Last night.
Deeky: Have you seen ads for the new show on A&E called "Runaway Squad"?
Liss: No.
Deeky: Reality show. The premise is this dood finds runaway kids and takes them back home.
Liss: Whut?!
Deeky: Yup! Don't most kids run away because they're being abused?
Liss: A lot of them do!
Deeky: What a fucked up idea for a show.
Liss: It really is.
Deeky: What do you expect from the network that brings us "Dog the Racist Bounty Hunter"?
Deeky: And "Kirstie Allie Is Fat."
Liss: OMG *snort*
…is "edgy" April Fool's Day pranks by smug hipster assholes.
[Trigger warning.] So, the totes high-larious group "Improv Everywhere," who stage awesome comedy "missions" in public venues, such as their annual "No Pants Subway Ride" (really) posted a video and images yesterday of their "No Underwear Subway Ride."
Text Onscreen: Improv Everywhere.
Only it wasn't real…? Because they were supposedly wearing flesh-colored underwear…? So the prank isn't that they were naked on the subway…? The prank is actually that they made people think they were naked on the subway…?
White guy with bullhorn, appearing to speak to a crowd of people gathered in New York City: Thanks, everybody, for coming out to the "No Underwear Subway Ride." [crowd cheers] For today's mission, we're gonna be going down into the subway; we're gonna be spreading out on several different cars, several different trains; at the same time, we are all going to be removing our pants and then removing our underwear. We want it to be a funny thing, we want it to be a positive thing, so please be as respectful as you possibly can. When the train gets crowded, you know, make sure you don't rub your genitals right up next to somebody else. It's not illegal to be completely naked in the New York City subway system, as far as we know… Everybody ready to take their underwear off? [crowd cheers]
[The rest is video set to dance music, the only lyrics accompanying which is a female voice repeatedly saying, "Hello Everyone." We see the crowd walking down stairs into the subway, then various men and women getting on trains and removing their pants and ostensibly their underwear, sitting on seats, standing in front of other passengers, etc.—as well as passenger reaction shots. Some people laugh uncomfortably, some people look scared, some look away, some stare, some move away. The genital areas of the participants are pixilated throughout the video.]
Ha ha…?
And now the thread at their place is full of people who are understandably disturbed by the notion that there's nothing wrong with exposing your genitals on the subway (as long as you're "as respectful as you possibly can" be about it), and people who are contemptuously mocking anyone who was TOO STUPID AND UNHIP HAR HAR to get the irony and actually fell for the prank.
Well, I got the goddamn "joke," but I fail utterly to see what's amusing about treating sexual assault on the subway as a punchline, when female commuters (in particular) are ubiquitously harassed by opportunistic predators who expose themselves, grab breasts, buttocks, and/or genitals, and use the motion and capacity of public transit as a cover for nonconsensual frottage. Check out the number of times "bus" or "train" etc. come up in the Survivor Thread and the Right to Go Out Thread, if you've any reservations about the prevalence of this form of assault.
This might—might—have been funny in a world in which sexual terrorism on public transportation isn't a real, serious, and pervasive problem.
But that is not the world in which we live.
In the world we live in, treating one of the most endemic forms of sexual assault or harassment as a subject ripe for a zany prank—and shaming people who don't see the alleged humor—is just another irresponsible and tiresome perpetuation of the rape culture.
[H/T to Gabe.]
Gentle readers, I confess that as I write to you today, my breast is swollen with pride at the ingenuity of Man. Not one hour ago, I arrived home on my velocipede after a brief sojourn at the local dram shop. Imagine my choler when I discovered my niece Eugenie, now on spring holiday from Miss Phyllida X. Catchpole’s Academy for Shallow Breathing, achortle like a madwoman in an attic at the web-window on her foldable traveling Babbage engine device! Naturally I sent the girlchild to her room so that her delicate organ of thought could recover in that environment, whose anodyne yellow wall coverings were selected especially to soothe the womb-fevered faculties. No sooner had I pocketed the room-key than my eyes grew wide as whiskey barrels at this sockdologer of an e-newsey, penned by one Ed Yong.
