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Archives for December, 2008

December 31, 2008

The heart wants what it wants

Daniel Radosh

Brendan Halpin on Rick Warren.

Intellectually, I understand this, and I can even appreciate it as good political strategy, and I understand that this middle finger raised to gays and lesbians and those who care about them may, in the long run, actually lead to a progressive coalition that will make life in this country for gays and lesbians better.

None of this changes the fact that it's wrong. Pandering to hatred is always wrong, denying people's humanity is wrong, and standing against love is wrong. It wasn't the intellectual appeal that got me to open my wallet; it was the fact that this campaign was able to overcome my cynicism and make me believe there was actually something different going on.

It will be very interesting to see how the crowd responds to Warren. Various actions are being floated: turning your back, singing We Shall Overcome (my favorite), but unfortunately nothing has coalesced yet, which makes me suspect we're in for a handful of boos, a larger handful of people booing the booers, and pundits commenting that The Gays have apparently decided to give Obama a pass... for now.

December 30, 2008

The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #175

Daniel Radosh

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

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First place
"Him? This is my idiot friend Steve. He used to be... are you wearing a fucking yarmulke?" — Hubert

Second place
"Yeah? Well at least he's not a 35 year old man wearing sneakers and a hoodie." — Jared

Third place
"You know how the Boy Scout motto is 'Be Prepared'? Well, when you were in Boy Scouts, Steve here was doing acid. And he never stopped." —Rubrick

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #175" »

December 29, 2008

How I spent my Hanukkah (and why that's the right way to spell it)

Daniel Radosh

There are still a few hours left till the sun sets on the last day of Hanukkah, so here are a few clips from the newest seasonal installments of Holy Dazed on The Jewish Channel.

December 29, 2008

Why not a more timely response to the death of Catwoman?

Daniel Radosh

batcdtk882a.jpg

I hadn't actually intended to disappear for a week without comment -- I even had my annual inappropriately sexy Christmas and Hanukkah photos all picked out -- but I was rushing to meet a deadline (failed!) and had to leave town and wifi without posting. During that dark period, I missed the opportunity to pay tribute to Eartha Kitt, so consider this that. Yeah, I missed Harold Pinter too, but I was never a fan. My chief association is sitting uncomfortably through a production of The Lover starring a college girlfriend. I suppose that's not Pinter's fault, exactly, but let's face it, these obits are always all about me anyway.

Anyway, I'm back now to see how 2008 ends. Let's see... Israel is killing Palestinian, virginity pledges don't work, and a party in Brownsville ended in gunfire. It's like I never even left.

December 19, 2008

Why not Bil Keane?

Daniel Radosh

Geek extra.

December 19, 2008

Why not Bil Keane?

Daniel Radosh

December 18, 2008

Being disagreeable

Daniel Radosh

Barack Obama is defending his invitation to Rick Warren with a plea for postpartisanship.

What I've also said is that it is important for America to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues... That dialogue, I think, is a part of what my campaign's been all about, that we're never going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.

Greg Seargant asks "why campaigning against division and polarization by picking an equally radical choice on the left to give the invocation would be politically unthinkable?"

Meanwhile, consider how agreeable Warren himself chose to be -- how open to dialogue -- after the gay group Soulforce prematurely announced that leaders of Warren's Saddleback church, perhaps including Warren and his wife Kay, had agreed to break bread with gay Christian families on Father's Day:

We did not invite this group and I will not be meeting with them. They invited themselves to draw attention to their cross country publicity stunt. My staff has already told them that neither my wife nor I will meet with them for any discussion or debate.

Bear in mind that the Soulforce families were not asking to speak from the pulpit, or for Warren to publicly embrace them. They wanted a private conversation, to let Warren get to know some real people who were being hurt by his teachings and actions. And yet, not a chance.

Soulforce was traveling, by the way, with a mediator of sorts: gay-affirming pastor Jay Bakker. If Obama is really committed to having all Americans come together, he'll have Jay up there on January 20 too.

Finally, all this stuff about Warren is drowning out the other inaugural atrocity: a new musical composition by that hack John Williams! Is that really the pinnacle of contemporary American classical music? Maybe he'll reprise the theme from Jaws in time for a great white to bite Rick Warren's legs off.

Self-promotional update: Welcome, multitudinous friends of Andrew. If this topic interests you, I think you'll enjoy my book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. NPR sez, "Highly recommended as a memoir, a meditation on American religious tensions, and a perfect example of why taking popular culture seriously is so important.”

