"muslims," a word that makes women faint and brave men weep

Twice in the last month I've received endlessly forwarded emails warning the world of the dangers and threats of Muslims. First was an email from the boyfriend of an acquaintance of mine who decided to contact everyone in her email address book to let them know Barack Obama is a Muslim pretending to be a Christian for political purposes. Eek! Then yesterday I got an email from an acquaintance who occasionally sends me conspiracy theory crap or cute jokes. It told me that England had dropped the Jewish Holocaust from their history courses because of pressure from Muslims who deny it ever happened.

Obviously, neither of these things is true, as anyone who has the sense to check Snopes.com before sending out crazy emails would have known. Snopes, which looks into the truth or falsity of every rumor you can find on the internet, handled Barack's Muslim connections here and England's holocaust policy here.

The one of England is, I suspect, a typical example of a game I believe is called telephone where each person tells the next person what they were told, resulting in a story that completely changes by the time it gets to the last person. One school in England didn't teach at least one Holocaust class because of fears of anti-semitic comments from Muslim students, and emailers embellished the story. One interesting fact noted in Snopes is that while the email I got says "the UK" in its reference to England, there is an alternate email that says this is happening in the University of Kansas, which shows how emailers will edit and "clarify" stories before sending them on.

The Obama email looks to be more of a purposeful attempt to smear Obama, created probably by some hate group like the KKK. The email is full of bolded phrases like "parents divorced, atheist, he is a muslim, radical teachings, catholic school" (among the crazy fundamentalist right "catholic school" is almost as bad as "Muslim"). The Obama email is more disturbing because it is basically saying, be scared of Obama because he is a Muslim. That sort of direct, unabashed religious hatred is scary.

But what is scariest is that it is so easy for people to believe this. Neither of the people who sent me these things are drooling idiots. They are well-spoken, seemingly educated people. Yet they unskeptically accepted transparently nonsensical emails as a truth so important that it should be immediately emailed to all of their friends and acquaintances. And the most foolish of those acquaintances have probably all sent out the same emails to their friends and acquaintances. And all these stupid, stupid people are helping to perpetuate the concept that Muslims are essentially what Communists were though of as in the 1950s, a dangerous group of fanatics trying everything in their power to destroy our world through lies and manipulation for their own evil ends.

And all this, essentially because a small handful of Muslims belonging to an extremist organization in the Middle East killed a few hundred people by running a plane into a building, apparently thus giving permission for everyone to believe all Muslims throughout the world are dangerous, evil fanatics.

I have sometimes thought about what happens as oppressed groups get higher standing. Blacks, Hispanics, gays, while all still oppressed, have achieved greater acceptance throughout the years, and optimists would look at this and say, eventually we will end prejudice. But the hatred of Muslims proves otherwise; as some groups are accepted, new groups are nominated to take their place. Muslims, enjoy the bottom, because people are going to keep you there for quite a while.

TV news summed up

I recommend going to this petition against "big media." You can sign the petition or not, but watch the little video on this page, because it's brilliant.

it's simple: right wingers are insane

Fox News airs bizarre claim that Hillary ordered hit on cats

Frank Rich speaketh: Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?

This pretty much sums up my thinking about Hillary, although of course Frank Rich always says it better than I think it.

screw you, fanboys

Recently I came across a pretty aggravating thread trashing me for my review of Bioshock. It was remarkable both because it was a collection of furious diatribes against me in spite of my generally glowing review and because it was full of nonsense, include a statement that I just took over the column from a guy who has never written it.

It annoyed me enough that I decided to register for the forum so I could reply to that thread, but it seems new members have to be okayed by a moderator who has apparently gone AWOL, since it's been a couple of weeks and I'm still not able to post. So just for the record I'm putting my reply here. I'd been meaning to blog at some point in more detail about the problems with Bioshock's story anyway; it drives me crazy how critics keep acclaiming the game's storytelling, which is really quite weak.