Now, I have long held natural philosophy scriveners to be jackanapeses and charlatans of the first water. But surely no more so than the natural philosophers themselves, who purport to instruct me in the betterment of Man. I find that taking the waters at Banff with my faithful yeoman Bruce and the occasional dose of a good arsenic tonic are all I need to maintain the manly vigor of my constitution and the punctiliousness of my daily bowel habit.
It is one thing to observe, for example, the salutary effects of sassafras on Carbunculoles of Weymouth. However, too much of natural philosophy consists in pointless exercises such as those of that long-tressed Dutchman, counting the animalcules in a drop of water. Or the endeavors of that honey-fuggler Isaac Newton, cosseted in a dark room in a plague-ridden city for weeks, poking himself in the eye with a wooden stick!
So you may ken, dear readers, that I count myself no friend of natural philosophers and their scriveners and scribblers. But this Ed Yong gentleman has knocked me into a cocked hat! Here, at long last, is some information of use to the common Man in his daily activities. And, not surprisingly, it confirms what we Thinking Gentlemen have suspected all along: the organ of cogitation contains a soft spot that renders some more vulnerable to shecoonery!
Scientists have discovered the part of the brain that makes people gullible, it was claimed today. The findings could have massive implications for treating the growing number of people who fall wide-eyed for sensationalist media reports.
The fMRI scans also revealed that the supra-credulus was more active in the brains of women than in men. Evolutionary psychologist Stephan Koogin, who also worked on the study, thinks he knows why.
“Picture, if you will, a group of Pleistocene-Americans. The men are out hunting for mammoths and bears, and they can’t afford to be fooled by fake tracks. The women stayed at home picking berries or something, and they needed to tell each other far-fetched stories to keep each other entertained, because berries are really boring. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Assuming all of this is true, and who’s to say it isn’t, I’m right.”
If you're Danell Griego, of Belen, New Mexico, the answer to that would be Mary holding Jesus (two holy folks!):
In their marble shower is an image that they believe is of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus after he is taken down from the cross.
"We built the house a couple years ago, and we have a stand in the shower and a jacuzzi tub in the master bath," said Danell Griego, the person who discovered the figure. "We also have a hot tub right outside the master bathroom, so we had not used the tub. I decided I was going to try out the tub since it had been sitting there unused for so long. I got the water and bubbles ready, hopped in and was relaxing and decided to light a candle. When I reached over to grab the candle, right behind it was the image."
Griego barely knew what to do.
"It startled me at first," said Griego. "The image was plain as day. I jumped out of the tub and called for my husband and kids to come and see if they saw what I was seeing. They saw it immediately, all of my family and neighbors also saw it immediately."
by Shaker Natalie
[Trigger warning.]
[Trigger warning. Explanation of post title.]
So. There's this big article in the New York Times magazine called "Can Animals Be Gay?" And it's…interesting.
I won't spend a huge amount of time sharing my thoughts, because I primarily just wanted to point to point to the article and open it up for discussion. But, briefly, here are four things I noticed and wanted to mention:
1. "Being gay" and "engaging in homosexual sex" are, at some points, treated as the same thing, and, at others, treated as two separate things. I was reminded of Mustang Bobby's old post, "He's Not gay," which explains, essentially, that "gay" is cultural and "homosexual" is behavioral. Which is not to say that non-human animals can't be culturally gay (or that they can be), but only to say that the question serving as the article's title can't be answered without first making that distinction—something most biologists who resist anthropomorphizing animals are probably loath to do.
2. Although the biologist with whom the author spends time in the field, looking at same-sex paired albatrosses, carefully explains that identifiable rape exists within the species and is distinguishable from consensual mating, the author nonetheless fails to make any distinction between what might be more accurately defined as rape and consensual mating when referencing "same-sex sexual activity" in other species:
Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as "exhalated belchlike sounds." Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole.Which mimics rape culture narratives about bestial and aggressive same-sex sexuality that underlines everything from Santorumesque "marry your horse" rhetoric to retrofuck military policy.
