Ron Paul: Freedom to Die in the Streets

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Chris

Ron Paul: Racist or just batshit?

Amanda Marcotte puts her finger on a problem that seems to infect whiteboy hipsters across the country: Crank Disease, wherein you become convinced that a crabby conservative white guy with a racist past is going to be the savior of liberals and black people.

It’s worth pointing out at this point that supporting Ron Paul, even just a little, appears to infect the supporter with Crank’s Disease, where they’re making conspiratorial claims that we can’t assume that someone writing, “I, _____, am totally writing this,” actually wrote it. The longer you chew on that belief, the more likely you are to find yourself, a year from now, wearing camo and shooting up beer cans while complaining about a one world currency, which is of course, a totally different thing than your desire that the entire world trade in gold.

The Ron Paul variety of Crank Disease seems to turn clueless but otherwise benign whiteboys into vicious little pricks who lash out at any suggestion that he’s anything short of the Messiah. At the beginning of this month, I idly tweeted something about the racism in Ron Paul’s newsletters and immediately got a backlash from people who weren’t even following me. You would think I’d recommended a flash mob of disemboweling cats.

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Rick Santorum Doesn’t Want You to Get Laid

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Chris

Despite how obviously desperate the Republicans are to find anyone—ANYONE—who’s not Romney to nominate as their Presidential candidate, I never thought that they’d scrape the bottom of the barrel so much that Santorum would wind up in second place. And in second place by a mere eight votes, too.

As Paul Krugman notes, the fun part about the constant rotation of Republican Number Twos is that it brings all of their skeletons screaming out of the closet into the unforgiving glare of the media spotlight. In Santorum’s case, the more media coverage he gets, the more his name becomes synonymous with “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” Used to be that was a well-known joke only among readers of Dan Savage, who helped come up with it after Senator Santorum compared consensual homosexuality to fucking dogs. (To be fair, he did allow that gay sex wasn’t quite as bad as fucking children or dogs, but that it was still pretty damn icky.)

Now, even Rachel Maddow and the New York Times make sly reference to it. Next thing you know, “santorum” will make it into the OED, and not as a proper noun.

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No Soda Until Abortion Ends?

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Chris

A committed anti-choice activist takes a stand against abortion by foregoing his daily Coca-Cola.

Well, it looks like anti-choice activists have finally decided to stop fucking around and get serious about stopping abortion. In order to stop the alleged murder of thousands of “babies” in their mothers’ wombs, a site calling itself Until Abortion Ends: A Hero Initiative is encouraging people to send in videos and stories about making sacrifices to end the baby holocaust wrought upon the country by the godless feminists.”Tell us what you are willing to sacrifice for the unborn,” the site’s submission form says. “With your sacrifice you will inspire others to do the same.”

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Celebrate the Living While Mourning the Dead

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Chris

Picture of Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker who disappeared in 2010

The news sites are ablaze this week with stories about the discovery of human remains on Long Island that may turn out to belong to Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker whose disappearance last year triggered a search that turned up the bodies of nine other sex workers who advertised on Craig’s List. Gilbert showed up at the house of Gustav Coletti at 5 AM last year, panicked and begging for help: Continue reading →

The First Amendment: Christians Only

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Chris

Ed Brayton calls this quote by Bryan Fischer, the notoriously vicious Director of Issue Analysis at the American Family Association, “The Dumbest Thing Ever Said.” I don’t know if I quite go for that: it’s got some pretty stiff competition. The Reagan Administration alone provides piles and piles of political bullshit, and that only takes us up to 1988. Then you have to sift through another eight years of the George H.W. Bush years (starring Dan Quayle!), the crazed, drooling anti-Clinton paranoia of the eight years after that, and then finally the Shrub years, which may have triggered some tonic-clonic seizures as a result of all the facepalming I did in that time. Yes, the last thirty years of political culture have been heavy on the stupid, not to mention the sheer horrific. Fischer’s essay, in which he argues that Muslims—and by extension all non-Christian—have no First Amendment rights really falls more properly into that second category. The really horrifying thing is how used to hearing this sort of thing I’ve become.