Some fanboy also recently graffitied my wikipedia entry; probably someone mad that I didn't declare Halo 3 the greatest game in the history of the universe.

Here's the reply I was going to post to quartertothree [WARNING: BIOSHOCK SPOILERS BELOW].

Just came across this thread. It’s fine that you disagree with me, I disagree with critics all the time. Although I don’t usually rant and rave about people who positively review something I like because I disagree with a couple of points. (The last thing I felt like ranting about was the San Francisco movie critic who said “Click!” was almost perfect; that’s just insane.) But there are a lot of things said about me in this thread that simply are untrue, so I wanted to respond.

First off, I played BioShock all the way through, down to the very sweet final cut scene where you grow old and all the little girls love you. I saved almost all the little sisters and only killed one just to see what it was like, but restarted from a save point after that so I wouldn’t sully my good guy status (I like playing good guys in games, it’s just a preference).

I don’t know why, since I repeatedly talked about how great the game was, you would assume I hadn’t played it. Why would I not play a brilliant game? Is it really impossible to believe someone could play the same game as you and disagree with your take on it?

Second, Seth Schiesel never wrote the game theory column, except for a couple of columns when the Times was auditioning new game columnists. I have been writing the column for years and years. Seth writes articles on gaming but not, for the Times, reviews (with one or two exceptions). But I imagine it’s more fun for some of you to read Seth’s articles because, since they are reporting rather than reviewing, they don’t say anything critical about a game that could upset you.

What I write are reviews, in spite of what one poster said. This poster also mentioned my review of Daikatana, which is odd since I never reviewed Daikatana for the Times, although I did briefly pan it for some long-forgotten publication that I’m sure he never read.

The reason I write about more than one game in a review is because that’s what the Times wants from me (it started when they changed the column from weekly to biweekly and decided they didn’t want to lessen the number of games reviewed). Rather than trying to find two thematically similar games, I try to find the games I feel most deserve attention and then write a transition between them. People have complained about this before, but I have actually grown to like the approach. Anyway, there are already so many good games I don’t have space for that I would hate to leave out any more than I already have to.

Now as for the Art Deco thing, people seem to be making the assumption that I believe all the buildings should have been rebuilt to reflect modern architecture. Yes, that would be a stupid point, but it’s certainly not one I was making. Keep in mind that Art Deco doesn’t just mean the shell of the buildings. It means all the furnishings, fixtures, posters and ads on the walls. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it’s odd that a society would stay that aesthetically static for so long; it would suggest that there is not a single creative person trying out new ideas. But it was a pretty brief comment so I don’t know why there’s such a focus on it. I love Art Deco, it’s my favorite architectural style and I think it’s a tragedy that when it went out of fashion many of those buildings were destroyed because people considered them tacky. But I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that it is highly unusual for a city to be so creatively stagnant.

I did not, as a couple of people pointed out, write the article’s headline, and I was surprised that was what the editors focused on, but I am okay with their choice. Since my main concern was telling people what a great game BioShock was, I did not spend much time on the faults with the story, but here’s something I wrote to someone who emailed me when the game came out:

----------------------------------------------------
Because of a lack of space I didn't get to critique the narrative structure of BioShock as much as I would have liked. I actually find the seemingly universal ecstasy over the story puzzling. The game starts strong, but once it gets started it really just relies on that momentum. Half-Life had an interesting twist (discovering the army was trying to kill you) and the intriguing ongoing mystery of the guy in the suit. Max Payne started off with a cool opener, but it also had cool dream sequences to keep up that sense that this was a game that was really trying. I don’t feel BioShock made the same effort to keep the story moving. BioShock has a completely expected twist and a wandering plot; a big chunk of the game is simply killing people for some guy; that's not a story that moves forward, that's a story that wanders off into the alley and does some shit and then wanders back into the main plot.

BioShock is like Myst; the only real story is the back story. I don't say that's terrible, but I really don't think it's an especially brilliant approach either. To me it seems like the praise for the story has more to do with how poorly most action games tell stories than it does with the quality of BioShock's own narrative.

