Part of the joy of watching Top Gear, the BBC's outrageous car program whose new season starts this weekend, is that it's a droll, politically incorrect antidote to the stifling sanctimoniousness of rules-mad Labour apparatchiks. The Guardian, though reliably left-wing, recognizes that. Or, in this profile, at least the paper doesn't try to gloss over it. Says James May, one of the three hosts:
"We don't like being told by other people how we
should live and how we should think."
As for the underdeveloped environmental sensitivity of his colleague Jeremy Clarkson,
During filming for Top Gear, it was claimed he damaged a peat bog in
Scotland. On another occasion, the BBC was forced to apologise after he
rammed a pick-up into a chestnut tree to test the vehicle's strength.
He rails against political correctness and health and safety
regulations, and earlier this summer was accused of calling Gordon
Brown "a cunt" in unbroadcast comments to his Top Gear audience, whom
he has also referred to as "oafs". He has been condemned by chief
constables for glamorising speeding, has joked about truck drivers
murdering prostitutes, and said a woman presenter would be "a disaster"
on Top Gear.
He sounds like a sexist monster and a bully, but
then Clarkson's reactionary opinions are probably the calculated
wind-ups of a professional stirrer.
Precisely.
Undaunted by the criticism of reflexive nannies and professional sourpusses, the show's stars tear up the world's asphalt in clunkers and supercars alike, with so much good cheer and studied carelessness and schoolboy charm as to constitute a Jackass for doughy white men and the women who love them.
Another joy of the program is that it results in enraged comments by Guardian readers, such as this one by "jonnyhaw":
"I don't like cars and their effect on our lives and our cities, so obviously can't stand Top Gear. When is the BBC going to produce an hour-long, primetime programme for public transport users?"
When indeed. Really, that's almost as funny as the show itself.
Not yet familiar with the program? Right this way.
Or enjoy the Top Gear team doing the American South in sub-$1,000 jalopes, pranking each other almost to the point of death-by-angry-mob:
My two young Chinese-born girls were abandoned
as infants. My oldest was left in a box in the stairwell of a Chinese cigarette factory (let the two minutes' hate against Big Tobacco commence!). My youngest was placed in a box of her own in the middle of a traffic circle, where she cried her smog-filled little lungs out for hours, maybe days. Most likely, they were discarded in favor of boys — China's odious population-control policy at work.
So, really, I want to like the Girl Effect website. Of course girls deserve the same
chances as boys. I'm, let's say, rather adamant about that.
I'm put off, though, by the facile implication of the
site's makers that girls are the virtuous gender whose innate
decency and quiet wisdom will somehow make the world all right.
Equality means
treating everyone the same. That means not favoring one sex over the other.
There's something undeniably discriminatory about the assumption
that if you give a girl an education, she will rise through the ranks
and bless the community with her intelligence and superior judgment;
whereas boys are the hopeless gender, not to be entrusted with such
delicate things as leadership and vision.
On the other hand, I have donated to Greg Mortensen's Central Asia Institute,
where girls' education is paramount, so what do I know?
P.S.: For some reason, I get the feeling I won't have much to worry about with my daughters, learning- and empowerment-wise. Half an hour ago, just kinda goofing off on my Mac, I was teaching Jolie (4) the rudiments of Photoshop. Using the eyedropper tool, I showed her how to choose any color. "For instance, honey, here, let's pick brown." Her reply: "Daddy, that's more of a terracotta-rust shade." !! WTF is up with this kid?
Inevitably, the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the D.C. sniper who murdered ten people in 2002, drew heated protests in recent days. I understand the opposition to the death penalty in general, and am relatively agnostic on the topic. It's a damn sight more than unfortunate that in the U.S.A., capital punishment is
applied so easily and broadly, and in a pretty overtly
racist and often arbitrary way to boot. Then again, there are capital crimes that are so grotesque and heinous, and the guilt of the perp so completely beyond question, that I can't lose sleep over the killer being given a lethal injection. Yes, putting a man to death is horrible (it is supposed to be), just as I am repelled by the people who celebrate the snuffing out of another human being's life, even if that human being is a mad killer.
That said, I'm glad Muhammad's lawyers got nowhere when they tried to present last-minute evidence that their client had been beaten and generally treated badly as a boy. A shitty childhood neither excuses nor truly explains a single thing — be it failure to obey a stop sign, taking a dump in the cereal
aisle, and least of all, capital murder times ten. If it did, we'd be
living in a nation of dozens of millions of poor maltreated serial
killers (and, I suppose, serial/cereal dumpers).
Similarly, surely tons of sociopaths have enjoyed rather charmed, gilded upbringings. What's their excuse?
A Facebook friend of a friend, D.B., claimed yesterday that my notion is factually wrong:
No serial killer, rapist, dictator, or sociopath ever studied had anything but the most brutal of childhoods.
