Thieves are stealing more ATMs. I personally blame Barbershop.
I have noticed that there are tons more stories about things being stolen - manhole covers, copper pipes, catalytic converters, etc.
Are we falling into some sort of kleptocracy? And if so, when will we admit it's Barack Obama's doing?
You know, when liberals say that the media is in the tank for McCain, it's not because we're trying to create some reverse ratfuck scenario in order to improve our fortunes. It's because things like the Note exist.
Here comes the McCain comeback -- again.
A bulldog is in place, outside help is on the way, and the candidate is even coming back to the country on his new plane(action-hero style -- along with some hostages).
Suddenly, Sen. John McCain is catching some breaks.
And so the new narrative is primed and in place (and it’s the same as an old narrative): McCain could actually do this thing. (Actually, while the polls remain tight, right now he’d settle for not being counted out -- but he’ll take what he can get.)
The Politico gets an honorable mention for this hagiography of McCain's new campaign manager. McCain won't ever be counted out - not after a massive campaign shakeup four months before the election, not after blatantly lying about previous statements, not when Montana looks to be in play.
The best part about it, as always, is the idea that none of these reporters have the slightest clue how to stop the runaway train that is The Narrative, and that should they do so, they risk doing a disservice to us, the demanding public. After all, should we not receive our daily dose of minor gaffes and reinforcement of storylines decided on campaign planes, how will we ever know who David Broder wants us to vote for?
Ken Blackwell, who did his part to help get war-mongerer George Bush back in office in 2004, has a maudlin article about life up at Townhall. No, not Iraqi life, you fools. We can't imagine that he's started caring about the lives of people who have nerve endings to feel pain, brains to sense fear, and families that will miss them. The only life that counts, which is embryonic life, with a side hat tip to the critical importance of Republican existence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-Declaration of Independence
It behooves us all, especially in this pivotal election year, to reflect on the words of our nations Founders in light of medical sciences capacity to infringe upon the first human right, the right to life.
The right of women, who are citizens after all, to have lives, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? No, women, like Iraqis of both genders, seem to fall outside the category of "life" he's laying out here.
The Sunday Times of London recently reported that a couple screened children shortly after conception who might have had an increased chance for cancer so they destroyed the embryos that had the defective gene. This medical capability in modern day eugenics has terrifying and profound implications for American public policy.
The article started, A woman has conceived Britains first baby guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer. You would almost think that what she and her husband consented to was a good thing.
They had her eggs fertilized to produce 11 female children. They then had a lab genetically test all of them for a gene that increases the chance of breast cancer. Five of them were found to be free of the gene, of which two were implanted in her womb. Shes now 14 weeks pregnant.
The other embryos were all destroyed.
Presumably, all 11 should have been implanted in her, and if they didn't all fit, then some random woman walking down the street should have been snatched up and implanted with the rest before she knew what was happening to her, and then held under house arrest to make sure she didn't abort. In fact, considering that IVF procedures usually create more embryos than could be carried by one woman, there should be a program of forcing women to do this. If you focus on the right populations, someone hated like the rape victims of famous athletes or anyone that could be a reasonable stand-in for the hot cheerleader that wouldn't fuck you in high school, this program could work with minimal objections from the public. Feminists would object, of course, but Time magazine will step in to assure everyone that the kidnapped mothers-to-be will be the recipients of one box of diapers each, courtesy of their local crisis pregnancy centers, which will set them up nicely for all the demands of motherhood. Anything but interfere with the only life that counts, which is the life of embryos.
Okay, there's another life that so important that considering the haunting possibility that the world could have been deprived of it before we even knew it was there is too painful a thought to bear: The life of Ken Blackwell himself.
I am a cancer survivor. Eight years ago I was treated for prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is one of the leading killers of men in the world.
I am also 60 years old. What if there was a genetic screening test for prostate cancer 60 years ago? Would I have been born? As I look at the faces of my grown children, I contemplate that they would never have lived if their father had never been born.