I was also disappointed when someone told me that even if you kill all the Little Sisters, they still save you at that point in the game where you are lead to safety by them. To me, that seems lazy; if I play the game as a bad guy, I expect the story to change as a result. I don’t just want a different final cut scene. (If the guy who told me that is wrong, and the little girls don’t save you if you kill them all, then I apologize for this criticism.)

Fortunately it’s easy to find critics that will give every popular game a rating of 100, so it should be pretty easy to avoid nasty people like me who dare to offer minor criticisms of a game in their rave review of it.

I thank the couple of people who pointed out themselves some of the things I have just pointed out. I salute your thoughtful consideration.

what some say in 1200 words, others say in 7

I spent about 1200 words talking about how I thought Halo 3 was just Halo 2 in better graphics. But in the user review section of metacritic, someone beautifully summed up everything I had to say in only 7 words:

A very fancy patch for Halo 2.

oh goodie

Exciting news: there will soon be even less places you can get away from people blabbing on their cell phones. I can't wait.

the Bush plan to end democracy

I saw Naomi Wolf on the Colbert report talking about her new book, which is apparently an expansion of the article she wrote describing the ten steps governments use to close down an open society, all of which have been done by the Bush administration. It's scary stuff, to see how step by step the administration is threatening a democracy that has lasted over 200 years. At the same time, I'm not ready to flee to Canada quite yet, because my recollection is this is pretty much what was going on in the 1960s. Dissent was called unpatriotic, the FBI was setting up and entrapping these organizations, the threat of communism was used as an excuse to do pretty much anything and the country was divided between people who believed the hippies were going to have a revolution and take over the country and the people who believed we were one step away from martial law.

Somehow we survived last time, so I'm hoping we're going to survive again. The founders of this country thought things through pretty well, and did their best to design a country that could not be subjugated by a despot. And while in the short term the government will sometimes be very close to a terrifying dictatorship, over the long term things always seem to stay at a certain balance. Yes, the system could finally break down, but at the same time the Bush administration is pretty weak right now, and as much as they would love to turn this country into a fascist state, I think the time they were most able to do that has passed. Of course, I could be wrong. It is perhaps best to take seriously the possibility that I am wrong, and fight the government at every turn, until we get these evil, evil people out of office. Which will hopefully be quite soon.

Of course, if a Republican somehow manages to win the presidency next year, fleeing to Canada becomes the best possible option.

Larry Craig, victim and victimizer

Ben Stein is right when he says Larry Craig was screwed over by overzealous police and the GOP, but I have trouble feeling sorry for him. There are two ways to look at this. Either he is a gay guy who represents the party of screw-the-gay-guys, in which case he brought this on himself through hypocrisy, or he really is a straight guy who just happened to do some things that looks suspicious to a cop, in which case he is one of these Republicans whose anti-gay agenda is responsible for things like cops sitting in restrooms all day waiting to arrest guys for tapping the floor and sticking their hand under the stall wall. If you're a gay guy voting to screw your own or a straight guy encouraging bigotry, I think you deserve what you get.

Dick Cheney predicting the disaster in Iraq

Here's an interesting video. Dick Cheney in 1994 talking about how disastrous it would be to invade Iran. No context for this clip is supplied; my guess is he is defending Bush Sr.'s Decision not to take out Saddam at the time. So, Was he lying when He said it would be a mistake to invade Iraq or when he said it was a good idea? Either answer proves him to be a liar and a fool.

damn integrity

I admit it, I wish I got to go on junkets. Alas, I always work for periodicals who insist that taking expensive gifts from the companies you cover is a conflict of interest. Hey, I'd be perfectly willing to take a free trip to India and then totally trash a game. Alas, it is not to be. I twice had to turn down free trips to England for Tomb Raider games, although I don't seem to have been offered near as many junkets as some people.