December 18, 2008

Personally, I'm glad to have a better excuse than "too crowded" and "too cold" to skip the damn thing

Daniel Radosh

Salon has a short round-up of concerns about Rick Warren's invocation at Obama's inauguration ceremony, concerns that go to reasons well beyond Warren's enthusiastic opposition to gay rights.

Meanwhile, MSNBC's ironically-named First Read blog weighs in with this blindingly stupid remark: "Where was this outrage when Obama appeared at Warren’s Saddleback forum back in August? The difference may be that the forum came before Proposition 8 passed in California."

Um, yeah. Or the difference may be between acknowledging that the representative of a large group of people has legitimate questions that you are willing to address head-on in a civil manner and giving that person a place of honor as part of the official launch of your administration.

Never trust highly-paid network political analysts to do the job of bloggers.

In a related matter, Sullivan dismantles the paranoid free-speech argument against gay marriage, and, at the end, picks up on his antagonist's claim that he's all for civil unions, just not "redefining marriage." This has become boilerplate make-nice talk for virtually all marriage-equality opponents. Even the Mormons tried it. and Sullivan asks the question that should be asked of every one of them: Really?

A few weeks ago Richard Cizik, the infamously "moderate" president of the National Association of Evangelicals, got a little too caught up in the NPR spirit in an interview with Terry Gross and played the "I believe in civil unions but not marriage card." Result: He was forced to resign the next day.

Update: Politico frames this as a story about "a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight."

Sorry, but the people who got the proposal on the ballot and then spent a fortune on deceptive ads in order to jam it into the constitution are the ones who went looking for a fight. What's happening now is called finding one.

So what would be the most effective way for at least half of those 3 million people on the mall to protest when Warren gets up to do his thing? I have one idea, but it's probably gonna be too cold to walk home with no shoes on.

December 15, 2008

Life on Planet Safire

Daniel Radosh

080411_slide_mccain.jpg It must be nice to live on William Safire's homeworld, where "the business headline of the year" was "Big Bounce to 15,000 Dow After Soft Landing."

That, of course, was one of the NYTer's predictions for 2008, made just about a year ago. I've previously questioned the wisdom or running this ill-starred column every year, but since Safire insists on doing it, the only explanation can be that his predictions are actually coming true, if only on Earth Two.

So how was the rest of Safire's year? Not bad. Israel and Palestine finally worked out that two-state deal, after not one but three highly improbably facilitating events. US troop levels in Iraq are down to "100,000 and dropping steadily." Two books no one here has ever heard of were sleeper hits. And There Will Be Blood justly won Best Picture (defeating not No Country for Old Men, which wasn't nominated, but four films that, on our planet, went entirely unrecognized).

Whether the rest of the news from Planet Safire is good or bad depends on where you stand on other important issues of the day. For instance, if you hate the iPhone, you'll be happy to know that it apparently does not exist, and that instead, "'pod push-back' by music customers threaten[ed] Apple’s dominance of digital music space." Somehow, even if that happened here, I seriously doubt that particularly coinage would catch on.

How'd the 2008 election turn out? Let's just say history wasn't exactly made. It seems John McCain and running-mate Mike Bloomberg defeated the Clinton-Obama ticket on the basis of "character" and a winning theme of "nobody's perfect" (in Safire's universe, those are somehow not contradictory). The big issue of the campaign was taxes, but the election actually hinged on "a debate blooper." So I guess Bizarro Clinton told her sniper fire story there too.

Finally, Safire's alternate universe readers were directed to "lose this list." If only they had the same online newspaper archives we have here!

December 15, 2008

The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #174

Daniel Radosh

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

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First place
The Worm: "Please, my little elven friend, stop gaping and get me out of this bird's mouth before it eats me!" —Ed

Second place
"Thanks, but I just had a giant omelet." —Steve_O

Third place
"The name's Magpie. Steve Magpie. I killed your hatchlings. Now feed me." — Francis

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #174" »

December 12, 2008

The bleeps are not really bleeps

Daniel Radosh

LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm does his best to take on media self-censorship in a self-censored medium.

If some guy shouts "U-o%$#@-!" at a candidate's rally, print reporters can't write "U-o%$#@-!"

They must type something like, "He shouted an eight-letter barnyard epithet." Even then some wussy $#&*/=@ editor will likely delete that. How $#&*/=@ quaint!

Now, these fg9##$6_+ television reporters have another #g\g';[0 problem. They can't substitute stupid symbols for bad words on-air. They have to use one of those %%&*^/+@ bleeps...