I don't believe that's true (examples welcome, I'm too overworked to hit Google much right now) — but even if it is, so what? What are we to take away from that? Lots of folks endure
loveless childhoods, even beatings, and still make something of
themselves. I'm rather attached to the idea that people are responsible for their own actions. If we don't believe that, where does our personal culpability for bad / criminal behavior end? And if "others" are overwhelmingly to blame for how we turn out, couldn't every bully, thug, and killer just insist they wuz robbed — robbed of a childhood with a mom's kisses and a dad's hugs, not to mention teachers' persistent attaboys and apple pie on Sundays and bi-annual family trips to Disneyland?
Yes, they could, and many of them do — or else their supporters and defense attorneys will do it for them.
The nadir of this belated mollycoddling and soft-hearted ueber-tolerance has to be an article entitled The Price We Pay For Shaming Little Boys by Dr. Mary Armstrong, a Canadian pyschotherapist. (D.B. referred to the short essay approvingly to bolster his argument, so I checked it out.) The good doctor's screed qualifies as one of the oddest pieces of failed academic prose ever
secreted in the field of psychology, which is quite a distinction in a profession rife with claptrap.
What does Ms. Armstrong set out to do? It's pretty ambitious: She is begging of us to understand that high-ranking World-War-II-era nazis and all their henchmen, right down to the lowliest concentration camp guards, are honest-to-god victims.
That's right. Armstrong contends that because
early-twentieth-century German men grew up in a "harsh" child-rearing
culture, and were then further cheated out of building "self-esteem" due to the
"humiliating and bloody defeat of 1918 and the subsequent shame of
Versailles," they couldn't help but take revenge on Jews.
Germans who had been traumatized in childhood took out
their rage on Jews and others who reminded them of themselves when they
were helpless children. They projected onto others all their own 'bad'
qualities which they had never been able to accept in themselves.
Oh,
those poor Nazis! Their lack of "self-esteem," fueled by their cold Prussian daddies, caused them to go bonkers and kill six million Jews.
This
is, to a T, my problem with the kind of moral relativism preached by D.B. and others; in the end, Armstrong's so-soft-it's-rotting view of human depravity lets even
Hitler's mass murderers off the hook. To hear her tell it, any Nazi can claim full-blown "injured-party" status right
alongside the gays and gypsies and Jews he and the rest of his Herrenvolk tried so very hard to
exterminate.
For his part, D.B. says he is not out to excuse bad behavior, and I believe him. But he's playing a game of dialectics. There's is really only a hairbreadth's difference between explaining why someone is
legally but perhaps not morally culpable for premeditated murder or
genocide (after all, "they grew up with abusive parents," etc.), and excusing it.
John Allen Muhammad has been dead less than 24 hours, but my thoughts are not with him; he leaves me neither hot under the collar nor cold in my heart. My thoughts are with the families and the friends of the ten people he killed.
I'm sorry if that offends people like D.B., and delighted if that offends crackpot victimology champions like Dr. Mary Armstrong.
I've been traveling a lot this past week, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont. I'd hoped that my Maine plates would turn into a mark of pride on November 3. Instead, it feels like I've been driving around with this on my car. "Regrettable" doesn't begin to cover the bitter outcome of Tuesday's election.
I have a
question for Maine's Yes-on-1 voters: Will you have the guts to tell your
children and grandchildren (not just today but in a generation from
now) what you did, how you pulled the lever in favor of discrimination?
Just curious.
One reason I was relieved to leave the Netherlands behind had to to with the stifling requirements of government-mandated sameness. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of petty Dutch rules that governed everything from what you were allowed to call your newborn to what exact color you were allowed to paint your front door (in Amsterdam's city center, you may choose any color at all, as long as it is a particular shade of dark green).
To my chagrin, I've since learned that forced conformity is the rule in a good number of municipalities in the U.S. too (to say nothing of condo boards and homeowners' associations, which appear to be the favorite refuge of wannabe tyrants everywhere). The mentality is on perfect display here:
A property manager's decision to paint a rundown rental house pink is angering some neighbors, who say the owner is trying to get back at the city. BK Management repainted the house in the New Chauncey neighborhood district after city inspectors said the dwelling needed aesthetic improvements. Chad Budreau of BK Management said the owners originally wanted to install neutral siding but chose paint because of the cost. "We were able to get the paint for a very good price, and the students living there seem to like it a lot. A lot of people have actually called and complimented us on the color," he said.
Katy Bunder, who has lived in the neighborhood for 22 years, isn't one of them. "It's the worst I've ever seen on a home," she said. Bunder says the owners "intentionally devalued" the house.
Which makes zero sense.
I wonder if Ms. Bunder would accuse the owners of these and these homes of having "devalued" them. Me, I think it's kinda nice that not every house has to be painted beige or eggshell-white; though if people like Katy Bunder had anything to do with it, no doubt that'd be the law.
Most great children's literature, despite its greatness, is still an open book. As adults, we know why these books work. We see and recognize the masterful, rhyming whimsy in Dr. Seuss' greatest hits; the bursting-at-the-seams anarchy and just a hint of loneliness and lost-ness in the Eloise series (minus the dreadful Eloise at Christmastime, that is); the simple-minded, almost soulless innocence of Curious George.