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Lolita, Darth Vader, and Hugo Schwyzer

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Chris

Darth Vader and Glenn Beck: It's their job to be villains.

When you watch Darth Vader blow up the planet of Alderaan in Star Wars, or telepathically strangle an incompetent flunkie in one of the sequels, it may be brutal, but it’s not really upsetting. That’s what Vader is there for; it’s his job to be a professional villain and spread bloodshed, pain, and misery throughout the galaxy. In a strange way, it’s comforting to see him relish his latest act of torture, murder, or genocide; it reassures you that the world is exactly the way you expect it to be.

The Darth Vaders of gender politics are people like Maggie Gallagher, Glenn Beck, Andrew Schlafly, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and their various hanger-ons . While I think that the world would be a better place without their hidebound misogyny and homophobia, I understand it. It’s their job to be assholes, and so when Beck spouts off his latest conspiracy theory about how the gays are going to shove their homo thing down his throat, I nod and take it in stride. The world is normal.

It’s when feminists, or anyone else that I think should be on the side of the angels, start weaving reactionary assumptions about gender that I wig out. The world is not as it should be. It’s as though I walked into a theater that’s showing another version of Star Wars, the one that Lucas keeps stored in his basement along with the last existing print of the Star Wars Holiday Special. In this version, Vader is still blowing up planets, but Luke and Leia spend their spare time downing beers with Imperial Stormtroopers and torturing kittens.

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When Do We Get CSI: Gallifrey?

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Chris

When you think about it, doing Doctor Who as a police procedural is pretty obvious, if not downright inevitable. While I steer away from the various Law and Order/CSI clones on television faster than a cloud of tachyons, I’d actually watch this. The only problem is that to make it work, they’d have to make the science much more implausible than it is now. I can believe in a time-traveling phone booth that’s bigger on the inside much more easily than the routines where the CSI team solves the murder by getting a computer tech to “enhance” the reflection in a photograph of an eyeball. Yes, the Doctor might stretch the laws of physics and reason a little bit, but at least he’ll respect you in the morning.

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Push the Bush: Loving and Hating “Map of Tasmania”

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Chris

Amanda Palmer turns the merkin into an art form in her video for "Map of Tasmania."

On the one hand, we’ve been in desperate need of something like Amanda Palmer’s new song, “Map of Tasmania,” for a long time now. I’m old enough that I can remember when a woman shaving her pussy was seen as transgressive and edgy, but that stopped being true a couple years before people started to freak out about Y2K, and shaved pussy became something that women had to do. Nothing illustrated this better than the internet’s outpouring of shock and disgust last August when Sasha Grey flashed an unshaved bush on an episode of Entourage. If you still needed to have the point made for you, that should have done it: shaving the pussy is now the default, no longer something that women do for pleasure, but as a duty if they don’t want to be seen as gross and unkempt.

With all that in mind, I have to give an enormous thank you to Amanda Palmer: “Map of Tasmania” is a flamboyant, shameless ode to female pubic hair. It’s joyful, and sexy, and the video, which shows off some very creative merkins, is even better. We really need to get back to the idea that pubic hair isn’t gross and disgusting.

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Sex Ed of the Past: Count Spirochete

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Chris

Campy vampire "syphilis" on the left; real syphilis on the right.

I have a real fascination with the history of sex. Because sex as a whole is kept so securely in the closet, its history is one of the most poorly-documented areas of our culture, and it’s easy—almost inevitable—for each generation to feel like they invented everything that’s not ten-up-ten-down heterosexual intercourse. Partly because it’s so well-hidden, the history of sex is especially revealing about who we were then and who we are now.

Below is a great example of the history of sex education called “The Return of Count Spirochete.” Despite its crude and colorful appearance, it wasn’t intended for children. According to the “Armed With Science” blog, “Count Spirochete” was produced in 1973 for the National Naval Medical Center to educate members of the U.S. Navy about the risks of syphilis and gonorrhea. It doesn’t look like a military educational film; what it resembles, more than anything, is an episode of “Schoolhouse Rock” dedicated to VD.

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