Month: July 2013

Press Charges Against Alec Baldwin, Ctd

A reader writes:

A question: I’m wondering how Alec Baldwin’s gross, shitty remarks on Twitter have made you feel about your stance on hate crimes laws. If I am remembering correctly, you are against them on the grounds that they criminalise thoughts and motivations instead of just behavior. At any rate, you’ve now said that Baldwin should be prosecuted for the threats that he made. Fair enough. Threaten people with violence in public, prosecution is just what you may get.

I’m assuming, though, that your revulsion and desire for justice has been influenced by Baldwin’s use of homophobic slurs in those threats. Without them, would the threats be as serious, as deserving of punishment?

Because isn’t that kind of the real argument behind hate crimes legislation? That violence perpetrated against members of marginalized groups specifically because they are marginalized is actually more harmful and more threatening and terrorizing, on purpose, by it’s very nature? For example, arson is one thing (and already illegal), but burning down a black family’s house to terrorize their neighbors and larger community is another – causing ripples of fear and injury and damage just like the damage done (as you point out) to children who are bullied and threatened with language like Baldwin’s daily.

My only reason for seeking legal recourse is that Baldwin publicly threatened a named individual with violence and urged others to commit it – and has not withdrawn that call to beat a man senseless. That’s one reason Stark has closed his own Twitter account to just a few. He’s under physical threat of violence – and Baldwin has not recanted that threat. I’d have the same position regardless of the identity of the target – and would want no further charges than threatening violence against a specific human being. Another reader:

Would you care to compare and contrast your reaction to Alec Baldwin’s outburst to Niall Ferguson’s idiocy about Keynes?  Are you willing to forgive one just because he’s your buddy?  Not that Baldwin is any sort of good guy; just look at what he said about his daughter six years ago.  But what makes Baldwin so deserving of your wrath?

Niall didn’t threaten to physically hurt anyone – and was widely pilloried by liberals. That’s the difference. Another is tired of the coverage:

Do we really need multiple posts on Alec Baldwin’s tirade?  We all understand the hypocrisy – he’s a liberal actor who got mad and said some anti-gay slurs against someone who he thinks wronged him.  But he’s certainly not the first celeb who’s words deviate from his politics.  Calling him out on it out is fair enough. But please do not become some pseudo-Page 6 and cover it incessantly.  If you do, you’re pulling a page out of the Fox News/NY Post playbook.

Agreed. If anyone in Hollywood or the gay establishment had really taken him on, I wouldn’t feel so compelled to point out the double standard.

Popcorn For The Politburo

In pursuit of the Chinese market, Hollywood is throwing bones to the communist censors:

Some of the changes made to placate China’s censors are the type of harmless edits only a bureaucrat could love, like tweaks to Kung Fu Panda to ensure that the image of China’s beloved panda was not slighted. Others are for graphic content. Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained had to remove some violent scenes and nudity.

But other changes demanded or encouraged by censors are not as harmless.

The pandering to China in Looper (portraying China as a strong superpower) and in Iron Man 3 (flying the protagonist to China to seek out a particularly skilled surgeon) fits nicely with China’s desire to strengthen its global image. Chinese censors removed a line from the movie Life of Pi, “religion is darkness,” for fear of angering the devout. This suggests that former President Hu Jintao’s concept of a “harmonious society” and avoiding polemic issues motivates the censorship board.

Censors also successfully demanded changes to the zombie flick World War Z. Originally, the movie cited China as the source of the zombie outbreak. Quartz writes that the script also called for characters to discuss how the Chinese government covered it up – a plotline that censors probably found far too reminiscent of accusations that the Chinese government covered up a SARS outbreak in 2003, as well as more recent viruses. The moviemakers changed the location of the outbreak to Russia.

More Dish on the movies and global censorship here and here.

An Ephemeral Web

Google has threatened to evict thousands of blogs on its Blogger platform following a terms-of-service change to crack down on pornographic ads. Felix is worried:

What I fear is that the entire web is basically becoming a slow-motion Snapchat, where content lives for some unknowable amount of time before it dies, lost forever. Sites like archive.org can’t possibly keep up; and the moguls who own most of the content online are simply not invested in the ideals of the link economy. When even Google is giving bloggers just three days to save their sites or see their content disappeared — three days when many of them are on summer vacations, no less — it’s pretty obvious that there’s no such thing as a truly benign online organization any more.

A 2012 study found that 38 percent of links disappear within five years.

Why Should Women Shave? Ctd

Some dudes sound off:

Now this is an interesting thread.  I am a straight male and I personally would despise having to shave my armpits and legs every few days. So I don’t actually know why I expect women to do it.  I mean, when I have to shave my face I go old-school and make it a luxury.  I have my safety razor, my badger hair and my creams and I get a nice shave.  I do this once a month.  The rest of the time is a Monday morning once-over with a beard trimmer (I am somewhat blonde and can get away with it).  If I had to do that to a higher percentage of my epidermis, I’d be even lazier.

