“The Photoshop Cops” are taken on by Kevin D. Williamson at NRO. As he writes:
Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.) and Lois Capps (D., Calif.) have, at the urging of reformed adman Seth Matlins (D., formerly of Creative Artists Agency, Rock the Vote, etc.), offered up a very silly bill to empower the federal government to censor advertising on the theory that the overuse of photo-editing software causes anorexia and other eating disorders. The world being full of stupid people, there is an emotionally incontinent for-the-children petition demanding that the Federal Trade Commission implement this censorship, on top of Mr. Matlins’s earlier demand that advertising in which images have been altered — which is to say, advertising — be labeled to alert beef-witted Americans to the fact of that alteration.
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It is difficult to know what to make of a culture in which the federal government subsidizes sex-change operations while forbidding the alteration of photographs, but it is remarkable that the political tendency that insists on the depiction of “real women” in fashion advertising also, in other domains, defines “real women” to include people with functional penises and testicles used for sexual intercourse resulting in the occasional pregnancy. “Humankind,” as T. S. Eliot observed, “cannot bear very much reality.”
Read the whole thing, which is written by the author of a recent book titled The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome — and cultures approaching their obsolescence do tend to engage in exponentially increasing numbers of mass delusions. They help to make the time pass more easily, and reduce the need to wrestle with much more painful truths.
Which brings us to Gavin McInnes on “15 Myths Millennials Accept as Fact,” found via Kathy Shaidle.
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