Who are we $#&*/=@ kidding here? You know =)&%9\ well what every one of these $#&*/=@ euphemisms means. Even if we mix up the symbols in each &#$-*@/ phrase, you can @/-$&#* figure it out.

Same on the (bleeping) TV bleeps. It's a royal pain in the bleeping %$*. We don't even allow )%-$ in the Comments section here because that would be $#&*/=@ rude.


December 12, 2008

Why not Bil Keane?

Daniel Radosh

bpnude100.jpg

Complete Bettie

December 11, 2008

Smooth move, Einstein

Daniel Radosh

Here's a message I got today from iTunes' "Genius" service.

sdm.jpg

You know what, Genius? If I bought a song called "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," I'm probably not uncomfortable with those words.

December 10, 2008

Yet strangely, they bleep out every fuck

Daniel Radosh

blagotaint.jpg

December 8, 2008

Lohanb**bies

Daniel Radosh

ll1thumb.jpg You know self-censorship has gotten out of hand when even Lindsay Lohan feels the need to protect the sensibilities of her MySpace friends. In a sure indication that bowdlerizing "offensive" words has become nothing but a mindless reflex, La Lohan writes that tabloid reporters making up stories about her fights with Sam Ronson "must really feel silly, embarrassed, out of stories, scr*w*d, f*ck*d, punk'd, and so much more."

Really? Firecrotch can't bring herself to say "screwed"? Or "punked"? Next she's going to be graffitiing bathrooms with the message that "Scarlett is a bloody N-word for women."

To make the whole thing crazier, Lohan actually directed her comments at "the people that make shit up." Not, that is, "the people who make sh*t" up.

But maybe "shit" is more acceptable than "screwed." Even the Washington Post Celebritology blog flirted with it today, approvingly reprinting the following as one of its comments of the week: "I'd like to see a Shatner-hosted home improvement show called 'Who Shat In My House?'"

Who indeed?

[h/t: J]

December 8, 2008

The end is extremely fucking nigh

Daniel Radosh

198305~The-Quiet-Earth-Posters.jpg After last week's (ongoing) discussion of all things post-apocalyptic, my friend Jim pointed me to Quiet Earth, a blog devoted entirely to the genre. It maintains an exhaustive list of post-A titles. I'm looking forward to nuclear armageddon so I'll have time to check them all out. Hope I don't break my glasses or anything.

December 8, 2008

The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #173

Daniel Radosh

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

081215_contest_p465.jpg

First place
"I never thought that line about my red wagon, laundry cart, and suitcase business being too big to fail would ever work, but boy howdy, did it ever!" —bunsen

Second place
"I love this synagogue!" —John Tabin

Third place
"I think I have enough for a latte." —JohnnyB

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #173" »

December 7, 2008

What, now we can't even say Nunt?

Daniel Radosh

The Smoking Gun:

Meet Bridget Clemons. The 19-year-old Floridian, an employee at a Pensacola strip club, is facing an assault rap after confronting a shoe store employee she accused of calling her the N-word for women (four letter, rhymes with bunt).

Bonus: Keep reading, and there's the actual word on the first page of the police report. At least the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office doesn't resort to self-censorship.

[h/t Tim Moraca]

December 5, 2008

That's great, it starts with an earthquake

Daniel Radosh

52689L.jpg Now that we've gotten vampire films out of our system, let's tackle a new genre: the post-apocalyptic. I'm ready to start psyching myself up for Fallout 3 (and the coming 40% unemployment rate) with a romp through the most gritty, whacked-out, disturbing, hilarious, and all-around awesome survival-in-the-wasteland stories.

The essential elements of the genre are set out by io9, including but not limited to scarce resources, warlords, degraded culture, forced breeding, cannibalism and pee-drinking. The big picture, of course, is society reorganizing itself on the ruins of collapsed civilization. Sorry, On the Beach fans, but that barely makes the cut. The apocalypse can be a single sudden event or a long, slow decline, but the post-apocalyptic (or the unfolding of the apocalypse) should be the center of the film, not a brief interlude as in the Terminator series (at least until Salvation).

I've been into this genre since I was a kid, when I devoured books like The Stand, The Tripods, Z for Zachariah, Warday and the very odd Riddley Walker. For whatever reason, I was put off by The Day After, probably because it was so heavily pushed as a Cultural Event. We may even have been required to watch it for school.