99.9% of people who say, "But if my mother/grandmother had been allowed to have an abortion, I might never have been born!" are arguing that the tragedy of illegal abortion in the past was much graver than we ever thought. They never realize it of course---the Ken Blackwells and Tom Coburns of the world think that their presence in this world was a self-evidently inevitable and important event---but reasonable people pretty much have to disagree with that assertion. But you can't really argue with people on whether or not the world really needed them to be born, so I resort to saying that if my parents hadn't gotten busy the night I was conceived, I would have never been born, thus the law must mandate non-stop fucking to be sure I don't suffer an existential crisis.
How about insisting they be taller than average, or have superior abilities? While youre at it, why not also select the eye color and hair color? Dont just fertilize eleven eggs. Fertilize a hundred, choose the single best one, and destroy the rest.
Considering that no one ever gets pregnant the old-fashioned way anymore, but that the entire human race is being repopulated through IVF, this is indeed a situation we have to worry about. Within a year, no one will be leaving it up to chance. Enjoy those 17 pregnant teenage girls in Gloucester now, folks, because by this time next year, the pregnancy au natural will have gone the way of the do si do.
This is similar in one regard to our recent national debate on embryonic stem cell research. For several years the press and liberals pounded the president for opposing the destruction of fertilized embryos like those destroyed by British doctors for scientific research. But earlier this year scientists discovered a method for extracting stem cells from skin cells called somatic cell dedifferentiation. Now scientists can engage in all the research they like without harming anyone.
To make this clear, he's arguing that while doing experiments with stem cells is harming someone, tossing those same stem cells in the trash is not harming someone. Which makes sense. If I pull all the hair out of my hairbrush and throw it in the trash like a normal person, I do not increase the world's human suffering. But if I put some hair in my mouth and chew experimentally to see what it tastes like, I'm committing a grave moral error on the level of murder. These are the fine moral distinctions that plebes like us can't understand, but Ken Blackwell can, which is why it was very important that he was born.
My late, but not forgotten lengthy weigh-in on this topic. I've had so little time to actually write anything of consequence this week, but I didn't want to toss off something frivilous about Barack Obama's speech about implementing a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships if elected. The thumbnail purpose -- to offer secular programs administered through faith-based entities to address a host of social ills, with the rationale being that these organizations are community based and focused and therefore can serve populations more effectively and competently at the local level than the federal government.
Read his entire speech from Tuesday, as well as the fact sheet issued by the campaign on the general parameters of the program. Any assessment should be based on the primary source material, as incendiary as this topic is, particularly for Dems, who love the circular firing squad.
An aside -- two interesting diaries popped up here on the Blend that are worth the click, a first-reaction diary based on the initial AP report of Obama's speech on this, "Obama To Expand Bush Faith Based Programs," by Susan_F, and "Eight questions on Obama and "Faith Based Initiatives" by Firefly, which drills down into key issues that any program of this nature raises for the presidential candidate, who is a constitutional scholar.
So my post is merely an attempt to break my reaction down. The hurdles I encountered are below the fold.
Hurdle #1: the Bush precedent poisons the waters of discussion.
Naturally, the current iteration of this kind of program, the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has time and again shown that the Bush administration politicizes and destroys everything, and that colors our view of intent and execution. After all, Bush not only politicized faith-based programs by focusing on turning over tax dollars to the religious right for it to continue its propagandizing - he has corrupted purely secular agencies of government to the highest degree, such as the Department of Justice (remember Alberto Gonzales) and FEMA (Katrina), to serve as agents of the Republican agenda, and rife with corruption, and cronyism.
So casting that aside as I thought about Obama's intent, both political and pragmatic, was difficult, and this hurdle has nothing to do with church-state separation, but operational excellence. For instance, faith-based organizations were able to mobilize and help Katrina victims far faster than the incompetent, unprepared FEMA. That was exposed right before our eyes on national television. But what we don't know is how many of those faith based organizations engaged in discrimination or prosyletized those they served. Oversight was poor regarding contractors and agencies engaged to clean up the Gulf, imagine how little oversight there was about church-state separation problems with faith-based relief agencies.
It's convincing me that any implementation of this kind of program, given government bureaucracy, will have sufficient oversight to avoid something like this:
The director of a Christian boot camp and an employee were arrested Friday for allegedly dragging a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell behind the group during a morning run, authorities said.