All these books, while unique in their tone and content, and while groundbreaking in their day, are transparent enough. They're not quite formulaic, but they were written in an idiom that is fairly easy to copy, both for the original author and for the epigones following in his or her footsteps.
I know only three exceptions to this general rule: Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, a book that has occasionally forced me to pretend I had something in my eye; Alice in Wonderland, awash in odd imagery and day-glo allegories; and Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. (Admittedly, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon deserves at least an honorable mention here.)
Of these, to me, Wild Things is the most impenetrable mystery. It's Heart of Darkness for toddlers. It stirs something deep in me, and presumably in generations of other readers, that I cannot put into words. I'm tempted to compliment the book by saying that it is pure poetry, but that's a meaningless descriptor — especially for someone who, like me, has never cared for poetry that much.
Wild Things is, I believe, irreproducible. It appears fueled not by a calculated "what if" (what if a little girl lived in the Plaza Hotel, what if an explorer brought an African chimp to America), but by one author taking a kernel of an idea and recklessly letting it take him where it
wants, giving in to the pull of his intuition and subconsciousness.
There's no internal logic to Where the Wild Things Are, no overt meaning (though lots of hidden ones), let alone (shudder) a message: rather, the book is a danger-skirting fever dream that Sendak rides without holding back, capturing a wisp of inspiration that can't be willed to return.
Sendak is an admirer of Herman Melville, and once said of Melville's books
"There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me."
I doubt there's higher praise for any author. It applies equally to Sendak himself.
Whether Spike Jonze's movie will do justice to Sendak's masterpiece, I don't know — I'm prepared for the film to be somewhere between a glorious flop and this generation's Kazaam.
So why am I even writing about Sendak on Nobody's Business? Because the irascible author tells scared little children to go fuck themselves. Well, almost.
That's a whole new level of caution-to-the-wind curmudgeonry. I have to say, I admire it a helluva lot more than the bromides of professional audience-panderers like Disney Corp (the a-holes who turned A.A. Milne's beautiful Winnie the Pooh into a godforsaken saccharine cuddleball).
I also like imagining how Sendak's remarks will rile the mollycoddlers and the nannies who insist that children's entertainment must be exclusively wholesome and educational (the kind of people who are not above trying to ban his books, such as In the Night Kitchen, from public libraries).
We need Wild Things, like Sendak. Yeah: Wild Things, too.
It's come to this: A prominent New York Times scribe supports government-coerced speech.
Randy Cohen, the paper's self-styled resident ethicist, is in favor of mandatory warning labels on advertising images that have been Photoshopped. He hints he might even support a ban on such images, analogous to a law that Britain's Liberal Democrats have been pushing. (French parliamentarians have also been clamoring for mandatory warnings, with fines of more than $50,000 per violation.) Cohen got religious about the issue in the wake of the Ralph Lauren skeletal-model controversy.
Let me start here: I desperately wish that some kindly art director at the Times would digitally correct Randy Cohen's too-magenta, overly-shiny, yellow-toothed headshot (at right). Long live Photoshop!
And
I advise anyone — Times pontificators, social activists, legislators — to keep their damn noses out of my business. How I make the people
in front of my cameras look (and yes, I frequently use Photoshop to
soften laugh lines, brighten smiles, discreetly slim belly bulges, and
so on) is none of anyone's beeswax; it's between me, my clients, and
those models.
The wannabe busybodies can make their images look
they way they want and I'll make my images look the way I want. Then
we'll let the marketplace sort out which photos consumers prefer. Fair enough?
To be sure, yeah, those
'shopped Ralph Lauren models look horrifyingly freakish to me; and in trying to belatedly suppress the images with stupid legal threats, the company sure didn't do itself any favors. The dreadful, what-were-they-thinking Photoshop work
in question rightly reaped a firestorm of criticism, causing RL
to apologize and (a)mend its ways. That's the way we take care of things in a
grown-up democratic society — not by slapping mandatory warning labels
and wholesale prohibitions on some of the things we don't happen to
like.
Imagine, in a few short years: If I want to publish a photo that I took — hang it in a local gallery, put it in an ad, share it on Flickr — and I've used Photoshop's
cloning tool or healing brush, I'll be forced to destroy the
visual integrity of my image with a mandatory warning label, roughly
as attractive as a bar code and possibly a whole lot bigger. If I disobey, my business may be fined out of existence.
That's nuts. And wrong.
I won't stand for anyone doing that to me, my images, my vision, my style, my business, or my clients.
And for what? To protect women from "developing an unrealistic self-image"? (Does anyone else see how sexist that notion is on its face — as if women are too weak-willed and lame-brained to be trusted with glamour photos that may shatter their delicate Victorian sense of selves?) Or is the goal to promote
truth in advertising? In either case, then we should also ban or regulate, just for starters, push-up bras, breast implants, artificial
eyelashes, botox, and lip gloss.
It follows that, if "reality" is the goal, or the only reasonable benchmark, we should require people to walk around with text stenciled on their foreheads saying they've had lipo, they still suck in their stomach at parties, and they've shaved their armpits. After all, those things are not what nature intended. They promote unrealistic body images, and, being augmented reality, are carried out to deceive.