I'd like to work for a magazine that just doesn't care about this stuff. Not to review games though; I think you'd get more perks as an entertainment critic. So if anyone is looking for a writer who would take an all-expense trip to Hawaii to plug a new TV series and then talk about how much the series sucks, give me a call.

Kansas: all the callousness without all the Broadway shows

Kansas Shoppers Step Over Dying Woman

why must the Democrats always blink first?

If the Dems don't take the next election, it will because they
don't have the guts to just fight it out. Generally I think it's rather admirable that the Democrats aren't willing to shred the government the way the Republicans will do, but right now I think they should just go bulldog stubborn and say, we were voted in by anti-war and anti-corruption voters, let's give the people what they want. And if the government screeches to a halt as Bush vetoes bill after bill, well fine. But instead the Democrats seem to want to make sure there is no reason to believe they are anything but wimpy, ineffective, pseudo Republicans.

No guts, no glory.

Gilmore Girls: RIP

Hey look, the Gilmore Girls is over! I saw the ad saying "series finale" so I figured, I'll take a look and see how it all turned out. (Note: I was rereading some of my blog entries, and look, it sounds like I'm going to start talking about the final episode and then I never actually do! Sorry about that!)

I gave up on the Gilmore Girls months ago. After Amy and Dan Palladino left as the producers it just didn't feel right anymore. It was sort of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; everyone in Stars Hollow looked the same, and sounded the same, but they somehow just didn't seem like they were really the same people.

I hope the folks at the CW network have now figured out how stupid it was to not give the producers the two-year contract they were asking for. The CW is a new network that needs content, and they've lost one of their two best shows (the other being Everybody Hates Chris) because they wouldn't bend a little for the Palladinos. And while ostensibly the show is going because the stars wouldn't come back, it seems probably part of the reason for that is the lack of the shows creators combined with the poor quality of the season.

They could have at least paid the Palladinos something to tell them where the show was supposed to be going; the story went off the rails, but Amy Palladino apparently did have a plan for this year and I'm sure she would have sold an outline to CW if they'd asked.

Classic killing-the-goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg behavior. Bye-bye Lorelei and Rory; sorry you couldn't go out on a high note.

Exactly how dumb would a Democrat have to be to believe George Bush? Let's ask one.

As the Democratic candidates for president wander from state to state speaking and debating, there is one question I would like to stand up and ask each candidate who voted to authorize the Iraq war: Are you a liar or are you an idiot?

It’s a fair question. Because the explanations the candidates have given are hopelessly inadequate.
There seem to be two basic excuses for voting for the authorization. “I was misled by the administration into believing Saddam had weapons of mass destruction” and “I voted for the authorization in order to give the president a stronger position from which to negotiate.” John Kerry used both explanations, and it worked out just great for him.

I’ll take the second explanation first, because it’s the most absurd. Very simply, anyone with an I.Q. of over a hundred who was paying attention knew that Bush was going to invade Iraq the moment he had the authority to do so. I knew this, and I was getting most of my news from the Daily Show and from talking to my news-junky mom. Bush was jonesing for a war. Everything he did, every action he took, every speech he gave made it abundantly clear that he was determined to go to war at any cost. About the only way that wouldn’t have happened is if Saddam resigned and left the country, and there was zero chance of that.

Now, if I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Bush would use that authorization for war the moment he got it, is it possible that canny Washington insiders could not figure that out? Am I really that much smarter than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden? It is a terrifying thought, because honestly, I am not all that smart. And it raises the frightening possibility that Bush isn’t the only borderline moron in office.

Dennis Kucinich, my favorite not-a-snowball’s-chance-in-hell candidate knew it. He voted against the war, and has been quoted as saying “It must be really tough for Presidential candidates to come before the American people and claim that they were tricked, deceived, misled…by George Bush?”
Perhaps they are that stupid though. Kerry, for one, seemed to believe Bush’s lies at the time. Was the president taking senators into the oval office and hypnotizing them?