All that said, being in NYC I’ve seen plenty of women who have stopped shaving their legs or armpits.  I cannot explain it, but I have an absolutely visceral reaction to it.  I am immediately and ferociously grossed out by it. This is likely immature and/or neanderthal of me, but I can’t help it.

Another:

I was going to stay out of this one, but here goes: I don’t think women should have to shave, but it is the case that basically any woman who wants to date me has to shave on a very regular basis. I simply find smooth legs on a woman very sexy, and hairy legs completely off-putting. I don’t know if that’s a mere cultural construct, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m not changing my mind.

Besides that simple preference, I think the idea of shaving is really sexy. It means that a girl paid attention to her body and changed how it would look and feel, just because it might make me want her even more. That idea is hot!

I should add, I also groom myself very carefully.

I trim my pubic region and shave everything balls and below. I shave my face regularly. I moisturize twice a day. I clean the hairs out of my nose and pluck the few strays that grow off my earlobes. I don’t see this as an imposition, and I really don’t get why women or anyone find it to be such a pain in the ass. We’re talking about 5-10 minutes of effort in the shower, right? Is that really such a terrible thing? If that’s the level of problem we’re down to, I’d say we’ve come a long way in terms of women’s equality.

I also don’t think that wanting women to be hairless as a sexual preference constitutes “misogyny” per se. Misogyny properly defined is “The hatred of women by men.” Having a certain aesthetic preference, I think, doesn’t rise to that level. It’s tempting to use that word to more generally refer to anything men want women to do that some women don’t want to do, but we shouldn’t make that mistake. There are men out there who really do hate women. Those are the misogynists. The rest of us just think smooth legs are sexy to touch.

Another:

Straight man here with a preference toward women who shave their legs and pits. I applaud those in the thread who choose not to shave, but I don’t view myself as “oppressive” or “misogynistic” because I have a preference toward a cultural norm. Most people find baldness or men with toupees less attractive than men with a full head of hair (granted not to the same extent). It’s the same with men with patchy beards, or neck-beards. Nearly all of them have to regularly shave to feel attractive in the public’s watchful gaze. Do I think these are “oppressive” viewpoints? No. Do I think it sucks for bald men that want hair, neck-beards that don’t like shaving, and women that don’t want to shave? You bet.

Dreaming Of A Discharge Petition

It could allow the immigration bill to pass the House, but Beutler doesn’t expect it to materialize because “immigration Republicans who signed on would face external consequences, even if leadership tacitly give it the go ahead.” Drum nods:

A different House and a different party leader might be crafty enough to see the value in a discharge petition, but not this one. They’re true believers. They won’t secretly agree to leave the defectors alone after the vote, which is the minimum necessary for this to work, nor will John Boehner risk telling them secretly that he won’t take away their committee assignments or otherwise retaliate against them. The party leadership just doesn’t have this level of craftiness in them.

Bernstein adds his voice to the chorus:

It’s one thing to vote against the party on substance; it’s a much bigger deal to work with Democrats to gain control of the House floor.

Happily Ever After

Peter Fulham looks back at E.M. Forster’s Maurice – a novel written in the early 20th century depicting gay love – and ponders the dreams of those struggling for acceptance:

Comparisons between the gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement can be too simplistic, but in at least one respect there is an unmistakable commonality. I remember hearing Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in middle school and being thrilled by his simple, lucid metaphor of dreaming. But it didn’t occur to me just how literal King’s words probably were.

The idle mind of a marginalized person spends a lot of time dreaming. King’s dream was of a world in which black children and white children co-existed together, uninhibited by racism. For a lot of L.G.B.T. people, I suspect the dream is also of children: the gay middle-schooler no longer terrified by the wrath of bigoted parents, the two high-school girls who no longer have to hold hands in secret.

He closes with this beautiful passage from Forster about the novel’s ending:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.

The Iraqis We Betrayed

A heart-wrenching timeline of emails from an Iraqi who tried to get asylum, after helping the US during the occupation, and who is now dead. It’s from Ira Glass’s This American Life. Of 25,000 visas to the US once authorized, only 5,500 have been issued. This dead man’s emails represent just one of them.

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

A reader takes the discussion thread on an unexpected tangent:

I am a member of the furry fandom. Recently the International Anthropomorphic Research Project has been conducting surveys to better understand the psychological, anthropological, and sociological aspects of the fandom. One of these surveys was on the sexual orientation of furries. Furries are vastly more likely to identify somewhere along the spectrum of bisexuality than non-furries. Only around 40% of furries say they are either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. It is not clear to me (or to the IARP’s researchers, so far as I know) why this is the case, nor have I heard any reasonable hypotheses.

Even more interesting was the data they found on the orientation of fursonas – a furry’s created persona within the fandom. When asked about their orientation versus the orientation of their fursona, the biggest change was that fursonas were much less likely to be exclusively or almost exclusively heterosexual and much more likely to be dead-even bisexual than the person behind the fursona (some data here and here). IARP researcher Courtney “Nuka” Plante (himself a furry) has hypothesized this might be because some furries who have questions about their sexual identity might use their fursona as a sort of testing ground.