Cosmetics are merely "hope in a jar"; Photoshop, on the other hand, offers guaranteed
results. How is that a bad thing? I wonder how many people wouldn't like to look a little younger, a little trimmer, when they have their photo taken. In fact, I'd
wager that rather a lot of the very same men and women who profess to abhor "photochopping" would, if given the option, prefer to look at a photo of themselves in
which they're five pounds lighter, and in which they have mild
laugh lines instead of deep crow's feet — "reality" be damned. They demand that other people's pictures be unretouched; I suspect they'd like their own portrait to be the sole exception.
I recently attempted to test this theory in a discussion on an online forum. To the local feminist who publicly excoriated fashion photography and Photoshop artifice, I extended this (I thought) rather generous offer:
I invite you to have your photo taken by me. After I'm done brightening eyes, smoothing
skin, and so on [in Photoshop], you get to pick either the high-resolution before or after version to display to the world (Facebook/Flickr/YouTube et cetera). When would you like to schedule your free session?
I never heard from her again.
The effectiveness of any of the augmented-reality methods I mentioned above (Photoshopping included), and the degree to which they convince people that there's no choice but to copy that look in real life, depends entirely on
the gullibility of the beholder. The answer to the problem, then, is not "Make more laws." The answer is not "Let's have a Photoshop / fashion police." The answer is "Stop being such an impressionable dimwit."
I'm genuinely happy about this YouTube video (below), which I recently watched twice with my seven-year-old daughter (who is anything but a dimwit but still plenty impressionable). It's a great discussion piece and we had a nice talk about it, one we'll repeat as necessary:
It seems to me that, as usual, education is a thousand times better than legislation.
This whole debate is ultimately about personal freedom — the freedom to pursue the image you can see in your head,
whether you're a photographer or someone dolling herself up for a date.
UPDATE, Wednesday evening: Cohen published a followup today that's even more gobsmacking.
By his own explicit if belated admission, a warning label
would have no effect; after all, to his opponents' idea that surely we may expect a bit of critical, independent thought from the would-be
victims, he replies
[This] erroneously assumes that simply knowing that an image is falsified immunizes you from its effect.
Interesting,
no? So he's saying, labels won't help; and women can't be counted on to arm themselves
with a modicum of skepticism. It seems that banning 'shopped images is
the only solution Cohen is left with.
I remember an era when the Times was on the first line of defense against First-Amendment attacks.
Bernard Kerik — former NYPD police commissioner, one-time Homeland Security Secretary nominee,
national Sept. 11 hero — has a new label. Inmate No. 210-717.
Kerik got his assigned number at the Westchester County jail after becoming the first NYPD commissioner to wind up
behind bars when a judge revoked his bail Tuesday for trying to taint
the jury pool in his upcoming corruption trial. ...
"Mr. Kerik has a toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance
that leads him to believe that the ends justify the means, that rules
that apply to all don't apply to him in the same way, that rulings of
the court are an inconvenience," [judge Stephen] Robinson said.
Remarkable post from Scott Greenfield, a prominent blawger, reflecting on the mindset of prosecutors — and on what happens when their pedestal implodes and they lose their job and find themselves literally living with their parents again, as happened to the once high-flying and perhaps overly self-righteous David Greenspan:
Oh, how wonderful to be so powerful, to be able to make life and death
decisions for others with the might of the State behind you. How
glorious to laugh about it with your friends at the bar afterward, how
you showed this miscreant who's boss. And to make defense lawyers,
many years your senior, talk sweet to you, beg you, cajole you, try to
curry your favor, all to weasel some small concession out of you. How
wonderful it is to wield such power.
And then one day it's
gone. All gone. The judges who once loved you no longer know your
name. The lawyers who quaked when you looked at them askance ignore
you. You're nothing. You're nobody. All the bridges burned, the
friends you thought you had, and nobody will take your calls. ...
Some may feel the Schadenfreude, but that's petty. They are only
children, fed a false belief of importance and given powers far beyond
their abilities and understanding.
Here's a small anecdotal measure of the efficiency of the U.S. postal system.
So a product I ordered from Hong Kong was shipped on October 3rd and arrived at a New York sorting facility, after an 8,000-mile trip, on the 5th. Then our "neither sleet nor rain nor snow" paragons took over, unfortunately producing eleven days of zilch (and counting). As of right now, the status on the postal service's website still shows that my package is "in transit."
To call that "tracking" is to call Stephen Hawking "a silver-tongued orator."
By the way, the distance between New York and Downeast Maine is about 400 miles. An arthritic donkey could have covered that stretch by now.
More fun: The manager at my local post office says I'll have to wait at least another week before he's willing to begin making inquiries.
James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, asks an intriguing question when a New Yorker scribe quizzes him about David Letterman having allegedly been blackmailed by Robert Joel Halderman, a TV producer with knowledge of Letterman's intra-office trysts.
It's perfectly legal for Halderman to write, or threaten to write, a
screenplay (or an e-mail to TMZ) exposing the fact that David Letterman
had flings with "Late Show" employees. It's also legal for Halderman to
ask Letterman for money as part of a business transaction. So why are
the two things illegal when you put them together? In other words,
Lindgren said, “Why is it illegal to threaten to do what you can do
legally anyway?"