The argument that candidates simply believed Bush’s lies about WMDs is arguably slightly more credible. They certainly sounded convinced at the time; in Hillary Clinton’s floor speech on the authorization she even declared intelligence about Saddam and WMDs “undisputed.”

Of course, the WMD story was disputed at the time. And I myself was pretty sure the whole thing was a lie (once again I’ll mention that I was just barely following the news and am not especially brilliant or insightful). If you accept the basic premise that Bush wanted war at any cost it’s not hard to deduce that he was fudging information. And there were congressmen at the time, such as Kucinich and Jim Jeffords, who had enough sense to see through the charade.

Some people were even in a better position to see the lies, as recently indicated by Dick Durbin, who said that as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee he could see how Bush was lying to the public. John Edwards was also on that committee, but that didn’t stop him from voting for the authorization, possibly because his political advisers told him to.

Sure, they all regret the vote now, and Edwards has at least apologized for it (and put out a nifty ad telling congress to resend the vetoed Iraq funding bill), but the question is, why do they regret it? Is it because they have now realized that a preemptive strike against Iraq just to feel better about 9/11 is fundamentally immoral? I doubt it. Unless you believe that these seasoned politicians really did take Bush at his word, you have to accept the idea that they wanted to go to war.

They just wanted it to be a quick, well-run war that would boost their popularity. The only thing I believe from these people are comments like Joe Biden’s “The thing that I regret [is believing] that this administration had any competence” or Clinton’s “"How could they have been so poorly prepared for the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein?"

These politicians don’t regret voting for a war; they regret voting for a bungled war. Their only mistake, in their own minds, is that they misjudged the administration’s level of competence. (Not to blow my own horn, but once again poorly-informed, less-than-gifted me believed that Iraq was going to be a huge disaster along the lines of Vietnam.)

All of which makes me think that people like Clinton and Edwards, when asked if their vote to authorize war was a cynical ploy to curry favor with the voters or a sign of their utter stupidity, should answer, “both.” They probably believed more than they should have of Bush’s lies, but they also probably knew this was a mistake and decided that the political fallout from voting against the authorization was worse than the possibility of tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians.

I will consider the possibility that if they had crystal balls and realized exactly how much damage their vote would cause that they might have voted the other way, but this may be too generous of me.

Of course, this makes Barack Obama look pretty good to the anti-war crowd, since he was at anti-war rallies in 2002. I give him points for that, although it does not actually guarantee that he would have voted against the war. In that bizarre, panicky post-9/11 period politicians were gutless and pandering, and who’s to say that with the hot and heavy breath of public opinion down his neck Obama might not have caved. Still, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt since he spoke so forcefully at the time.

But the only two candidates I totally trust on the issue are Kucinich, because he did vote against the authorization, and Mike Gravel, because the guy’s as old-school liberal as they come. But the press has decided these two are joke candidates. I suppose Kucinich is hoping that his anti-war stance will seem prescient and get him some support, but being right when everyone else is wrong never gets you anything; all people really remember is you disagreed with them. Anyway, Kucinich will lose because he’s my favorite, putting him in the illustrious company of progressive losers like Paul Simon and Mo Udall.

The only thing in Kucinich’s favor right now is Gravel’s candidacy. I like Gravel, but his abrasive, take-no-prisoners style and justifiable fury at the mendacity of the major candidates has the press pretty much writing him off as the “crazy uncle” candidate. This means the press has someone more fun to pick on than Kucinich, but since the press has decided there are only four (or perhaps three) real candidates it seems unlikely the public is just going to go out and decide for itself.

Which means I’m going to have to vote for one of the other guys. Right now I’m leaning towards Obama if Kucinich and Gravel have dropped out by the time of the New York Democratic primary, but the election is long way off and the other candidates can still persuade me that they are the best choice. All they have to do is give a really thoughtful, well-reasoned answer to my question:
Are you a liar or are you an idiot?

as charming as a sewer rat eating the eyes from an alley cat: my review of Charm School

There's an entertaining British reality show called Ladette to Lady which takes a bunch of obnoxious, overly sexualized women and sends them to a finishing school to teach them to be ladylike. So when I heard about VH1’s Charm School, I thought, cool, an American version of Ladette to Lady.

