On his show tonight, Sean Hannity said that this clip of Bill Maher…
was equivalent to this one of Rush Limbaugh…
Amazing.
The Virus of Reason
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Monthly Archives: March 2012
I Haven’t Had My Teeth Cleaned Since 1974!
Right now, I’m reading Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever by Wallace Shawn. The first, A Thought in Three Parts is disturbing in the extreme. It is all about how people are incapable of connecting with each other, despite all their external attempts. The second part is so pornographic that I wonder how it could be produced. But it has been. According to Wikipedia, it “caused a minor uproar in London in 1977 when the production was investigated by a vice squad and attacked in Parliament due to allegedly pornographic content.” Allegedly pornographic content?
(Bob is sitting on the bed with Helen and Dick. He masturbates. Helen and Dick watch.)
BOB: (masturbating faster and faster) I’m coming soon!
DICK: Oh boy.—
HELEN: Oh—God—
BOB: Oh! (He comes, shooting sperm toward Helen and Dick.)
It gets worse. Helen proposes a contest to see whether Bob or Dick can ejaculate higher onto her naked body. I forget who won.
Having said all this, Shawn is an extremely interesting writer. I’m sure seeing one of his plays today is very much like what it was to see The Bald Soprano in 1950. But they are in no way easy; they challenge emotionally and intellectually. Most people will not be willing to work as much as these plays require. What’s more, they are not what people who know Wallace Shawn, the film actor, will be expecting. There are no comments on the joys of electric blankets or exasperated inconceivables.
For anyone who likes Shawn or who has been paying any attention to politics over the last 30 years, the following clip is easy. And extremely funny.
DJ Flula Remixes Celebrities!
I am working diligently to create a series of videos. But with videos like the one below, it is hard not to get discouraged. The guy is a total freak—in a good way.
Boycott The Hobbit
The fucktards associated with Saul Zaentz’s production company are trying to shut down a pub in England. Why? Because it is called The Hobbit and the first part of Peter Jackson’s film is supposed to come out this December. The pub[1] has been in existence for 20 years, during which time Zaentz has owned the rights to Tolkien’s books. It seems to me that this is a clear case of squatter’s rights. But I don’t even see the problem here. Titles cannot be copyrighted. This must be some kind of trademark law run wild.
Stephen Fry (who will be in the upcoming film) tweeted, “Sometimes I’m ashamed of the business I’m in. What pointless, self-defeating bullying.” Indeed.
It is nothing for me to say I will not see the film because of this. Although I think Peter Jackson is very good, I also think his Lord of the Rings is wildly over-rated. Ditto for Tolkien. But there is something that all you with Facebook accounts can do: join the campaign.
Stupid evil fucktards!
[1] Fun Fact: the word “pub” is short for “public house,” just as “tavern” is short for “an establishment where alcoholic beverages are sold to be drunk on the premises.”
Dennis Moore
If we look at tax policy in the United States, we see that the government works as a kind of reverse Robin Hood. Conservatives like to say that inequality is surging everywhere so: nothing to be done! But of course, even this logic isn’t consistent. What’s more, the basic facts are incorrect. Inequality is much worse in the United States. We need someone as conscientious as Dennis Moore.
Satire is Dead
I’ve shut off comments here for a number of reasons, the most important being that there just isn’t a critical mass of readers. The only articles here that generate a lot of comments are those on Kory Stamper, which probably speaks to the fact that the writing here is too eclectic. But while I did accept comments, I accepted them all and deleted the spam.
Brad DeLong posted an article by Owen Thomas about limiting commenting to “experts.” I find the idea offensive in a number of ways, but mostly I just wonder if such people realize that their readership would fall through the floor if they did so.
A commenter, Cawley, wrote:
Speaking as someone who is neither an expert or particularly well informed or well reasoned, it strikes me that your comment threads seem to be populated by the expert and the merely well informed and well reasoned to a remarkable degree. And, although I’ve had a couple (admittedly snarky and potentially ad hominem) comments moderated out, you seem to accomplish this with a fairly liberal moderation policy. (After all, I get through it regularly.)
I could not help myself. I replied to the comment:
That should be “nor,” you dolt! Stop embarrassing yourself.
:) <== Satire is dead.
And what did DeLong do? He proved my point by refusing my comment. What a dolt! He should stop embarrassing himself.
Update
Comments are back on, but I am moderating them.