I'd never really thought about it, but I find that a convincing argument. Halderman is a douche — but why would he be a lawbreaker?
Saul Smilansky, the author of "Ten Moral Paradoxes," said that, in his opinion, what Halderman did
wasn't heinous. "It's not terribly attractive, but it's still fairly
standard capitalist practice," he said. "The Marxists used to say that
capitalism is like blackmail — everyone tries to buy people off. Many
social transactions look like blackmail when you examine them." He
listed a few: "couples in divorce proceedings basically blackmailing
each other to get a better deal," consumers telling a company "if they
don't get a settlement they’ll go to the press" — in other words, any
negotiations based on threats. What makes blackmail different? "There's
no good reason to allow it," Smilansky said. "But our attitude towards
blackmail, that it's so unusual, so terrible — it's just sanctimonious."
I frequently blog about unnecessary new laws — but unnecessary old ones can be plenty odious too.
The legislation I want most is a bill stipulating that for every new law that gets put on the books, lawmakers must abolish an existing one. The law against blackmail ought to be be a prime candidate for legislative overhaul, or, better yet, for scrapping altogether.
"Whilst it is obviously a load of nonsense it will appeal to people who are in distress or are vulnerable. It really is manipulation of people's fears and a complete fraud."
That's a Catholic clergyman from Cambridge, England, speaking out against a local center for the occult. Self-awareness has never been the Church's strong suit, I suppose.
Interesting piece about how parking enforcement has become a cash cow for towns and cities across the United States. Local government workers privately call it a curb tax. Cute.
How
aggressive is enforcement? Bolofsky said he's seen New York drivers get
tickets for double-parking merely because they are waiting for someone
to pull out of a spot on the street — a time-honored practice in the
competitive world of city parking. "They
sneak up behind people. They are waiting in the wings, in the shadows,"
he said. "Then they knock on the window and hand the driver a summons."
In its manifesto the Democratic Party, which won a general election in
August, pledged to introduce full videotaping of interrogations.
Japan's courts have a conviction rate of more than 99% — although it
cannot be compared directly to other countries because there is no plea
bargaining. Prosecutors usually proceed with a case only if they are sure they will win, and a confession has been called the king of evidence.
Extracting one from an innocent man or woman isn't as hard as it may seem.
"The
detainee has absolutely no access to his defence lawyers, has no idea
how long the interrogation session would go," said Rajiv Narayan of
Amnesty International.
That's not quite accurate: Any suspect in Japan may be detained for 23 days before charges must finally be brought. So the suspect need only hold out for three-plus weeks against treatment like this:
"[Interrogation] involves many, many hours
of repeated questions [as many as 16 hours a day, RvB] and sometimes sleep deprivation, and where the
detainee is given the impression he would only be released once he
confesses." ...
[One suspect, a British national,] says he was handcuffed, tied with a rope to his chair and not allowed to use the toilet. Every day he was presented with papers in Japanese, which he did not understand, and told to sign them.
But, you know, the Japanese do make the trains run on time. Whole article here.
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania
find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot.
Since "guns did not protect those who possessed them," they
conclude,
"people should rethink their possession of guns." This is
like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly
associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then
concluding that skydivers would be better off unencumbered
by safety equipment designed to slow their descent.
Mary Kenny, in the Guardian, writes why she, as a Catholic, feels persecuted, and why this so-called persecution elates her:
To be persecuted — or at least, disapproved of — is the highest honour,
because it means that the Christian is not fitting in with "the
system": he or she is not part of any "establishment".
Quite. Christian culture is far outside the mainstream, and so antithetical to the establishment, isn't it? Christians have zero political power; no overriding cultural influence whatsoever; and apart from the tattered Bibles that they stealthily pass back and forth while hoping not to get caught, they really have nothing to call their own.
This is the norm everywhere in the West.
Except for every fucking place I've ever visited in the U.S.A., the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and so on.
It's bizarro world for any of Christ's followers to claim otherwise. Our entire Western culture is so absolutely steeped in Christian notions, Christian values, Christian traditions, Christian power, and Judeo-Christian laws, that it throws Ms. Kenny's observational faculties into some doubt. To be kind, perhaps she genuinely doesn't know any better; perhaps she can no more experience reality than a fish truly experiences water. In other words, when the stuff that constitutes your environment is so pervasive, it may just become invisible.
On a good day, I find Kenny and Christians like her amusing. On a bad day, they irk me no end. What do they know of persecution beyond what their pious ancestors did to heretics and freethinkers and "witches"?
Western Christians claiming the mantle of martyrdom, openly cherishing the delusional belief that they're spat upon and vilified at every turn — now that's some goddamn chutzpah.
In her broadside, Kenny also bemoans the fact that our culture has turned materialistic, that opulence has become a virtue:
The world rewards greed, pride, aggression, pushiness, clamour, and frocks and rocks that cost a million.
Christianity, she suggests, is the antidote to this cultural disease.
