A little something to offend everyone. I’m impressed.

An ABC pilot called “Good Christian Bitches” has religious and women’s groups up in arms over what they describe as an extremely offensive and distasteful show title.

The dramedy, based on Kim Gatlin’s novel of the same name, will be brought to life by famed “Sex and the City” and “90210” executive producer Darren Star. The plot centers on the life of reformed “mean girl” Amanda, played by “Talladega Nights” actress Leslie Bibb, who returns to her hometown of Dallas to find herself fodder for malicious gossip from the women in the Christian community.

Still in the early stages, the pilot has not been guaranteed a spot on ABC’s lineup. And though the show’s title may change before it goes to broadcast, “Good Christian Bitches” is already causing uproar.

Christian publisher Tessie DeVore told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column that the show, which features the tagline “For Heaven’s sake, don’t let God get in the way of a good story!” could put Christians in an unfairly bad light.

“I find the title offensive. I don’t think those two words should be combined,” she said. “A show like this can damage perceptions [of Christians in this country].”

It also could be a slippery slope for future shows, said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents’ Television Council tells Tarts.

“In the past, we’ve raised concerns about changing language standards for television,” Henson said. “Once a particular profanity or obscenity has been embraced by a particular show, it quickly becomes mainstream.”

And Yana Walton from the Women’s Media Center said Christians aren’t the only ones who should be upset.

“It is not an appropriate term to use to describe any woman, regardless of their faith,” Walton said. “Entertainment media, especially music and films, have been normalizing misogynistic language for years.”

More…

Article by Roderick Long.

Nature of a Ruling Class

We tend to think of the “ruling class” as a Marxist concept; but the notion has a long history before Marx, particularly in the ancient Greek and Roman historians, and class analysis played a central role in 18th and 19th century classical liberalism as well. Whenever the decisions and actions of the political machinery are largely controlled by a particular group, and serve to advance the interests and reinforce the power of that group, such a group is properly called a ruling class. A ruling class is, obviously, a bad thing to have. This raises two questions:

• How does a ruling class operate and maintain its power?

• Is it possible to construct a political system that will not fall prey to a ruling class?With regard to the first question: I do not believe that a ruling class needs to exercise its will or advance its interests consciously. That does often happen, of course. But what more usually happens, I think, is that as various policies are proposed or adopted in the governmental arena, those that adversely affect powerful, influential, and concentrated interests will get noticed and vigorously attacked, while those that affect the average person — too busy to keep track of what the government is doing, to poor to hire lawyers and lobbyists, too dispersed to have an effective voice — will be largely unopposed. This creates a kind of filter mechanism, that strains out legislation that harms the powerful, while allowing legislation that harms the weak to pass unhindered. The result, whether intended or unintended, is that government power tends to be turned more and more, by a kind of malign invisible hand, in the direction of advancing the interests of the powerful at the expense of the interests of the weak.

   More…

Article by Scott Locklin. 

From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to have for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps like a modern-day Squanto, I can help the lefties understand my tribe. I was born to the lower middle class and spent a couple of adult years living the life. I score a 63 in Charles Murray’s “bubble quiz,” which puts me into the “first generation middle class with working class parents” category. When I was a boy, people around me came from intact families, went to Catholic Church, knew people in the military, and worked jobs which soil the hands. They enjoyed pastimes such as deer hunting, mud bogging, and backyard wrestling. We were dimly aware of a hostile tribe in the nearby college town. These were folks who drank coffee with foam in it, who thought so little of the average hayseed that they would walk out in front of a moving pickup truck. The latte-sippers didn’t control the Democratic Party in those days: Working-class white men such as Tip O’Neill did, and everyone in my town voted for the Party of the Working Man.

The latte tribe insists that working-class peckerwoods are voting against their economic interests when they vote for Republican candidates. This may be true, but it doesn’t mean that voting for the tax-and-condescend party would be a vote for the economic interests of the world’s Archie Bunkers. NAFTA was a Clinton Administration achievement, after all. Why should Archie vote for theMeathead party that shipped his job to Mexico? Economists of all political stripes have also noted that low-income working families tend to pay an appreciable portion of their earnings in taxes. Maybe they get it all back in “services” somehow, but the working poor notice how the non-working poor live off the state without doing any work. They take it personally that working harder ispenalized while left-wing policies reward being lazy and dependent. Palefaced plebeians also dislike the latte-tribe concept of “white privilege,” which says the Obama daughters should be given legal preference over poor white kids.

More…

Article by F. Roger Devlin.

Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010

By Charles Murray
New York, NY: Crown Forum, 2012

Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

At 416 pages, Coming Apart is Charles Murray’s most substantial offering since 2003’sHuman Accomplishment. It continues a theme familiar to readers of The Bell Curve: increasing American social stratification. Murray focuses on whites because otherwise the social trends he describes might lazily be explained away as effects of demographic change; he demonstrates that the trends are almost wholly unaffected by race or immigration. As he notes, a constant focus on how racial minorities ‘lag’ whites serves to distract attention from important changes in the benchmark population itself.

The author begins with a description of American life on the eve of the Kennedy assassination, highlighting everything which would shock the younger generation: just three TV channels; no Thai restaurants; ‘coffee’ meant Maxwell House. If you missed a movie when it was in the theaters, you would not get to see it at all.

The products of the entertainment industry still usually validated American norms. Subjects such as abortion and homosexuality were never touched upon in television shows, only rarely and disapprovingly in movies. Most liberals were willing to say that extramarital sex was wrong. Only three and one-half percent of American families were headed by a divorced parent. In many neighborhoods, houses were left unlocked and children could go about unsupervised.

But American women had “much to be outraged about,” the author tells us, such as being expected to marry and have children! If Murray gets portrayed as a ‘hard-rightist,’ it is only because presenting data honestly is now all such a designation requires or implies.

Such class differentiation as existed in 1963 was only reluctantly acknowledged: ninety-five percent of Americans described themselves as either working class or middle class. Poor people refused to think of themselves as lower class, and rich people were almost as reluctant to be considered upper class. A typical house in exclusive Chevy Chase, Maryland cost only twice as much as the nationwide average. People who could afford luxury cars often refrained from a fear of seeming ‘ostentatious’ – an old protestant pejorative which has now mostly disappeared from American English.

This was still recognizably the American society observed by Tocqueville one-hundred-thirty years before: “In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

The people who had risen to the top in 1963 had little in common except their success. Most had grown up in middle-class or working-class families, and they retained the preferences and tastes of those milieus. Their status was precarious, and often not successfully transmitted across even a single generation. In other words, America was ruled by a rapidly circulating elite, not by an upper class. (The “old money” families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston were an exception, but their numbers were tiny and as a class they had no influence on the nation’s destiny.)

Coming Apart tells the story of how this equilibrium was upset in the years that followed. Murray first discusses the rise of a new upper class; then, turning to the opposite end of the social scale, he shows how the white working class has deteriorated into a proletariat.

The new upper class is a product of our higher-tech economy, which relies heavily on people with exceptional cognitive abilities. A young person with outstanding mathematical ability might formerly have aspired to become a college professor; today he can make a killing writing code or managing a quant fund. Business decision-making has also become more complex and the stakes are higher. “Today, if a first-rate attorney can add ten percent to the probability of getting a favorable decision on a regulatory ruling worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he is worth his many-hundreds-of-dollars-per-hour rate.”

More…

News of the weird.

—————-

FOOTBALL FANS in the central African state of Congo were hurling accusations of witchcraft at each other yesterday after a freak blast of lightning struck dead an entire team on the playing field while their opponents were left completely untouched.