The camp has been hailed in the past by the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Truth be told, the Bush administration did precious little with this office other than use it as a carrot to dangle in front of fundies as proof of "his compassion agenda" and the access he granted to them. It was largely a sham:
"I have this burden on my heart that the name of God is just being destroyed in the name of politics. I felt like I had to write this...People are being manipulated. Good well-meaning people are being told, ‘Send your money to this Christian advocacy group or that.’ And that’s the answer. It's just not the answer. It’s not the answer."
-- David Kuo, on 60 Minutes, author of Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, on the use of the use and abuse of fundamentalists by the White House. Kuo also said that political affairs people in the White House referred to Pat Robertson as "insane," Jerry Falwell as "ridiculous," and that James Dobson "had to be controlled."
That leads to Hurdle #2...
Hurdle #2: Obama's intent - political, altruistic, both, or neither?
After eight years of Bush's hollow, craven program, the news that Barack Obama would attempt another stab at this was surely not going to be received well by many Dems who are mindful of the encroaching theocratic bent some of our elected officials are prone to, and see the desire to make electoral inroads with religious voters as dangerous.
Of course it's a narrow but understandable view, given Hurdle #1, to immediately equate all faith-based groups as inherently evil in intent, or hell-bent (pun intended) on prosyletizing. There are plenty of progressive religious organizations capable and willing to work within or beyond federal guidelines to help their communities.
Since Obama, a constitutional scholar and a person of faith, does have to try to reconcile those issues and their impact on decision making in a country that is based on church-state separation, this is difficult, but it also isn't something new. I'm really surprised at the sense of shock about the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships idea that I am seeing out there. The Illinois senator has never hidden his faith, or believe in the idea, so I see the negative reaction to this at this point in his candidacy as kind of odd, similar to the highly negative reaction to his statement that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman. It's no news (and is no different than all of the 2008 top-tier Dems), but at this point in the race it continues to breed mistrust, even as he issued statements opposing the state amendments banning same-sex marriage and reiterated his support for civil equality.
However, It's seen as playing politics because the position is ultimately irreconcilable if viewed on any logical basis, particularly because Obama knows the law, and knows Loving v. Virginia. But the American public has been equally illogical about the matter from some time now, and as we've seen, most contemporary pols follow, not lead, on hot button social issues. That's not an excuse, mind you, just an observation of fact.
In the case of this faith-based initiative, it's a similar problem -- given the McClurkin debacle, Obama has had to deal with how to court both LGBTs and religious blacks, honestly and fairly, given that there are key issues both groups face that place them in opposition to one another. Part of Barack Obama's success has been his ability to bridge a host of groups of great diversity -- age, race, region, class, religious/non-religious to name a few -- by seeking inclusion and common ground. Unfortunately building a broad base like that means you will step on land mines. This is a big one.
Just my two cents -- I do believe you can be pro-LGBT, believe in the separation of church and state, have personal beliefs and govern the country successfully with the correct balance. This does seem like a superhuman task, given politics in this country. Can Obama do this? I have no idea.
Anyone who is certain one way or the other is not being truthful. A president cannot pass legislation or approve a budget; a president cannot in a sweeping move, change a bloated government bureaucracy into a well-oiled machine that can perform the oversight necessary to avoid huge amounts of waste, fraud, abuse and discrimination in any program, let alone one of this kind. The idea of assisting local agencies, be they faith-based or secular, that have their pulse on the nature of local problems and may have more innovative solutions based on their knowledge of their communities is a good idea on paper as far as problem-solving is concerned. The problem is that on paper doesn't usually translate into real world implementation without serious problems. And that leads to...
Hurdle #3: Discrimination.
This was Obama's reaction to a question about discrimination against LGBTs by faith-based orgs.
He said religious organizations would not be allowed to use taxpayer funds to proselytize and would not be allowed to discriminate in providing services or in hiring staff for government-funded work.In answer to a reporter's question, Obama said federal anti-discrimination laws do not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation. But Obama said he believes local laws in some states prohibiting discrimination against gays would apply to faith-based social programs funded with federal money in those states.