"There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality," the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. "Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise." While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a "heterosexist bias" and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do. In 1999, Bagemihl published "Biological Exuberance," a book that pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists' biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years — sometimes innocently enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust.Bagemihl is quoted in the piece noting that LGB people are "often better equipped to detect heterosexist bias when investigating the subject simply because we encounter it so frequently in our everyday lives," which I absolutely believe—and I'm pleased to see in the Times the idea that bias can be objectively determined, particularly by targets of a specific bias who develop by circumstance expertise in its expression.
Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as "mock" or "pseudo" courtship — or just "practice." Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as "a nuisance" that "goes on and on." One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report "the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses" which are "all too often packed" into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, "I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly." To think, he wrote, "of those magnificent beasts as 'queers' — Oh, God!"
The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction.Except, of course, for all the human animals for whom reproduction will never, ever, be the point of heterosexual sex.
After spending about two years typing my fingers into bloody stumps about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, this is truly rather amazing news:
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.YES.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.
The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration's claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans' international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.
The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department's claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity's lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.
The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to "unfettered executive-branch discretion" that had "obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching."
Suggested by Shaker summerwing: If you could go back in time and talk to your ten-year-old self, what would you say? How do you think the entire conversation would go?
I would say: "There are going to be some tough times ahead, but I promise you that you're going to be okay."
I imagine my 10-year-old self would react pretty much the same as I would now if my 60-year-old self suddenly showed up to have a chat: "WTF? OMG. LOL! And zounds! But, you know, awesome. Totally awesome."
And we'd marvel that I apparently never grow out of spilling soup on my shirt.
So Sarah Palin has this show on Fox coming up called Real American Stories, which, according to this article, is about "people who have overcome adversity" and the guests include(d):
Among the success stories Palin plans to highlight are those of country music star Toby Keith, former GE Chairman Jack Welch, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. LL Cool J (birth name James Todd Smith) was also included in the roster ...They even put out a promo video showing LL Cool J's interview.
"Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW"Fox, classy as always, responded with:
"Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith's interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career."Yes, that's it. LL Cool J doesn't want to be associated with inspiration. You got him there!
And as for his "fledgling acting career," the CBS-TV show he stars in -- NCIS Los Angeles -- is only one of the most watched programs on TV, and a big hit for the network, you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats.Well, ok, NPR did not actually say the "you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats" bit (that was a slight embellishment on my part) but they totally should have.
by Shaker Scott Madin
[Trigger warning for discussion of video games which simulate rape and violence.]
I've got video games on my mind lately — as some of you have probably seen me talking about in comments, I was at the Penny Arcade Expo in Boston this past weekend — and I just wrote a mostly-positive post with some criticism and a dubiously clever pun for the title over at my blog, about gamer culture in general and one panel at the Expo in particular.
This post is much less positive, and I'm also much less certain, ultimately, what should be done to try to fix the problems I'm talking about.
Many of y'all probably remember previous discussion, both here (Rape For Sale, Looking for Rape Products? Try Amazon., From the Mailbag for 2009-08-17) and at many other blogs over the past several years, of a Japanese computer game called RapeLay, the genre of hentai (lit. "pervert"/"perverted") games, and the subgenre of rape-focused hentai games to which it belongs.
CNN's Connect the World program has now run a story on the game, and its continuing availability through illicit channels despite its having been pulled from production and removed from retail. The video from that link is embedded below the fold; CNN doesn't appear to have a transcript available, so I've included one at the end of the post.
CNN's Eve Bower also has a post on the Connect the World blog which brings up some additional issues, and related context from recent news in other countries — Iceland's recent vote to ban strip clubs on the grounds that they're degrading to women, and a women's rights advocate in China arguing for the repeal of laws against obscene material.