I have my own favorite movies, none of which, I admit, are exactly high art: Escape from New York, Road Warrior, Logan's Run, 12 Monkeys, Idiocracy. I've never seen the reputed classic A Boy and his Dog, though I've just bumped it up the Netflix Queue, along with 28 Days Later, which some people seem to count as more post-apocalyptic than zombie.

Which brings me to other great films that I'm not sure should really be included. Technically they seem to meet the criteria, but they feel like different genres to me: Dawn of the Dead, Planet of the Apes, Children of Men, the Matrix.

For the record, Waterworld is not as bad as it was made out to be at the time (it has some intriguing ideas and looks cool, though the script and acting are pretty, well, soggy). Costner's true apocalyptic crapterpiece is The Postman, possibly one of the funniest movies ever made.

Should we talk books? For pre-apocalyptic novels, of course, there's our own Kevin Shay's The End As I Know It, now available in paperback for your holiday gifting, but that's a different category. If you have not read Y: The Last Man, it's a must. One of the best post-apocalyptic visions in any medium. Incredibly thought-provoking, exciting and funny as shit. I will confess to having never read A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fact that appalls my Christian friends who know that I have read Left Behind and a dozen similar trashy propaganda works masked as end times thrillers. (For that matter, I've read the genre's secular equivalent, A Handmaid's Tale, which is better written, to be sure, but no less obnoxious, smug and delusional.)

Nor have I read The Road, and at this point I might just (gasp) wait for the movie.

So what do you recommend? After throwing this out to my Facebook circle and browsing a few online lists, there are some titles I'm totally curious about: The Blood of Heroes, Damnation Alley (not on DVD, sadly), Le Dernier Combat. I've heard mixed things about I Am Legend, though I'll probably see it eventually.

As for TV, I wanted to like Jericho, but it was so goddamn lame. With that in mind, can anyone vouch for Showtime's Jeremiah (baring in mind that I never got into Babylon 5)?

Finally, having seen The Day After Tomorrow, I know 2012 is probably gonna be dreadful, but this is one of the most snappy trailers ever.

December 5, 2008

Stalin: Pol Pot totally ripped me off

Daniel Radosh

Guitarist Satriani accuses Coldplay of plagiarism

The thing is, if this is true, it's hard to know who should be more embarrassed.

December 4, 2008

Beyond pardon

Daniel Radosh

Waterboarding_wideweb__470x332,0.jpg

I mentioned something like this briefly towards the end of yesterday's post, but here's an even more striking demonstration of the moral bankruptcy of the forgive-and-forget approach to America's recent history of torture. In an article on whether Bush should issue a blanket pardon for torture, Mike Mukasey says no, because that would lead people to believe that there was something wrong with the government's interrogation, detention, and surveillance programs that would require pardoning in the first place -- which in turn will cause people to be less likely to endorse similar approaches down the road:

"People are going to get the message, which is that if you come up with an answer that is not considered desirable in the future you might face prosecution, and that creates an incentive not to give an honest answer but to give an answer that may be acceptable in the future. It also creates some incentive in people not to ask in the first place.”

Um, yeah, that's called deterrence, and it ought to be one of the things our criminal justice system is concerned with. Stifling discussion is a good thing when discussion veers into the illegal and immoral. If someone's "honest" answer is, "lets induce fatal hypothermia," you're damn right I'd like to disincentivize that.

That so many people (not least the attorney general -- who got the job because he was a vast improvement over the last one) can still believe that no serious wrong has been done actually persuades me that in fact there shouldn't be prosecutions. Yes, prosecution would serve the cause of individual justice, but the country is much more seriously out of whack than simply arresting bad guys can fix, and setting it right needs to take priority. That's why I'd rather support a truth and reconciliation commission.

Prosecution will only harden the hearts of those who can't understand the evil that occurred, and make them more disposed to repeat that evil given half a chance. It could also, especially if done poorly, frame America's torture program into the bad actions of individuals, or of a specific chain of command, rather than a systemic problem. And it will create an incentive for the accused to deny, obfuscate, and challenge, which means that even if they are convicted, the public will still be left with the general sense of a debate that may not be completely settled. A truth commission, done properly, would remind people once and for all why torture is always a moral outrage.

December 3, 2008

Tortured language

Daniel Radosh

In today's New York Times article on Obama and the CIA, reporter Mark Mazzetti (with Scott Shane) repeats some of the irritating nonsense that Glenn Greenwald has already called him on, with new twists. Let's subject it to enhance interrogation, shall we.

Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.