Bzzzzt. Big problem Barack. I have zero rights in the state of North Carolina as a gay person. This flies in the face of all of your strong statements about civil equality. Are you saying that you approve of homeless LGBTs being turned away by a fundamentalist-run shelter in states that still legally discriminate? Just a casual "too bad, so sad" response for us out in Red State America? That wasn't well thought out.
On the other hand, politically, this could be another example of sheer numbers being considered over purity of conviction. I'm sure this program can and will help millions of people in ways the federal government cannot. Certainly more people than those who would be turned away because of religious bigotry. If that's the part of the political calculation, then Obama, in order to defuse the predictable blowback specifically on this issue, should have taken the opportunity to also announce his intention to place the passage of an inclusive ENDA at an equal level of importance as the establishment of a Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It would then highlight the injustices that a program like this brings to the forefront -- discrimination of any kind comes at a cost to a religious organization that intends to take federal funds.
Quite frankly, I don't know why a faith-based organization that wants to continue to discriminate should feel entitled to any federal funds. John McCain predictably, thinks religious organizations should take our tax dollars without strings -- and be able to discriminate. The fact of the matter is that Obama's announcement isn't being received well by the right wing fundies either. Take this reaction from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who agrees with McCain (NYT):
[E]vangelical leaders said not allowing religious groups to hire based on their beliefs would strip them of the very basis for religion-based programs.“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place,” said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
...A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain “disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight.”
So there are a lot of unhappy people for different reasons. It's interesting to see such an array of reactions on the issue of discrimination. It's also instructive to note that on the left the fact that LGBTs can and will be discriminated against has largely been ignored. Sometimes your alleged friends drop you quickly when protecting their candidate. Paul the Spud at Shakesville hit the nail on the head.
Part of the reason I'm so upset is because of the reaction of many on the left to Obama's speech. Apparently, once Obama stated he was going to "hold up the Constitution," everything was A-OK, and we could go on about our lives. At Salon:There's simply nothing wrong with this. If Obama honors church-state separation and keeps the safeguards in place, as he clearly said he would, there's no reason the government can't partner with ministries willing to provide a secular social service.
Melissa chimed in with equal vigor:
Not every faith-based program is explicitly (or at all) anti-gay or anti-birth control, but that's a pretty big question mark when you're seeking services. This is particularly problematic for trans women and men, especially those who don't easily "pass." LGBTQs risk facing real hostility at faith-based service centers, especially in faith-based programs that service men and women separately.In other words, one of the most at-risk populations for addiction, depression, homelessness, and suicide face significant deterrents to seeking help from faith-based programs.
That's not going to change under Obama, nor would it under anyone else. It's an inherent problem with faith-based programs, which is why the government's involvement with them is crap. Period.
Paul also mentioned Jesse's post on the topic where I mentioned in the comments that LGBT discrimination would legally occur under Obama's program. That nugget garnered no reaction:
You will note that, in comments at Pandagon and in the comments thread in my post from yesterday, the discrimination of LGBTQ persons by FBO's was brought up by Pam Spaulding and Melissa. And they received no response. This cannot be ignored or forgotten, especially by progressives; this is not simply a case of being discriminated against due to religious beliefs. This is, once again, the neglecting of LGBTQ Americans. And there's simply everything wrong with that.
This, friends, is where the rubber meets the road in the progressive movement. It's less about Barack Obama on this specific issue, it's about when you see your allies' blind spots revealed in service of "the greater good." Combatting LGBT discrimination -- a basic treatment of a group's civil rights -- hasn't yet reached a level of serious commitment on the left that we can trust self-styled progressives not to look the other way, and tell us to go sit down and suck it up for "the big win."
That can be interpreted as the old tattered heterosexual privilege slip of our society showing; it's no different than when I point out white privilege slips showing when those occur; it's notable that people usually take offense at the latter being pointed out by similarly going into denial and equivocating...or just silence, as in this case. Both of those privileges do not come out of malice, but they as we all know they usually go unchecked and unexamined, because it makes people uncomfortable - it also allows institutionalized and cultural discrimination to continue.
So, did I actually make any kind of decision on where I stand on this issue? I guess not. It's very complicated and troubling from every POV. I think there are merits to actually trying to do a program like this in the right manner, but I don't have full confidence that it can be pulled off. Barack Obama will clearly do a better job than Bush, who didn't even try to work hard at accomplishing anything resembling "compassionate conservatism."