But I was wrong. Charm School is instead a disgusting, puerile, putrescent monstrosity that represents the very worst television can possibly offer. Words cannot properly express the loathsomeness of this show; one would have to instead combine vomiting noises with the sounds of flies circling shit.

The ostensible premise of Charm School is to take the vulgar, trashy women who vied for Flavor Flav’s affections on Flavor of Love and send them to “etiquette boot camp.” The actual purpose of the show is to find new ways to humiliate these women; the winner is likely to be the craziest and meanest of the bunch.

There is nothing charming about Charm School. First off, the mistress of the school is comedian Mo’Nique, who is funny in her standup act and quite presentable on the show but is hardly the epitome of style and grace (be honest, Mo’Nique, if you had any real class you would never have agreed to appear on this show). Her assistants are some woman who, like Mo'Nique, seem strict but basically decent, plus some guy who's just a prick who delights in insulting women. I can’t find these cast member's names on VH1’s website, which shows you about how important they are to the show.

Charm School made its intentions clear in the first episode when the girls were forced to take a long hike and camp in the woods, then were divided into two teams that had to race through an obstacle course. What, you ask, does this have to do with etiquette? Nothing, although Mo’Nique makes some claim about measuring teamwork.

The team that lost seemed to lose primarily (at least as portrayed in the show, which is of course edited for effect rather than truth) because one of the girls chosen to be a team captain chose weak girls who she worried would feel hurt if no one seemed to want them. She was roundly criticized for this shocking display of decency by the judges, who told her that this was a competition and she couldn’t be soft. I’m sure Miss Manners would completely agree.

In episode two, which I foolishly decided to watch, some guy from The Bachelor got to decide which girl was most presentable. One stole another’s expensive dress to rattle her, then told her so right in front of the bachelor who, instead of being shocked at such creepy behavior, crowned her the winner.

This is all particularly horrendous because Ladette to Lady shows it is possible to make a cheesy reality show that has a little honor to it.

Ladette is not an especially classy show. Basically, they get a bunch of alcoholics, sexoholics, and tomboys together in an old etiquette school where they are taught skills that were popular amongst society women decades ago, like cooking and flower arranging. The show loves its drunken women. In season two, one woman flashes her breasts on every occasion (on English TV, and on the Sundance Channel, which shows it in the U.S., nudity is allowed, so there is none of the blurriness VH1 employs to hide the naughty bits), and not an episode goes by in which we don’t see an archival clip of her lifting her shirt. Ladette also is constantly sending the girls off to pubs or leaving them alone with bottles of booze just so they can go wild and then be chastised by the school’s teachers.

At the same time, the show really does reward graciousness. It does teach these women how to speak more eloquently and carry themselves more gracefully. The women who keep causing trouble get kicked out, the women who work hard and improve stay. Ladette is ultimately a show about transformation, and while most of it is in thrall to drunken debauchery, towards the end the show seamlessly shifts into something positive That glorifies hope and possibility.

But Charm School doesn’t want their cast to transform themselves; it wants them to abase themselves. The show seeks to find all the ways these women can be humiliated, and the women themselves are willing and eager participants in their own abasement.

This is a shame, because these women need help. Obviously VH1 reality shows are all as unreal as you can get, heavily scripted and cast with people with no interest in anything except gaining fame and fortune (I kind of liked some of these shows at first but the utter and complete falseness in every second of every minute of every show eventually drove me away). The girls of Charm School are all hoping that, like “New York” in the first season of Flavor of Love, they can parlay their shame into a career. I’m sure they would argue that it’s just an act, that they’re playing for the cameras and that this is not really who they are at all, and there would be some truth to that. At the same time, people with high self-esteem would never go on a television show in front of millions of people and grovel for success as these women do. The girls of Charm School could use some genuine lessons in etiquette and charm, but what they really need most is a good therapist.