There are a lot of issues involved here. In particular, I'd like to talk about not only CNN's coverage, which tries to highlight how disturbing the subject matter is but also falls into the "journalistic balance" trap of making sure to find a woman who says she's not offended by the game (as though "offense," rather than the harm to all women — indeed, all people — that the perpetuation of rape culture represents, were the issue), but also whether legislation is a viable way to address the problem games like this represent, and what the existence of games like this says about game culture and games as a medium. I'm going to sketch some of my thoughts, but I'm especially interested in having a discussion and hearing Shakers' ideas.
The content of RapeLay and other games like it is clearly indefensible. The question is, what, if anything, can effectively be done about it? Most experience seems to indicate that banning something for which there's a market, no matter how bad the thing is, doesn't really work to prevent people who want the thing from acquiring it, and in this case that also seems to be true: RapeLay isn't available for sale through any legitimate retailers, but people who want to play it can still get it easily. And I worry that it will be difficult to implement laws which target only material like RapeLay and its ilk without also potentially — depending on the views of the particular people executing the laws at whichever particular point in time — catching in the same net subject matter that has traditionally been wrongly deemed objectionable (e.g. gay characters).
The CNN report fails, I think, to make it clear that neither sexual violence nor sexual activity with female characters who look extremely young are universal features of hentai games, for example. And if outright bans not only may have overbroad effects, but also probably won't prevent dissemination of the games, what's the use of enacting them, especially when developers of rape games could simply work in another country, and distribute their products over the internet.
To make the probably-obvious analogy to illegal drugs, prohibition and cracking down on supply just hasn't worked, because demand is still present; prohibition + demand merely creates a black market.
And, unlike hentai games, illegal drugs are physical objects that need to be transported, causing logistical problems that don't exist when the product is strictly virtual and distribution is effectively both free and instantaneous. Surely prohibition on digital material won't even work as well as the prohibition on illegal drugs — a notoriously dismal failure — anyway.
Now, obviously I don't want these games to be on the shelves, or available on the Internet. Nothing about them makes the world a better place. They are a self-perpetuating component of the rape culture, which, if not demonstrably a cause of actual rapes, are nonetheless the sort of symptom that itself contributes to the exacerbation of the disease. It is only in a rape culture that anyone would think to create games like these, and anyone would want to buy them — and though the rape culture would find other avenues of expression, as it always has and still does, if these games did not exist, they, as well as those other avenues, nonetheless contribute to the continuing mainstreaming and normalization of rape culture's basic idea of women and girls as sexual objects and as things (I use the term advisedly) to be despised.
Where, then, do we start: How can we prevent dissemination of harmful games like this when the pervasiveness of rape culture means there's a continuing demand for them, or how can we work to undermine the rape culture that creates the demand for games like this, when their existence, and indeed the ubiquity of expressions of rape culture in every medium, itself perpetuates and normalizes rape culture? How many people, like Kibble and Gardner, seek out things like this because they're curious, but through exposure become desensitized and come to think of them as normal?
Another issue brought up in the CNN story and blog post is the comparison with non-sexual violence in many games. Most Americans (and probably many other cultures, but I can't speak for them) reflexively think that graphic, bloody depictions of non-sexual violence are less problematic (even, frequently, unproblematically entertaining!) than graphic depictions of sexual violence.
Many of the games I enjoy playing involve a lot of killing — some, like Gears of War, extremely graphically: One of the things many fans love about Gears is the ability to cut enemies in half with a chainsaw attached to the barrel of your gun. Extreme discomfort (to put it mildly) is, I think, self-evidently the appropriate response to something as reprehensible as RapeLay, but doesn't that throw into question the ubiquity of violence as such in our sources of entertainment?