That's enough cognitive dissonance to make one's head asplode. I have some images I'd like to show her. My pleasure.
P.S. Here, former Pope John Paul complained of a drop in living standards after he'd moved from the Vatican to the kingdom of Heaven. Another spot-on Onion spoof.
More than 500 complaints per 1,000 officers in one year's time. Even when you take into account that not every complaint is justified, that's a pretty astonishing number. Three British police forces easily reach such a level of [cough] professionalism, and plenty more fall only just shy of the mark.
"The [public school] cheerleaders [who habitually display banners with Bible verses urging fans and players to "commit to the Lord"]are not trying to push a religious cause, to shove
religion down someone's throat," said local youth minister Brad Scott,
who was LFO High's class president in 2004. "The cheerleaders are just
using Scripture to show motivation and inspiration to the players and
the fans."
I never said to ban certain books from the local library, I just don't ever want anyone to see them there.
I didn't get that woman pregnant, I just ejaculated in her a little.
I didn't beat my elderly neighbor to death, I was just showing him that basebal bats are harder than skulls.
I didn't eat the missing piece of pie, I only took a couple of dozen little bites.
I don't want to encourage people to firebomb abortion clinics, I'm just saying that playing with molotov cocktails in one would be really interesting.
I didn't say that the First Amendment's establishment clause doesn't apply to our public school, I just want students to be able to yell Bible verses through bullhorns at the bake sale.
As is his custom, Johann Hari doesn't hold back. Here are the first three sentences of his great little essay about kings and queens (and the not-overly-bright masses who blindly support them):
It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to
pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of
us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy —
selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed
through, and surrounding them with sycophants from the moment they
emerge — produces warped and dim people and demands that we scrape
before them.
This is Hari's delightful way of reintroducing Britain's beloved Queen Mum, by most reliable accounts an icy harpy obsessed with bloodlines and with spending her subjects' money:
By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was
treating the British Treasury — our tax money — as her personal piggy
bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted
every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained
that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up
about it". ... Michael Mann, the former Dean of Windsor,
who knew her very well, explained: "She feels that Britain is Great
Britain and that, therefore, ours must be no banana court. To lower
standards [i.e., her spending on champagne, caviar and limos] is to
denigrate the country and, insofar as high standards require big
spending, so be it."
For about two months, in 1994, I thought I might want to go to law school. Instead, I took up the much more lucrative professions of writing and photographing. (I kid about the dough, of course. But speaking of dough... Q: What's the difference between a pizza and a photographer? A: A pizza can feed a family of four.)
But if I had become an attorney, I would really want to write legal briefs that include phrases such as "Mr. Spock ate my balls" and "You are a homosexual blood elf!" In other words, I would like to be Marc Randazza.[link to pdf of Marc defending the creator of www.glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com]
Fuck! William Safire died. Pancreatic cancer. I didn't know him personally, but he has long been a small part of my life. I read a couple of his books — and on most Sundays, his erudite, slightly pedantic, peerless, and often funny New York Times column, "On Language."
His friend Mort Janklow, the literary agent, remembers Safire thusly:
He was funny, self-deprecating and amazingly scholarly. He was a contrarian and passionately liberal on civil rights,
human rights, the right of privacy. He constantly came up with columns
that surprised people on the right and on the left.
A contrarian-minded, pull-no punches civil libertarian. You can see why I liked the guy (even though I had silent disagreements with him about everything from Nixon's fitness for office to the sinfulness of dangling participles).
His death also saddens me because it drives home the tragedy that conservative thinkers in the vein of Safire and William Buckley and Milton Friedman are literally dying out, supplanted by — well, no one, really. I mean, Jonah Goldberg? Bill Kristol? Ann Coulter? Ha!
P.S.Hey, Wall Street Journal: When you publish the obituary of America's foremost language maven, could you maybe run it by a decent copy editor first?The paper's photo caption says that the Medal of Freedom was bestowed to Safire; the correct preposition, of course, is on (or upon). The print version of the article also states that Janklow and Safire were friends for more "then" 60 years. Sigh. It seems we need Bill Safire now more than (then?) ever.
Take a look at these faces. These young boys are convicted U.S. sex offenders. That tells you a lot about our country, about how we view sex, about how we fetishize law-enforcement "solutions," doesn't it?
I'll never play down actual sexual violence, including rape, by teenage boys. But of course, most adolescent sex offenders are guilty of nothing of the sort. Most of them haven't truly victimized anyone. They are guilty, if you can call it that, of being curious, and horny, and possibly confused, as befits their age.
At 13 or 14 or 15, they are trying to figure out what it means to have developing bodies and a case of raging hormones, and sometimes the tentative fumblings that result run afoul of laws that politicians and prosecutors are grimly applying to ever-greater numbers of people, kids included, because American voters love the binary clarity of good versus evil, pure versus perverted, young Becky's innocence versus young Robert's budding immorality.