1) Brennan played an "alleged role" but "protested" the allegations... Here's a thought for reporters: why not actually try to determine what his role was and whether his protest has merit? Greenwald managed to dig up quite a few examples of Brennan endorsing rendition and torture and claiming to have "intimate" knowledge of some cases. Surely a Times reporter could do similar digging.

2) "Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left." OK, so where's the evidence? This description of Obama's decision certainly seems possible, but it's also possible that Obama decided that his ardent supporters on the left were, in fact, correct about Brennan — a completely different story. At the very least, Mazzetti and Shane should have said apparently rather than evidently.

3) In the earlier article that Greenwald dissected, Mazzetti wrote: "the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks."

Greemwald observed that "to object to someone like Brennan... is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who 'played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda,'" so today Mazzetti avoids stating this as fact and attributes it to a source.

Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service.

Now you could look at this as progress (or, conversely, as an acknowledgment by Mazzetti that in the recent past he treated the opinions of his biased sources as factual statements) but it's hard not to read this as if there is supposed to be something wrong with creating anxiety in the ranks of the CIA over illegal and inhumane actions. More to the point, even though it's now posed as one man's opinion, that opinion is left unchallenged — until Mazzetti's own reporting several paragraphs later actually refutes it: "Among those mentioned as possible candidates for the job are Stephen R. Kappes, a C.I.A. veteran who is the deputy director." When you list people who "worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror" or "played a role in the agency's campaign against Al Qaida," Kappes would be near the top. I'm not an expert on the internal workings of the agency, but I see that Kappes clashed with others in the hierarchy and was instrumental in eventually banning water-boarding. Not everyone is tainted, just the ones who dove into the taint.

December 3, 2008

Because we wouldn't want to tarnish hockey's image as the sport of gentlmen

Daniel Radosh

elisha-cuthbert-hawaii-558-12.jpg When the New York Times headline is Avery Punished for Vulgar Remark, you don't have to know who Avery is to know that reading the article will in no way inform you what the vulgar remark was.

True to self-censorship form, the newspaper of record-ish will say only that hockey star Sean Avery "used a derogatory term to refer to his former girlfriends, saying that it had 'become like a common thing in the N.H.L. for guys to fall in love with' them."

So what unprintable term did Avery call Elisha Cuthbert et al? Bitches? Hos? Cunts? Chicks?

Nope. Thanks to less scrupulous tabloids (and YouTube), I learned that what Avery actually said was, "I just want to comment on how it's become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don't know what that's about. Enjoy the game tonight."

Enjoy the game! Such a polite Canadian!

The wire services split on this one, with UPI daring to actually report the most relevant detail of the story and AP opting to protect the delicate sensitivities of hockey fans. Guess whose lead most papers followed?

As far as I can tell, the Times has only used the offending phrase twice and never about a person (once incorrectly in a food article and once in a review of what sounds like an alarmingly bad gay comedy, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Why they printed the full title is anybody's guess). The phrase has gotten the media in some trouble in the past, but not everyone is so demure. Us Weekly used it to describe Ashlee Simpson.

[h/t: Colby Cosh]

December 3, 2008

Why not Bil Keane?

Daniel Radosh

The videos available don't quite do her justice. Here's one audio recording.

December 1, 2008

Breakfast of Champions

Daniel Radosh

news011a.jpg There goes Michael Phelps' most-sought-after celebrity endorser status. It was a tough choice: make millions as the clean-living, all-American momma's boy... or blow a few months with a topless skank from Las Vegas via Beverly Hills Pimps and Hos.

The late, lamented Radar foretold this, of course. But honestly, after all that color commentary about how Phelps has hands the size of dinner plates, we shouldn't be surprised when he lands a girlfriend with tits the size of Butterballs.

December 1, 2008

Running out the clock on his contract

Daniel Radosh

Shorter Bill Kristol: "When it comes to Islamic terrorism, liberal columnists can't bring themselves to condemn the real enemy: liberal columnists!"

December 1, 2008

The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #172

Daniel Radosh

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

081208_contest_p465.jpg

First place
"What the fuck are you smiling about? It's World AIDS Day, asshole!" —David F

Second place
Standup comedian, off-panel: "You see, black people carve statues like this, and white people carve statues like THIS!" —Francis

Third place
"As the team swam to shore, they encountered a pleasant fellow, treading water. They asked him if he knew how to dunk. He laughed, and said no. They then dunked his head under, holding him there until bubbles came to the surface.” —Damon

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #172" »

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