing something more ambitious. The show asks a deeper question: what does it mean to be human?

The answer is that individuality is essential to humanity, which is what Pluribus is really about.

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Strange things are happening in America. Believe it or not, this is real (see below).

Stranger yet, the 22-foot golden statue of Trump reportedly was blessed by some Christian and Jewish leaders. Via the Substack Letters From Leo:

“Before the unveiling, the figure was blessed. Pastor Mark Burns — Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and a candidate for Congress in South Carolina’s 3rd District — assembled a circle of evangelical and Jewish clergy at the foot of the gilded statue and consecrated it.”

I’ll resist my urge to make a joke about a golden calf and instead quote from the Book of Psalms (135:15).

“The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands.”

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Who thinks raiding public pensions to finance municipal grocery stores is a good idea? I’ll give you one guess. (Answer here)

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I have an article (paywall) in The Epoch Times on the science of manipulation, showing why good people follow bad orders. An excerpt:

That [Adolf] Eichmann might have been more clown than monster did not absolve him of guilt. But by exposing what she called “the banality of evil”—a phrase still used today—[Hannah] Arendt revealed something both truer and more unsettling. In a sense, she was echoing [Stanley] Milgram’s conclusion that ordinary people “doing their jobs” can unwittingly become agents of destruction. Not because most people are inherently evil, but because most are conformists who tend to obey authority.

The paper asked me to write on this topic for them, and I haven’t enjoyed writing an article so much in a while. I was able to reflect a bit on learning about Stanley Milgram’s experiments as an undergrad in an introductory psych course. The experiments made a deep impression on me.

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Finally, is there an “oversupply” of housing in the US? The question sounds absurd when you look at the national housing market. Yet many people claim that’s the case.

Economist Jason Sorens finds the gaping hole in these claims.