The Facebook IPO

Well, there's a certain amount of buzz going on regarding Facebook's big IPO week, and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is showing the suits on the Street enough respect, turning up with a hoodie and a cocky attitude and all....  A lot of buzz, but maybe not as much as was expected.

I don't know, something about Facebook feels like a house of cards to me, like the Dutch Tulip Craze, when the price of tulips went through the roof in the 17th Century during a period of wild speculation, until somebody with sense stopped and said, "Hey, these are just a bunch of freaking tulips."

The habits of people under the age of 30 may be one thing, but the wise investor may ask him or herself just what people over the age of 30 find Facebook particularly useful for.  Personally, I've found it quite useful in discovering the differences I've developed in political and religious views from some friends that I haven't seen in decades, but I sense a lot of it has to do with the the beauty of FB stalking that allows a lot of people to say with grim satisfaction....



...which can only carry you for so far, but then again, I'm no investment genius.  Who am I to argue with 900 million people?

The Meaning of Mr. Hollande

As predicted by many, the Socialist Francois Hollande has defeated the sitting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
  
In absurd fashion, the right-wing Drudge Report has tried to spin this event in its headlines as bad news for Obama because it's a case of an incumbent being unseated.

Contrary to what Drudge might think, it's clearly a case of people in Europe becoming fed up with IMF-mandated austerity, but what is the broader picture? It looks like it may be the beginning of the end for austerity, and possibly the end of the Eurozone itself, if France breaks with Germany in the current strategy for dealing with the debt crisis so far. Does it also mean a resurgence of the left in Europe? Maybe not. The French Socialists are known for being pragmatists rather than ideologues. Things might not change that much. Should the Socialists in France take heart at the results, or was it more a case of the French people being fed up with Sarkozy's arrogance and buffoonery? The strong showing of the the far-right, anti-immigration National Front Party of Marine Le Pen in the first round has caused more than a little bit of disquiet.
 
I was reading an article in Slate the other morning, which seemed to indicate that despite the Socialist victory, the real story of these results is the resurgence of extreme right-wing parties, not only in France, but throughout all of Europe. The thesis of Yascha Mounk’s article seems to be that instead of strangling them in their cribs like they should have, center-right parties in Europe formed coalitions with extreme rightist parties over the years in order to win elections against the left, but have now lost the ability to control them.

The true winner of this election isn’t France’s left; it’s Europe’s far right…The reason is simple. In this election, France’s establishment has embraced Islamophobic ideas to an unprecedented degree.

Right-wing populism, once a fringe phenomenon, has been conquering the bastions of Europe’s political mainstream with frightening speed.. It’s difficult to know whether Europe’s populists are approaching the zenith of their power or will continue their steady rise. But one thing is certain: At no point in Europe’s postwar history has the far right’s influence been as pervasive as it is now….  

All of this matters beyond France because, historically, what happens in Paris often portends what will happen elsewhere on the continent. It’s not just that most Europeans think of the French Revolution as the cradle of modern democracy… Up until now, populists have celebrated their biggest successes in countries like the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland. But France isn’t as small as the Netherlands, as politically dysfunctional as Italy, or as new to democracy as Poland. The sad spectacle of the last several weeks is the culmination of a wider European trend of accommodating the far right—and it may suggest it’s about to get much worse...

Like in France, established political parties across the continent at first vowed to shun surging populist leaders like Jörg Haider of Austria or Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. A cordon sanitaire was to unite all democrats in their fight against the far right threat. But unity did not last long. As populist parties in these countries gained in strength, traditional coalition governments, especially those formed by center-right parties, lost their majorities. Center-right leaders realized that to gain or preserve power they would have to cooperate with the populists. As a result, in one country after another, center-right parties that had once vowed to fight the far right have come to rely on them to prop themselves up.