A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids “moon” a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders, where they may well learn a lesson or two about rape. A teenager, who takes a sexy of photo of him, or herself, is paraded around the community as a “child pornographer” for the rest of his or her life. Two kids in the back seat of a car have fumbling sex. The law says one is an offender because the other is a “victim.” One week later, a birthday passes, and it is no longer a crime. One week’s difference and a life is ruined. In other cases an act that is legal on Monday is illegal on Tuesday because the older of the two turned one year older. That becomes enough to qualify him, or her, as an offender.
So again, there are these mugshots, and they speak volumes. Absolute heartbreaking volumes. But louder still speaks this graph, below, and the accompanying realization worded succinctly by the blog Classically Liberal:
When you look at the ages of the offenders you see that 14-year-olds are apparently the most sexually dangerous group in America. The rate declines from there, but throughout adolescence the law is far more likely to deem kids as offenders. You may imagine the dirty old man down the street. But with age people are less likely to “offend”. One reason is that they are more mature. But another reason is clear. Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.
Here is one such case:
Here's another (hat tip: the Agitator), of a young man who took nude photos of his then-17-year-old girlfriend. They later married, but because he was an adult at the time the pictures were taken, he was branded a sex offender anyway. When he failed to report his new address, as he was by law required to do, the U.S. justice system decided to put him away for three to six years.
Take one last look at those photos on the top. Those kids, I assure you, are no more wicked than you or me. Most of them, and most of their fellow young offenders, pose zero danger to anyone.
They are not the perverts here. We are, as a society, for tolerating — no, demanding — the willful destruction of children's lives while telling ourselves it's really all about protecting kids.
Ahead of the safety summit next week with Secretary Ray LaHood, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM) has rallied behind a ban on hand-held texting and cell phone use while driving.
The product in question — mobile phones — has nothing inherently to do with cars, so I'm confused as to why car makers have any legal or moral standing in the matter. It would be about as puzzling if the AAM were to support the FDA if that agency attempted to ban the consumption of prime-beef hamburgers behind the wheel.
So what's going on? Ah:
[AAM] members are developing hands-free and voice recognition systems that
will allow drivers to send and receive text messages and phone calls
without looking away from the road.
Consumer Reportsalleges that that's still far from safe enough, and wants more laws. I have some serious issues with the legislative approach; when it comes to cell phones and driving, increasingly draconian laws are damn near useless.
The last day of the Muslim holiday Ramadan happened to coincide with a car-free day that more than a dozen environmentally-minded Dutch cities had been planning. Various Dutch Muslim groups erupted in protest. Not being allowed to drive anywhere Allah's followers wanted, they said, would hinder customary family visits, and put a crimp in their religious feast. Using public transportation? Too inconvenient. Riding a bike? Too difficult and undignified. Clearly, they were being discriminated against.
The Amsterdam City Council relented, and made a special exception for these believers. No, they still weren't allowed to drive automobiles in the designated car-free areas. Instead, all Muslims in the Dutch capital were offered unlimited free taxi rides that day.[link in Dutch.] Yes, seriously.
Listened to Sean Hannity on my car radio for 20 minutes. Was strangely cheered to hear that his advertisers included (a) a prostate-test company, and (b) the maker of the Jitterbug, a cell phone for the pre-senile crowd.
Out of respect for my friends who've passed the bar exam, whereas I rarely succeed in even passing one bar, no lawyerjokes please.
However...
Look at the new terms and conditions that Marc Randazza of the Legal Satyricon has on his blog. Turns out that you're not allowed to read TLS posts (much less quote them, or link to them) if Randazza — who happens to be a cyberspace friend of mine, as well as a committed free-speech attorney — seriously disagrees with you.
First off, he tells readers:
This Agreement is a legal contract between You and the publisher of a collection of blawgs, listed below.
So just by reading a few words on Randazza's blog, you are entering into a contract. Who knew?
It gets more fascinating. You see, the Legal Satyricon has a blacklist. Randazza's word, not mine. Said list is filled with quite the spectrum of evildoers, from Joe the Plumber to anonymous Klansmen to Judith Reisman. If these (admittedly odious) folks so much as read one of his bloggy utterances, they ought to be prepared for a lawsuit.
c. BLACKLIST:
The following individuals or organizations are "blacklisted" and may
NEVER read any posts on our network, nor may they ever use any
materials from our network, without prior written permission:
1. Any member of the student body or faculty of Liberty University,
Regent University, or Ave Maria University, or any graduate of any one
of those three institutions
2. Any member of the ku klux klan
3. Any member of the nazi party
4. Scott Bergthold or any member of the law office of Scott Bergthold
5. Any member of stormfront
6. Any member of any organized “hate group” (If you're not sure if you
are a member of an organized "hate group," then presume that you are)
7. Any member of The Liberty Counsel
8. Valentina Kunasz, or any other member of the jury in the Lori Drew case
9. Any person who has ever been a plaintiff in a defamation case
10. Any current employee or agent of the law firm of Jones Day
11. Any state or federal prosecutor or employee of any state or federal
prosecutor’s office or any agent thereof (Blevins excepted)
12. Any member of the Bush administration
13. James Dobson, Sarah Palin, Donald E. Wildmon, Catharine MacKinnon,
Phil Burress, Judith Reisman, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. "Joe
the Plumber"), Gail Dines, and anyone who doesn't think that those
people are all complete blithering fucking idiots.