All I can say to the Obama campaign is that there was no way to roll this sucker out without causing dissent in the base of the party for the variety of reasons you are seeing out there, and you're boxed in by federal laws that set the senator up without any recourse but to endorse discrimination. That there was no plan to counter that, and it muddies the waters. It has to be clear what Barack Obama believes can and should be done to ensure people are treated equally under the law -- and how to handle circumstances when the law doesn't yet provide that protection.
Secular progressives need to remember that the U.S. for better or worse, is a religious country. That can manifest itself in various good in terms of charity and care for one's neighbor (and indeed led the struggle for racial equality). That can also be seen, as we have experienced under the thumb of the religious right, a dangerous theocratic bent that threatens basic freedoms and rights.
I think our experience of late with Bush has hardened many on the secular left to faith, and has resulted in the belittling of believers of all faiths (references to "sky daddy," for example), when in fact many observant people are politically our allies and even support LGBT equality (an aside - my views on faith are spelled out in this post).
How do we split the difference here when the enemy is the political religious right, not religion itself?
The key test for me for those who approve of government faith based partnerships is whether they would accept supporting say, a soup kitchen run by the Church of Satan, or a relief organization run by the FLDS or the Church of Scientology. The answer if they were asked this question would be telling, because if the answer by the campaign would be that all faiths would be equally scrutinized is yes, then they would have to deal with a different kind of fallout (that is equally legitimate).
When I was applying to law schools, I got a couple of letters from the University of Tennessee talking about all they had to offer. Sadly, Professor Glenn Reynolds was not on the list of items that would me me a leader of tomorrow, but I was always sort of tempted to write and talk about my undying love for his punchy, quick-to-the-draw wrongness. Alas, given that the bar can look back at your old applications, I decided a joke app, no matter how free or how fun, wasn't the best way to make a point that would probably be lost before the Ole Perfesser had a chance to look at it.
Hey, that's why I blog instead. Insty today:
A HEDGE-FUND READER EMAILS:
Does this (the Dow since early May)...
have anything to do with this (Obama/inTrade) ?
It's the correlation that no one in polite company is discussing.
Luckily, we're not so polite here. It's certainly suggestive.
Polite company wouldn't tend to discuss that because polite company tends not to be fucking stupid, not to put too fine of a point on it. Also note that since Obama effectively clinched the nomination, Seattle not only lost the Supersonics, but the Mariners sped to one of the worst records in baseball.
Does Barack Obama hate Seattle? And is there anything, from fascism to racism to economic collapse to forging his birth certificate, that he can't do? I think we should just raise him up to be our Man-King now and hope that he smiles kindly upon our fortunes.
Democrats suggested today that Senator John McCain may choose Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane of Hazzard County, Georgia, as his running mate. Coltrane, despite being a fictional character from a nonexistent county, is widely discussed in Democratic circles as being a tough on crime conservative with a long record of executive experience. "Coltrane is causing fits among many key figures in our party," said one Democratic operative, citing both Martin Sheen's advisor from The American President and Martin Sheen's ex-president from The West Wing.
You cannot escape motherfucking Wall-E. He is in your dreams. He is your dreams.
Well, not really, but I wanted to approach yet another facet of this movie. And no, it's not the fact that Wall-E is a less verbose Johnny 5. It's the conservative caterwauling about it. I'd go over a list of complaints, but the fascist bomb got pulled by Jonah Goldberg-
(Okay, we're going to talk about Jonah Goldberg for a second. Actually, what we're going to do is make Jonah Goldberg jokes. Jonah Goldberg is so dumb he blamed baby back ribs on Roe v. Wade. Your turn.)
