I don’t often watch movies, so when I set up to watch two versions of the same plot, you know something serious is on. First, Dawn of the Dead (2004) next in the Netflix queue is the original Dawn of the Dead (1978). I just finished reading The Road, and I’m halfway through World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars.
A whole swarm of fantasies about the end of the world, self-sufficiency, loneliness, and human weakness.
Part of my job is sorting the wheat from the chaff of the internet. That means I come across some pretty brilliant chaff, like this Conservababes Forum discussion of next month’s elections:
IF THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS WIN IN 2006 AND 2008:
YOUR INCOME AND PAYROLL TAXES WILL GO UP
THE US WILL LOSE THE WAR AGAINST ISLAMOFASCISTS AROUND THE GLOBE
3 OR 4 NEW SUPREME COURT JUDGES AND DOZENS OF FEDERAL DISTRICT JUDGES WILL BE LEFTISTS
ABORTIONS WILL INCREASE
HEALTHCARE WILL BE NATIONALIZED BRINGING ON FORCED EUTHANIZATION OF THE AGING
HUMAN CLONING AND EMBRYONIC STEM CELL FARMING WILL BE LEGALIZED
PUBLIC EDUCATION QUALITY WILL CONTINUE TO DECLINE
…
FREE TRADE WILL BE RESTRICTED BY TARIFFS AND REGULATIONS FAVORING UNIONSAT LEAST ONE MAJOR US CITY WILL BE VAPORIZED BY TERRORISTS
AT LEAST 10 LARGE SCHOOLS WILL BE DESTROYED BY ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISM
…
GUN MANUFACTURERS WILL BE SUED, POSSIBLY INTO BANKRUPTCYGAY MARRIAGE AND POLYGAMY WILL BE LEGALIZED AND NORMALIZED
FAST-FOOD CHAINS WILL BE SUED, POSSIBLY INTO BANKRUPTCY
THESE ARE THE ELEMENTS OF THE SOCIALIST AGENDA… AND THEY WILL BE SUCCESSFUL. FORGIVE ME IF I LEFT ANY OUT.
I just can’t tell if they’re serious. I mean, you can argue about Bush’s record on the economy and on security, but forced euthanasia and polygamy? And there’s some stuff in there that really seems out of place– regulations on the Panama canal? And why would blowing up cities be part of the Democratic agenda? Not to mention the panicky fear of “socialism,” which I thought the US grew out of at about the same time I grew out of being afraid of monsters under the bed.
They just are.
I’ve started a page on gay marriage and I’m having a hard time being balanced about it– the vast majority of arguments against it are “I HATE GAYS.”
One that almost makes sense is pointing out the fact that health insurance is tied in to marriage and employment, and that gay marriage could increase insurance costs borne by employers — at least, those that have a lot of married same-sex employees. But that’s a problem that needs to be fixed in the insurance policy, not in marriage policy. (That sounds like a software engineer blaming the hardware, but it’s true. As an aside, I wonder whether a better health system in the US would reduce the urgency of the gay marriage fight.)
I did, however, find one old article in the Weekly Standard, that brings up points I hadn’t thought of before. It’s a pretty conservative magazine, and I expected it to be full of the same “the queers are trying to push religion around” vitriol that everyone else spouts. But instead it starts with Catholic Charities, the Boston-based adoption agency that shut down rather than comply with the anti-discrimination laws of the state, and moves on to a Catholic high school that expelled a couple of homosexual students. If a religious school can’t prohibit actions and proclamations that it believes to be sinful, is it even a religious school any more?
Well, maybe. There are, after all, still segregated groups and schools which oppose interracial dating. Awhile back, Bob Jones University lost tax-exempt status over its (now, finally, abandoned) policy of prohibiting interracial dating. Before that, back in the 50s, there was a program of massive resistance to integration, which led several Virginia school systems to close down completely rather than integrate. Private, segregated schools (often supported by early school-voucher programs) cropped up in their place. But as segregation became less acceptable to the world, and as the IRS started taxing them like for-profit enterprises they closed or integrated.
Just like racism hasn’t disappeared, anti-discrimination law will never force groups to abandon their beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. But groups that actually do discriminate against same-sex couples will have to do so without state recognition, without state favors like tax-exemption, and without sympathy from the public. In the long run, people who don’t accept the equality of same-sex unions will be regarded in the same way that we now regard the segregationists of the past.
Way back in 2003, (as Brad Delong reminds us often enough), Daniel Drezner asked the following question:
Can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
Well, can you?
Powell’s Books presents The Pat Robertson Coloring Book, as drawn by artists from around the world.
See also Law and Order: An Adventure to Color.
From a discussion about copyright and YouTube/Google:
The purpose of fair use was to allow use of works when transactions were impractical. In that spirit we should acknowledge that if you use someone’s song in a basement skit that never leaves your basement, that should be fair use. But if 50 million people see the skit on YouTube and it generates $1 million in advertising revenues, that should not be fair use.
In other words, everyone who posts their version of the Numa Numa dance has to get express written permission from the RIAA on the off chance that it will become their 15 megabytes of fame.
Why not just piss on the my birthday cake while you’re at it?
I needed a new topic since I gave the Yankees page to a real Yankees fan. I thought, what’s a good topic? How about torture? Torture would be wonderful.
So now I run a page on torture, with links to stuff like this video of a dude getting waterboarded:
The best part of this whole Mark Foley scandal is seeing Dennis Hastert look like this:
How about a CIA personality quiz. Yes, that’s on the official US government intelligence agency site.
Aidan reminded me of the existence of carbonated milk. That reminded me of a Salon article titled I come to bury Iamcarbonatedmilk.com, not to praise it. It’s about expired domain names and why people register them.
I seem to remember being around when several absurd names were registered, including assbarn.com and the now-defunct mybuttthemovie.com. The motivation in each case quite simple: it seemed like a good idea at the time because we were very drunk. That also explains a lot of stuff purchased from EBay.