What does it say about gamers — what does it say about me — that I'm totally comfortable with the idea that, in a game like Resident Evil 4, I can shoot my enemies in the head and see their heads explode in a spray of gore, that I only started to have a problem with it when that extreme violence was overlaid with blatant racist, colonialist, genocidal imagery? What does it say about gamer culture (and the larger society in which it's embedded) that we think detailed, interactive representations of violent, gory murder are fine, and there's controversy over whether we should draw the line at rape and genocide? Nothing good, I fear.
I don't think violent games should be banned (irrespective of whether that would ever work, anyway). But I think that gamers, whose reputation for not being very self-aware or introspective is not entirely undeserved, need to look more critically at why so many of us find vicariously committing countless murders to be so much fun.
One line of questioning that comes to mind is: Does shooting someone constitute the same denial of their personhood as raping someone does? How does the difference in intimacy level factor into this?
On the one hand, it seems, rationally, as though the necessary closeness and the fact that most rapists are acquainted with their victims, while a murderer with a gun can kill someone they've never seen before from far enough away not to see their face or hear their voice, would argue for killing as more depersonalizing; but on the other, if rationality entered into it we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
Certainly in some cases, serial killers do adopt a "predator" mentality, and a view of their victims as Other, subhuman, prey; but I know of few if any video games which cast the player in such a role. Another point here, of course, is that in games where the player shoots people, those people shoot back (or attack in some way): they're active opponents, a threat to the player*. In other words, they have agency, which is a sharp contrast to the victim characters in games like RapeLay, and supports the idea that casting the player as a rapist is more dehumanizing to the victim characters than casting the player as a killer.
I don't really have any conclusions, and I've left a lot of issues involved in this story unaddressed, but I'm sure they'll come up in comments. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, both in general and in the context of this story and my experiences at PAX, about what a hypothetical society free of oppressive hierarchies would be like. I don't think we can really know, because our experience is so molded by those oppressive hierarchies, no matter where each of us stands in them; but we can see what our society is like, and perhaps extrapolate from that some things that a non-hierarchical society might not look like. And in particular, I think its forms of entertainment wouldn't look much like ours at all.
[Update: Sady Doyle, proprietor of such fine blogs as The Tiger Beatdown, also has a post on RapeLay at Broadsheet, and I always encourage everyone to read Sady's writing.]
*There was a notable exception to this recently, the "No Russian" level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Shaker Nolittlelolita had an excellent post on it, over at Hysterical Broads, but the gist is that your character, an American agent, is undercover in a Russian terrorist cell and must participate in a terrorist attack on an airport, indiscriminately killing civilians. The level caused a great deal of controversy, possibly even more than Resident Evil 5 did.
----------------------------------------
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
[Title: This report includes graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.]
[Shot of busy street in Akihabara]
Voiceover: The heart of Japan's electronics district. The world's games of tomorrow, on sale today.
[Shot of software boxes on shelves]
VO: On shelves in mainstream stores, plenty of what's known here as "Hentai games." Almost all feature girlish-looking characters; some are violent, depicting rape, torture and bondage in detail. It didn't take long to find a game where the object is revenge: find and rape the woman who fired the player from his imaginary job.
[Parts of screenshots from the game, depicting women in distress and/or tied up. Background sound effects of a woman moeaning as if in distress.]
VO: Most of this game we cannot show you.
[Shot of shopper holding game boxes whose covers are blurred out.]
Hentai games are not new for Japan. This country has long produced products the rest of the world would call pornographic,
[Shot of street again.]
but before the Internet shrunk the world, it stayed here.
[Shot of hands typing on a keyboard.]
VO: A quick web search generates hundreds of Japanese games.
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of shopper picking up games from a store shelf.]
VO: Once a game goes on sale in Tokyo,
[Shot of Google video results, apparently for search term "rapelay".]
VO: it's digitized and shared everywhere.
[Footage from RapeLay of a woman standing on a subway platform. During the following narration some of the possible actions are demonstrated in the game footage.]