-so we've pretty much had All Conservative Internet Traditions invoked. But here's the big thing that all these reactionaries are missing about Wall-E, something that you'd think, in their penchant to declare everything from Cinderella Man to, uh, Cinderella Man: Director's Cut a conservative movie, they'd have picked up on. There's a perfectly reasonable conservative read on the movie that doesn't turn it into a total piece of shit! Of course, that also involves not calling a movie that's anti-corporate "fascist", so leave it up to the hairshirted liberal to find it. The fundamental story of the movie is about a culture beholden to a nanny state - in this case, a literal nanny state that coddles them like babies from the cradle to the grave, a world where individual initiative is destroyed and cultural history is entirely alien to the entire human race. Basically, it's the exact thing that conservatives have been warning us about for years, wrapped up in a movie with cute robots who rebel against it and lead humanity to a hunting-gathering-growing Earth.
The main problem, obviously, is that the movie views the nanny state as a corporation rather than a purely public/liberal government entity. But for a movement which lists one of its biggest recent cinematic accomplishments as The Island, they need all the help they can get.
Where the power of Wall-E rests, and what makes it so controversial, is that it plays on a universal theme in a specific way - the abandonment of what truly matters in service to an easy and seductive evil. It's the distraught person selling his soul, the teenager selling out to be popular, Judas selling out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Hell, if you want, it's even a contorted Rapture story - mankind has finally managed to bring a reckoning on itself that has destroyed all it ever knew, and only by finally realizing the truth are they saved and returned to a peaceful reign on Earth.
It's just disappointing watching these people give up and reflexively turn against a movie because it involves environmental destruction rather than the hellfire and homosexual orgies they would normally connote as the End of Times, and a charismatic corporate leader rather than a slick Jewish leader coming under the guise of the United Nations. You've gotta work at this, people!
So, that PUMA thing blew up. Naturally, people are casting around looking for any reason to suggest that the stereotype---hysterical women too dumb to know what's good for them voting for McCain out of spite because Clinton lost, thereby inadvertently proving that women are probably too stupid to vote, much less run for office---is true, even in the face of evidence that there's rat-fucking going on. I never said that there was no way any woman could be that dumb---women are not superior to men, just equal to men, so we have our share of dumbasses. Just that it's overblown and that the overblown nature of it is suspicious, due to likely rat-fucking and disingenuous media trend-spotting.
Rick Perlstein, historian and expert in Republican dirty tricks, explains it all better.
No, it's not that some of the Hillary die-hardism isn't utterly organic, the product of sincere dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. But that was Buchanan's point in 1971: None of this stuff works unless you build it off divisions that already exist in Democratic circles. You exacerbate them. You light the fuse. You make it easy for good Democrats to rationalize that they're doing the right thing, as Hubert Humphrey rationalized to the president on election night in this private conversation that he was doing the right thing when he implied he helped sabotage George McGovern for the general election.
So people asked me what good exposing Astroturf does for the handful of real women that are so bitter they'll flush the lives of those on the Republican hit list such as Iranian citizens, not to say the rights of women, down the toilet with a vindictive vote (or refusing to vote) that helps McCain to victory? Well, it helps show them that they're being taken for a ride, for one thing, which might make them reconsider their foolish, selfish behavior.
Let me put this straight: Voting for McCain, or helping him win by throwing your vote to anyone but Obama or refusing to vote, is worse than doing all these things in passive or active support of Bush in 2000. Supporting Bush, actively by voting for him or passively by voting for Nader, was somewhat understandable, because he didn't actually let the voters know that he was gunning for abortion rights or to invade Iraq. I mean, you should have guessed that, but it's not immoral to be naive. But McCain cracks jokes about bombing Iran and has been eager to show his anti-choice bona fides. Really, he's left even passive supporters no excuse for themselves.
I hereby declare the death of the "a taxicab driver told me" meme. When white supremacists start talking to Uncle Ruckus on their way to the movies, it has officially eschewed all meaning and rounded the bend to some guy in the corner talking about how the nice driver man told him purple monkey dishwasher.