14. Any member or employee of Citizens for Community Values
15. Any member or employee of the American Family Association
16. Andrew Contiguglia — at least not until he pays up on his World Series bet. After that, he may have full privileges.
Just so we're clear, Randazza then explicitly states he is ready to prosecute anyone mentioned above, under "18 U.S.C. Section 1030," ("fraud and related activity in connection with computers") for "unauthorized use." Again, unauthorized use, in his view, includes reading Randazza's blog. I've known and read the guy long enough to suspect that if anyone on the other side of the free-speech debate pulled that one, Marc would be on him like an entire school of piranhas.
Number 16 is humorous, and number 13 might tickle your funny bone if you roll that way. The rest is, far as I can tell, not a joke (if it is some kind of parody: too much ambiguity, not enough har-dee-fucking-hars).
I accept that any blog, including this one, is a private space, to be legitimately controlled by its proprietor (essentially no different from one's home). But I don't think it does the free-speech cause any favors if a First-Amendment blawger start forbidding groups of people from reading his public words, on penalty of prosecution. Quite the opposite: he thus paints himself as having a double standard conflicted.
It's long been the core belief of free-speech activists that the best way to counter bad (hateful or ill-informed) speech is ... with better speech. A selective ban on simply reading web-based material that is freely available to billions of other people seems not just hare-brained; it seems unlikely to hold up in a U.S. court if challenged.
If only I had a wise attorney friend who specializes in free speech, and who could hold forth on the legality of it all.
Or are they just mouthing the politically correct orthodoxy?
But let's back up a second. I have at times been positively besotted with the Legal Satyricon, a terrific blog started by First-Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza. Marc is a fearless, funny, admirable guy. Everyone who cares about free speech owes him a debt of gratitude.
Today, though, I'm less than heartened by what I've been reading on the site.
I'll start here: Satyricon contributor Tatiana von Tauber, a smart pro-sex, pro-free-speech feminist who's also a very good photographer of the erotic, put up a post that struck me as wrong on several fronts. It's a piece that takes the fashion industry to task for equating thin with beautiful (so far, that's at least a glimmer of a defensible argument). Tatiana believes, she says under the headline "Why Fat Chicks Are Hot," that roly-poly gals are truly sexy as long as they are confident in their sexuality.
To illustrate her point, she puts up a photo of model Crystal Renn in a bikini (right). Renn is a couple of inches wider than Kate Moss. And I don't mean that in a wink-nudge oh-my-god-she's-enormous kind of way. Renn looks pretty svelte. So I wrote to Tatiana:
If Crystal Renn, in that (retouched or not?) photo is
supposed to be emblematic of "fat chicks," you're playing with a
stacked deck. You haven't seen fat, and you're not showing fat — you're
showing a dark-haired and undoubtedly attractive version of Brigitte
Bardot, widely seen as one of the most beautiful women of the 20th
century. Renn may be a big girl by fucked-up contemporary haute-fashion
standards, but I doubt that anyone sane would consider her fat. Hell,
she's not even Rubenesque.
In her J'Accuse, Tatiana also gratuitously implicates the porn industry: "The American porn industry is saturated with Barbie
dolls," she alleges. Rubbish. There is literally no other field in the entertainment
industry — movies, videogames, TV shows, mainstream magazines, and so
on — where bodies show as much variety as they do in porn. Most general
porn sites even have categories like "amateurs" and "fatties" and "mature" where the average female looks anything but Barbie-like. Or, you know, so
I hear…
And also, I said in my note to Tatiana,
I'll believe your exhortations to celebrate fat
people's confident sexuality when you can honestly say, and show in
your art, that you adore confident fat guys too; somehow I get the
impression that your comments are exclusive to sistahs everywhere, and
that men with beer bellies need not apply. I'm willing to be proven
wrong, of course.
I note again that her article is called "Why Fat Chicks Are Hot." Not a word about portly gentlemen.
So far, Tatiana's response is long on profanity and short on facts and arguments. It includes this:
If you saw Renn on the street in an oversized T-shirt and sweats, hair
back in a pony tail, no make up, tugging the kids along with a Wal-Mart
shopping cart, you'd ping her as fat so fuck you.
So in one fell swoop, we've gone from (me saying) Crystal Renn may not be a very good example of a fat woman to (Tatiana saying) hey a-hole, you would think she was fat if she dressed in ratty clothes and she wore no makeup and she had stupid-looking hair and she had her kids in tow and you saw her waddling down the ice-cream aisle at the local Wal-Mart.
Actually, I don't think that even then Renn would strike me as fat. Unappealing, maybe. Interesting that Tatiana, not me, seems to conflate those two things. And anyway, under those circumstances, Kate Moss or Heidi Klum probably wouldn't look very hot either.
I think I can safely stand by my assertion that she is playing with a stacked deck here.
There's another reason why the Legal Satyricon got on my nerves a little bit today, but I'll save that for a separate post, later today.
Recent Comments