Rats Are Great Pets
When I was in graduate school, I watched the movie The Abyss with three of my poet friends: Rebecca Davis, Jim Haining, and Gerald Burns. For what are probably obvious reasons, the character Hippy reminded them of me. Hippy is the guy with the rat.
I couldn’t find a really good scene from the movie—one that featured Hippy’s rat in a good way. There are a number. In particular, there is a scene where Hippy saves his rat (who is never given a name) by sealing her in a ziploc bag. Here she is being tortured by Ensign Monk:
As a result of The Abyss, my friends held a bake sale and raised the two dollars necessary to buy me a pet rat. This was not a terribly welcome gift. For one thing, I spent much more on food for my new pet the first week than they had on buying him.
But things turned out well. I had no place to put him, so he lived the first couple of weeks in my jacket sleeve. This included an airplane ride from Portland to San Francisco and back. (They didn’t check you before getting on a plane in those days.) At that time, I was crazy for the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink, and so I named my rat Barton.
The thing that surprised me about Barton was how he was nothing like a hamster. When I was young, many of my friends had these vicious rodents. They were not social and as likely to bite you as anything. Barton, on the other hand, was social, curious, and never bit. He was also very clean. And most of all: he ate with his hands; that was just too cute.
What I have since learned is that Barton was in no way unusual. Rats are great pets: much better than birds and certainly as good as cats and dogs. What’s more, they make great first pets.[1]
[1] People who buy rats to feed to reptiles? They are sick. Feeding a fellow mammal to a reptile is like feeding a fellow human to a bear. I know that snakes and bears have to eat, but we shouldn’t directly facilitate them in this way. It is wrong. Really.
Conservative Arrogance and Willful Ignorance
I’ve talked before about David Harvey’s excellent Marxist critique of our current economic crisis. HowTheWorldWorks presented a response video titled Crisis of Capitalism, The Critique. It is offensive in its ignorance or disingenuousness. Noscman1 then presented a response to that video titled “The Critique of the Crisis of Capitalism Critique by HowTheWorldWorks.” It is rather good and provides most of what you need to know about the HowTheWorldWorks video [Sadly, it is no longer available. -FM]
The main argument in the HowTheWorldWorks video is: Marxism bad; capitalism good. At least 50% of what he says is simply, “Well everyone agrees this is just wrong.” As noscman1 points out, it’s just all the people committed to HowTheWorldWorks’ ideology who believe that. If you are going to attack an argument, you really need to argue and not dismiss out of hand the argument.
There is one major point that noscman1 misses. HowTheWorldWorks contends that wages in the United States have increased substantially since 1980. Noscman1 counters this by saying that although wages have increased in the United States, they have not worldwide. This is not true. The problem with HowTheWorldWorks’ claim is first that these wages he presents are not in inflation adjusted dollars. More important, however, is that the wages given are averages. We all know that over the last 30 years there have been huge increases in total wealth. The point that those on the left make is that all those increases have gone to the wealthy. The middle and lower classes have seen very small (and even negative) wage growth.
Conservatism has weathered this financial crisis with a combination of arrogance and willful ignorance.
Pee on Me
Yesterday, I was talking to Andrea and the subject of trickle down economics came up. I said that it should really be called “tinkle down economics” because it is all about urinating on the poor. She countered with something that I don’t even like to think about, so I certainly won’t repeat it here. (She was having a bad day.)
I thought that phrase was pretty clever, but like anything clever I come up with, I was sure it wasn’t original. So I performed an internet search, and it turns out to be a fairly uncommon turn of phrase. But Jim Hightower beat me to the punch. (That’s not bad; I don’t mind following in the footsteps of someone as wonderful as Hightower.) Last tax day, Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation Magazine, wrote about this in an article title End ‘Tinkle Down’ Economics.
For thirty years, we’ve been treated to the big whopper that cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs. Let’s get real. Trickle-down—or, as my good friend Jim Hightower likes to call it, tinkle-down economics—hasn’t worked. Case closed. After George W. cut taxes for his rich pals, far fewer jobs were created than after President Bill Clinton raised them in the 1990s.
Then in December, the Obama-GOP deal extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy at a two-year cost of about $70 billion a year. Now Congress is making $40 billion in painful budget cuts this year. Meanwhile, President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan and others are battling over budgets and tax plans for the next decade and beyond. For the most part, what’s been missing from these suffocatingly narrow discussions is an easy source of income: taxing investments like ordinary income.