I got all excited when I saw Farhad Manjoo had a review up of something called the Smart ForTwo, which is a backseat-less small car that can fit into even the scariest small parallel parking spots. "Ah-a!," I thought, "People are beginning to wise up to a frustration that drove me out of driving and into bicycling, which is the clusterfuck nature of traffic and parking makes driving just plain miserable." Plus, I have a pick-up truck, so I'm already convinced that a lot of people need no more than two seats. This Smart Fortwo actually has more storage space for luggage and groceries than my truck does without using the truckbed, something you often don't want to do with something like a suitcase. But the fact of the matter is most cars out there are taking up a lot more physical space than the owners pretty much ever need---backseats that never touch a human butt, giant truckbeds that never haul a piece of furniture or a bag of compost. Massive engines that never get put to use hauling anything more than human beings. My annoyance at this trend far outstrips my environmental concerns. On a certain level, it's also symbolic of the wastefulness of American life. I'm also easily annoyed by houses that have tons of square footage and the owners have to start being creative about filling it. I wish the sleeker, smaller trend in computers would spread out to other aspects of American life, but so far, big and garish seems like it's here to stay. So any move in the right direction---prioritizing the compact, the simple, the maneuverable, the economical over the garish, the wasteful, and imposing---gets me all excited. And it does seem that the Smart Fortwo has very real advantages for maneuvering through traffic and parking. That's good. Make those people in giant SUVs drool with jealousy as you slip into a nice parking spot with your itty-bitty car. It might open up your mind to other ways to get around that opt you out of the worst parts of traffic. Dismantling the concept that cars have to look a certain way, or that bigger is better, is all very good.
But upon reading the post in-depth, I found that this car just doesn't even come close to being the innovation it looks like. The gas mileage is 33 mpg in the city and 41 mpg on the highway, which is good, especially for the price of the car, but not revolutionary good. And if the ease of parking the thing just encourages people to drive more, it's counterproductive. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't lay any kind of sufficient challenge, outside of aesthetic, to the wastefulness of a car culture where people are using an average of like one gallon of gasoline to move one single human being 20 miles. Until we get around the wastefulness of so much energy used to move so little mass, we're going to be stuck in this loop.
You know, I was hopeful. LaShawn Barber wrote a piece declaring (I thought) that fathers abandoning their children is a form of abuse. As the child of a single mother with a father who ran out, there was a constant, lingering doubt about my own self-worth that always played around the edges of my psyche, every so often wondering what was wrong with me that he left.
I should have known that would get blown out the fucking window.
As a 25-year-old, I've come to the conclusion that the only thing wrong was that he was and is an asshole. It is, however, a hell of a way to grow up, in no small part because there's always the assumption on the behalf of others that something had to have been wrong with your mother, that something's got to be wrong with you. True to form, this is exactly where Barber goes.
Despite what selfish and shameless adults think, children want fathers. They need fathers. They need masculine men in their lives who love them and would do anything to protect them, men who live with them, raise them, and sacrifice for them. Millions of children grow up without being loved or care for by the men who sired them. It makes me angry, bitterly so.
Oddly enough, most fatherless children aren't the result of selfish and shameless adults, they're the product of selfish and shameless fathers. Hence the "fatherless" aspect of the argument. Children of absentee fathers are not broken, simply hurt. We are not deficient, we are not flawed, and we manage to become perfectly functional, rational adults - we've even about to have a president to our advantage. The critical point in Barber's argument, of course, isn't about the abdication of responsibility - it's about the lack of vital masculinity in the home. Quoth Barber from another paternalist, James White:
“As I stared at the picture [of two ‘married’ women with a child between them] I could not help but see only one thing: the selfish, self-centered abuse of a beautiful little child by two people committed to the fulfillment of their own desires. I once again immediately thought of the comments of Rosie O’Donnell. She was asked about her ’son,’ and she said he has asked about where his daddy is. O’Donnell’s response is the very essence of self-centeredness: ‘I tell him Mommy only likes other Mommies.’
In any "nontraditional" home, the people who provide the stable, caring, healthy environment in which the child is nurtured and grown cannot be said to be abusive. It's not shocking, but still thoroughly disappointing, to see a child told that the very structure of love and attention that makes them who they are is inherently abusive - not because of anything denied to them, but because their family structure is allegedly inherently lacking.
This goes to a larger point about the conservative fixation on "saving the males". Barber's view of masculinity, much like Kathleen Parker's, is so thoroughly emasculating that I'm surprised they don't suggest men be chained by collar to workbenches, given demure wenches to snarl at and receive beers from. The masculine identity is so fragile, so easily lost that the male-savers feel compelled to launch a crusade to save it from the acidic clenches of the Vagina Monologue-chanting hordes of wannabe single moms and lesbians.