VO: This one, called RapeLay, begins with a teenage girl on a subway platform. With a click of your mouse, you can grope her, and lift her skirt. You, the player, stalk her, her sister, and her mother, following them on the train.
[Shot of reporter Kyung Lah in front of computer with RapeLay on the screen.]
Lah: What follows is a series of graphic, interactive scenes that we can't show you. Players can corner the women to rape them again and again, and it goes on from there.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: The game infuriated women's rights groups.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now.]
Bien-Aime: These sort of games that normalize extreme sexual violence against women and girls have really no place in our communities.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: International outrage led the Japanese developer to pull the RapeLay game from stores last year.
[Shot of YouTube search results for clips from RapeLay.]
VO: But that didn't stop its spread. In fact, the controversy took it viral.
[Shot of laptop screen; Lah is video chatting with a young couple in Britain.]
VO: That's how Lucy Kibble and Jim Gardner in England heard about and downloaded the game,
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of Lah sitting at laptop, talking with Kibble and Gardner.]
VO: As they told me over Skype.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Lucy Kibble: Just the fact it was a controversial subject, and I wanted to try it, really, just to see what it was all about.
[Shots of game store and streets in Akihabara.]
VO: That global availability is why international women's rights group say Japan needs to regulate game makers better, stopping creation of certain content.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, then of YouTube videos from RapeLay.]
Bien-Aime: What we are calling for, though, is that the Japanese government ban all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking, and rape against women and girls, and there are plenty of games like that.
[Shot of Japanese flag, pulling out to show Lah walking down the street.]
Lah: How sensitive is Japan to this issue? Despite weeks of repeated calls to the government, not a single government official would speak to CNN on camera. They wouldn't even make a statement on paper. Over the phone, one official who would not allow us to use her name said that the government realizes these games are a problem, and it is checking to see whether self-policing by the gaming industry is enough.
[Screenshots and footage from games Chain Trap and RapeLay.]
VO: Sexual images are subject to censorship in Japan. For example, in the RapeLay game, genitalia are obscured. But Japan does not have laws that restrict video game themes.
[Shot of laptop screen showing Skype call with Kibble and Gardner.]
Lah: Did you feel offended, as a woman?
Kibble: No, not at all.
[Shot of YouTube videos.]
VO: Lucy and Jim point out it is easy to find shoot-'em-up games, which no one seems to worry about.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Kibble: It's escapism, that's why people play it.
Jim Gardner: The idea of banning it, or telling people what they can and can't do, just because — on the off chance some kid might get involved in it, is just ridiculous.
[Footage of RapeLay.]
VO: But women's rights groups say the interactive games step closer and closer to reality, and no one should play a game where the only way to win, is to rape. Kyung Lah, CNN, Tokyo.
I have no opinion on Sandra Bullock's and Jesse James's marriage, or its collapse, or its survival, or any of the incidents that have led to a rumored divorce—and I will continue to have no opinion on these subjects.
However, I do feel compelled to acknowledge Jesse James' apparent fascination with (or tolerance for, or whatever description would be appropriate) white supremacy and its practitioners, just long enough that I might say: No.
Donning an SS cap while doing the Nazi salute and miming Hitler's mustache is not "a joke," it is not "funny," and it not awesome or clever or edgy to pose for a picture au Nazi for the "shock value."
I can't believe this is a post I need to write.
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Spudsy's ScooterToots, the bite-sized snack for scooter aficionados on the go.
Recommended Reading:
Andy: Sinead O'Connor, Thomas Roberts, and Bill Donohue Appear on Larry King to Discuss Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse Epidemic (I. Fucking. Hate. Bill. Donohue.)
Resistance: As Seen by the Census
Chally: Keeping Up Appearances
Tami: Social Capital and Denying the Pain of Black Women
Angry Asian Man: M. Night Shyamalan Talks Last Airbender and "Diversity"
Ellen: Secretary of State Clinton Calls it Like it Is on Reducing Maternal Mortality
Leave your links in comments...