The folks over at Responsible Wealth believe not only that the Bush tax cuts on upper-income folks should be ended but also that money made from money (i.e., capital gains and dividends) should be taxed like money made from work, not at the preferential 15 percent rate. They have a simple calculator that calculates your tax savings using just three numbers from your tax form (or from your head), and an interactive graph with videos of people talking about their taxes. It’s worth checking out at responsiblewealth.org.
Taxing capital gains and dividends at regular income rates would save $84.2 billion in 2011 alone, twice the amount we’re cutting from this year’s budget.
Don’t let the rich pee down on me.
“‘Cause you’re just like Hillary”
Let’s suppose that I didn’t have HBO, but really wanted to see Game Change. I know I can’t get an online subscription to HBO, because I’ve tried. And I don’t have a TV. That would leave me with two options: find an illegal copy online or go visit a friend who has HBO. Let’s just assume I went to visit a friend.
The film is really good; in its way as good as Primary Colors. But unlike Primary Colors, I will never watch Game Change again; it’s just too painful. The first half of the film made me really sympathetic toward Sarah Palin. I had forgotten that before running for Vice-President, she had only just started as governor of a small state, whose only real experience was as mayor of a place too small to comfortably call a town. And she isn’t that smart. The film does an excellent job of showing just how out of her depth she was. After about an hour, it really does look as though she is going to have a nervous break down. But she rallies and turns herself into something much worse.
The first we see of this is after Palin’s catastrophic interview with Katie Couric. She is on her cellphone, raging at her advisor, Nicolle Wallace, saying, “Now I understand what Hillary meant when she said she had to find her own voice.” Wallace pauses. “Yeah,” she says. “‘Cause you’re just like Hillary.”
It is only after the debate that Palin completes her metamorphosis into the rogue who ate the campaign. It is hard to say for sure, but the film indicates that she believed that she had done so well in the debate[1] because she had done things her way and not by listening to her advisors. From then on, she is uncontrollable. The high point of the movie comes on election night when Palin wants to give a concession speech. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s senior campaign strategist, has been itching for a fight with Palin ever since Nicolle Wallace bailed on her after the “Hillary” speech. He tells her angrily:
Governor, this country has just elected the first African American President in the history of its existence. And it is the concession speech that will legitimize his secession as Commander in Chief. It is a serious and solemn occasion, and John McCain, and only John McCain, will be giving this sacred speech. This is how it has been done in every Presidential election since the dawn of the Republic. And you, Sarah Palin, will not change the importance of this proud American tradition.
From a technical standpoint, the film is professionally done. Everyone involved helped to create a really well told story. Talk of Emmy Awards seem a little much, even though the film will doubtless garner some. The one thing that stood out to me was the special effects that allowed Julianne Moore[2] as Sarah Palin to debate the real Joe Biden.
If you have a “friend” with HBO, I highly recommend watching this film.
[1] My recollection is that she did not do well at the debate. Expectations for Palin were by that point so low that all she had to do was show up and not drool. The main thing I remember is that she refused to answer the questions and just said things from her speeches. And no one countered her, because, you know: she wasn’t drooling.
[2] Here is Julianne Moore in Neil Jordan’s filmed version of Not I in Beckett on Film:
TWiB is Back!
Dehumanizing Iranians and Jews
On 60 Minutes tonight, Diane Sawyer interviewed Meir Dagan, former Director of the Mossad. The reason for the interview is that Dagan believes it would be a mistake for Israel (or the United States) to attack Iran regarding its alleged nuclear weapons program. At the beginning of the interview, Dagan stated that he believes the Iranians are rational. “Really?!” Sawyer responded, as though he had just told her he had been anally probed by space aliens from Alpha Centauri.
This is a common belief in the United States: the Iranians are different from other countries; they are insane. The fact that we have heard the same thing many times before (most recently Libya and Iraq and North Korea), only to discover: my God! They’re rational actors; it’s just that they have different goals than we have for them.
Watching the consistently terrific Up With Chris Hayes today, I was struck by a comment that Rula Jebreal made. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi had said that the Iranians were not rational actors. Jebreal countered this, but went further. She pointed out that for hundreds of years, this is exactly what people have been saying about Jews. The fascists, for example, claimed that the Jews were not like the rest of Europeans because they were all part of some worldwide network of Jews. Even in the United States, people have put down Jews for being more loyal to Israel than the United States.
That was a shocking observation that should send a chill down the spin of all those who want to bomb Iran.