This is what makes Charm School so odious. It takes very screwed up women and tries to screw them up more for the entertainment of the masses. It is not an American version of Ladette to Lady but rather a serialized version of the Jerry Springer Show. Like Springer, Charm School thrives on sleaze, and just as Jerry would end each show with a smug, hypocritical lecture on how disgusting his guests acted, Charm School wants its women to be revolting so it can wag its finger in their faces and say, shame, shame on you. And just as with Springer, the most immoral participants are not the guests, but the producers who exploit them and the audience that revels in their degradation and in a self-righteous sense of superiority.

hey, white guys just have a lot to say

If you want to see exactly how white and male news shows are, check out the handy-dandy charts from Media Matters. Note that the political leanings of the show don't seem to have much to do with anything; Countdown is actually more exclusively white than O'Reilly (although Countdown's host once did rather smugly note that his understudy is a black woman; when does she get her own show?).

I don't know who Paula Zahn is but she seems a bit more open to black guests, although it looks like she's not better on the other races than anyone else.

hey you sitting there watching TV in your underwear; quit thinking you're a civilian

I didn't realize Paul Harvey was still alive, but after hearing him complain about Afghani women and children being labeled as civilians I think it's fair to think he's a bit senile. First off, the actual quote is quite disjointed and delivered in a weird, somnambulent tone; it really does sound like he's broadcasting in his sleep. Second, it reveals a bizarre point of view. He's basically suggesting, as best I can tell, that referring to women and children as civilians is keeping NATO from killing more people, or something.

The most fascinating thing is his comment that there haven't been any civilians since the invention of the aerial bomb. He doesn't just say, there's no such thing as a Muslim civilian, or a dark-skinned civilian, which I think is what a lot of right-wingers say; he's saying there are no civilians anywhere. Which means the folks who died in the World Trade Center weren't civilians, people blown up by suicide bombers aren't civilians, and little babies laying in their cribs aren't civilians. (A civilian, according to the dictionary, is "a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization.")

Someone needs to wake up Paul Harvey, tell him what a civilian is and send him to a retirement home where he can ramble incoherently without bothering too many people.

Here's what he said. Make sense of it as best you can. If you think this must be a typo because it's so confused, you can listen to this quote here.

And hear this please. In Western Afghanistan, where NATO forces are involved in some of the deadliest fighting since January, among the 136 dead this morning suspect Taliban. But there are others, 51 villagers, mostly women and children. Might not the news media put a stop to such pulled punches wars as this, if we would just desist from categorizing civilians. It was civilians, for goodness sake, who decapitated New York City. Since the invention of the aerial bomb five wars ago, there have been no civilians.

internet asshole faces real world consequences

We all know that the faceless anonymity of the internet allows people to be total pricks with a feeling of impunity. So even though I disapprove of violence, I can't help but take pleasure when a
a griefer is hunted down and beaten up in real life. Griefers are people who just enjoy ruining games for other people, and this one was not only obnoxious but stupid enough to give away too much personal info.

Is it right to break someone's fingers for ruining a game for them? Did these people try going through regular channels and trying to get the griefer banned before they went after him? I don't really know. I can't say it's right, and the masters of Warcraft should probably ban the violent people for letting their argument spill out into the real world like that. But still, if this sends a message that it's not okay to be a bullying creton, even when you're online, then I can't object.

Rolling Stone : THE LOW POST: The Imus Sanction

Just came across a think piece on the Imus blowup that does a good job of pointing out how full of shit pretty much everyone is. I'm not familiar with the writer, Matt Taibbi, but I think I've got to read more of his stuff, because he's sharp and savage. Here's a sample paragraph:

First of all, let's just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton -- dumb, rich -- gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.