Is there something to this? I've been reading a book that suggests that there is less here to worry about than meets the eye, but on the other hand, the book is a few years old now. It's called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French. In explaining the strength of extreme parties in the first round of French presidential elections in 2002, when Le Pen’s father made it into the second round of voting, it says....

In the French system, the main danger comes from the potential of electors to express too large a variety of points of view; This is exactly what produced the upset of the 2002 presidential elections (When Le Pen’s National Front advanced to the 2nd round). The left spread its vote across too many parties, which allowed the extreme right candidate to push the left out of the second round…. Like all European extreme right politicians, Le Pen’s platform was strongly anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, and law and order. Naturally, all of France and the entire world decried Le Pen’s first round victory, Jacques Chirac, who had come first, called the French to rally behind him and on May 1, one million people gathered in Paris to protest the extreme right.

The aftermath was interesting. Le Pen was completely isolated and hardly made any progress. On the second round, he garnered 19 percent of the vote, which was barely the sum of the total extreme right vote in the first round.

Who’s right? Have things changed significantly in the last ten years?

This has been parallel-posted on Wordpress at The Doge.

A Missed Opportunity

The Best Scene in The Passion of the Christ

A few months ago I caught an episode or two of Person of Interest, the CBS series starring Jim Caviezel. It's not something I'd watch all the time but I think he does a pretty good job in it. He's a solid actor.

I was glad to see this, because in the wake of the 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ, I was wondering if he was going to be caught in that Jesus part forever, as well as the culture-war imbroglio that followed it. Gibson warned him that it might harm his career, and last year Caviezel seemed to agree that this was in fact the case. I went to a Boston Catholic Men's conference in 2005, and he was a guest speaker, parlaying off his role in the film. His talk went over well with the audience, but I recall being struck by two things. Not only was he as devout and strident as his director Mel was at the time, but he seemed just as angry as well. I'm wondering how he feels now... I hope he's more at peace with it all.

During the Lenten season, I was looking at clips from some of the old Jesus films, the passion and crucifixion scenes in particular. I was amazed to see a stencil-colored one dating back all the way to 1903... but it made me remember how disappointed I was in Gibson's film when it came out. I had really looked forward to seeing it. I'd heard some of the criticism before I saw it, and I wanted the critics to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, I found it to be dark and demonic, and not in a constructive way. Gibson was approaching the height of what seemed to be some kind of self-loathing blood fetish in those years. In retrospect I found it no surprise that it was more popular with evangelicals of a fundamentalist stripe than it was with Catholics. In a sense, they were snookered into watching a movie version of the Stations of the Cross. For their part, Catholics were snookered into watching an extremely gory endorsement of penal substitutionary atonement.

In any case, one bright spot was the fine performance of Caviezel in the Jesus role, particularly in the flashback episodes. The flashback scenes were the best scenes in the film, particularly this one, and the one with Jesus and his mother at home. The flashbacks were welcome breathers from the almost non-stop brutality and gore throughout the rest of the film, and I couldn't help thinking what a lost opportunity this was; what a waste of an insightful and nuanced performance by Caviezel.

Credit needs to be given to Gibson for the idea of using Aramaic in the movie. That was a masterstroke. A brilliant idea. He cast it well too. If only he had done a more traditional Jesus movie, one that traced the whole arc of Christ's ministry, like King of Kings, or The Greatest Story Ever Told. If he had, it would have been The Greatest Jesus Film Ever Made.

This scene, in which Jesus teaches the crowd to "love your enemies" is the best half-minute of the film in my humble opinion, but it almost wasn't in there at all. It was done after everything else had been shot. Gibson was so piqued by the criticism he was receiving from Jewish and liberal scholars, based only on what they'd heard about the script, he included it as both a riposte and a spiritual reminder to himself. Very nicely done by Caviezel here. He'd done his research on semitic idioms, gestures, and mannerisms as well. In fact, as someone who's done a bit of acting himself, I'd venture to guess that he'd studied some videos of a sheikh or imam or two...

This post is parallel-posted on Wordpress at The Doge.