As a male, I find this anti-feminist position the most insulting and degrading thing imaginable. I don't need to be saved from According to Jim, I need to be saved from people telling me that I have a fatally flawed gender identity because my dad ran out. I don't need to be saved from a culture that says it's okay for two women to raise a child, that child needs to be saved from the people telling it that it's damaged because there's no male in the picture. Our culture doesn't need to be saved from single mothers and the athletes, hunters, builders, and bakers they raise, those children need to be saved from the constant denigration of their families by people too fucked up to see anything but an imaginary, gaping hole in their souls.
I'm a man. I managed to become that way without a father, because I had a loving household in which I was allowed to become who I was, to pursue my dreams, to not worry for food or shelter no matter how tight things got. Was it ideal? No. But the next time you want to tell me that my mother and grandmother abused me by loving me as much as any two people could love another one, you can kiss all three generations of our asses.
Sometimes the jokes just tell themselves -- who knew that those checks were destined to become a dose of economic Viagra. According to the Adult Internet Market Research Company, business has been "enhanced" significantly.
An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, "Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market."
Jillian Fox, spokeswoman for LSGmodels.com, one of the sites reporting figures to AIMRCo, added, "In a June 15, 2008 survey to our members, thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or renew an existing membership."
Do you think any of our fundamentalist friends re-upped their memberships so they could continue their "research"? Think Progress:
The Bush administration has attempted to wage an aggressive fight in the War on Porn. In fact, cracking down on “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography was “one of the top priorities” of Alberto Gonzales while he was Attorney General, often coming before terrorism prosecutions.
Spoilage, people, spoilage.
So I saw WALL-E last night, and wanted to throw in two cents on top of Auguste's humorous post on it. I agree that the second half, especially with its lack of subtlety, had nothing on the first half. The action sequences were imaginative in the way they were stylized, but it's true they didn't differ significantly from past Pixar exertions in the way it played out.
Still, I think that even with it being as unsubtle as it was, there was just a stylistic daring to the second half of the film that really rescued it from cliche for me. Science fiction hinges often on symbolism and style, and this movie had that in spades throughout. The homage to 2001 that constituted the second half of the movie was really well done. If you're going to go there, and borrow plot elements from such a classic film, it's best not to do it half-assed but instead go all out, as was done in this movie, right down to the way that the spaceship and the autopilot robot looked.
But I think what really stunned me was how dark the satire was in the portrayal of humanity after they left Earth. I'm always talking about how many movies when I was a kid were just really dark compared to modern movies, but this film really proved me wrong. I fully expected that when WALL-E came face to face with humans, the humans would be, I don't know, something else. Smarter and more wicked, I guess. What I didn't expect, and what floored me was that they were basically overgrown babies, fat with short arms and no bone density or ability to walk.* There's no mistaking the symbolism of the captain taking the first steps he ever had in his life to fight the autopilot, and what the filmmakers were saying about our wasteful, silly culture and the immaturity it breeds. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the bleak vision portrayed in this movie, but certainly they're not completely wrong about how certain parts of our infrastructure have deprived us of autonomy. (Think about how Americans are slave to our cars, for instance.) I think making the people of the future near-literal babies (with lots of comparison shots to actual babies to drive home the message) was a brave choice, and made the movie work much better than the alternatives would have. It makes humanity much more sympathetic, because people aren't wicked, just living these half-lives of utter dependence on robots. Their computer screens are Plato's cave, but they do embrace the opportunity to move outside the cave when it's given. And you can't even be mad at the robots, because they're actually doing the best they can with a bad situation. Communicating the message that we have to get past pointing fingers and start looking at systems is hard to do---people love a villain---but this movie managed to pull it off.
And yeah, there's no excuse for advertising it with cheap plastic crap. I was genuinely moved by the movie, and now genuinely pissed off that we can't even get out of the smallest of ruts.
*Yes, I realize that this has all sorts of weird implications in a culture where fat people are subject to all sorts of unfair stereotypes. But once the choice was made to represent grown adults as overgrown babies---which is the best choice for how the movie plays out---I'm not sure how you get around that problem.
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