Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers.
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face—
My naked arms—
My thighs—
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you,
For you to reach me, even,
With your tiny, timorous toes.
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Keli Goff contends that “we are not a nation at war over race. We are a nation suffering growing pains”:
For starters, the number of interracial married couples reached an all-time high in 2012, three years after President Obama took office, jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 18 percent. Those numbers don’t include those who are dating or cohabitating, an indication that the number of interracial couples is actually higher, as American marriage rates are at an all-time low.
And while a majority of Americans may not be in interracial relationships, a large number of Americans are now either related to someone or know someone who is in one or has been in one. Furthermore, mixed race children are the fastest growing population in the country. Someone who once may have been less evolved on race relations could very well now have a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild who is of mixed race, which will likely spark an evolution of some sort. That evolution can be seen in Gallup’s tracking of national attitudes on interracial relationships. In 1958 4 percent of Americans approved of such couples. By 1997 half of Americans approved, and by 2012 the number was 87 percent, a steady year-to-year increase in the years since the Obama presidency began.
If the North Korean regime had hoped to stop anyone from seeing The Interview with its cyberattack on Sony and unsubstantiated terrorist threats, they didn’t quite pull it off. After initially deciding to pull the film, Sony backtracked and released it online on Christmas Eve. The Interviewpulled in nearly $18 million over the holiday weekend, including $15 million online:
According to Sony, more than half the online revenue came from the Google Play Store and YouTube (both owned by Google), and after being limited to U.S. residents in its first few days, the online release was later expanded to Canada. Sony reports that the film has been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times so far. The 331 theaters that screened the film generated significantly less revenue, with a reported $2.8 million in ticket sales. Many of the larger theater chains declined to screen the film due to Sony’s decision to make it available online on the same day as the theatrical release.
While that’s hardly a good take for a major Hollywood release (its total production costs were somewhere in the $100 million range), it sure beats the zero dollars it would have made had Sony capitulated and pulled the film entirely. Still, Ian Morris observes, the studio could have made more money had it not limited the digital release to the US and Canada:
According to various sites, BitTorrent downloads on public trackers were at nearly 1 million viewers after 24 hours. Those numbers exclude private trackers and places like newsgroups, IRC and “locker” based copies (those hosted on Dropbox or similar sites). Factor all those in, and it’s plausible that more people pirated the movie than paid. … Of course, you’ll never stop piracy, but blocking the film from being watched in other English-speaking countries is just foolish. Sony could, perhaps have doubled its money if it had allowed non-US residents to watch the film. And even if this had penalties with distributors, it feels like this might be the ideal time to try the model out anyway.
Todd VanDerWerff seesThe Interview as “an important test of whether movies can now sustain themselves with day-and-date releases in theaters and at home”:
And though that $15 million weekend was undoubtedly boosted by curiosity seekers drawn by the controversy around the film, it’s still an incredibly impressive number. A Marvel superhero movie, which requires a much larger opening weekend than that, probably won’t be using day-and-date releases soon, but it stands as an increasingly viable alternative for smaller budget projects. … Of course, the big question in online releasing is how studios will balance the potential for money made there against the needs of movie theaters, which are still necessary to open big studio tentpole films, at least for the time being. And by so utterly outperforming theatrical sales with online sales, The Interview has also shown why theater owners are so worried.
So what, then, was Pyongyang’s game? Shortly before the holiday, Suki Kim advanced a compelling theory:
This scandal seems to be following the usual course designed by North Korean propagandists, where the more serious and consequential story gets buried behind the sensational headlines that benefit no one more than the North Korea regime. What is being overshadowed this time is the one thing Pyongyang desperately wants the world to ignore. The United Nations’ General Assembly recently voted, by an overwhelming majority of 116 to 20 (with 53 abstentions), to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, and the U.N. Security Council met on Monday and voted in favor of adding North Korea’s human rights issues to its agenda over the objection of China and Russia. … I am not sure how much Kim Jong-un really cares about being facetiously killed by actors in a Hollywood comedy, but it appears that he doesn’t want to have an arrest warrant issued against him by an international court the crimes against humanity.
Sony’s last-minute decision to release the film after all should give some comfort to Flemming Rose, who had linked the initial decision to pull the movie to the worldwide trend of “grievance fundamentalism” (a subject the Dish knows all too well):
In today’s grievance culture, with its identity politics and cultivation of the victim, the grievance lobby has succeeded in shifting the fulcrum of the human rights debate from freedom of speech to the necessity of countering hate speech; from the individual pursuing individual liberties to the individual being aggrieved by the liberties taken by others. That shift becomes counterintuitive, the logic increasingly absurd. Those aggrieved by free speech are defended, while others whose speech is perceived as offensive to such a degree that they are exposed to death threats, physical assault, and sometimes even murder are deemed to have been asking for it: “What did they expect offending people like that?”
Thus, perpetrators are transformed into victims, victims into perpetrators, and it’s impossible to know the difference. The distinction between critical words and violent actions, between a picture and a violent reaction, between tolerance and intolerance, between civilization and barbarism is being dissolved.
In a must-read Atlantic cover-story, Fallows biopsies America’s public, political and economic understanding of its military:
Outsiders treat [the US military] both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.
An essential point about military spending:
America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops.
He estimates that overall national security will cost more than a trillion dollars this year, noting that “the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War.” And the political will to combat such excess remains highly unlikely:
A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”
“The word ‘should’ is the worst thing that ever happened to the left. ‘Should’ has become a virus in the contemporary left, a word that is more effective at defeating left-wing resistance than any right-wing argument ever could be. It seems like every day I read fellow leftists telling me what they should and shouldn’t have to do, rather than what they are compelled by injustice to do. ‘Feminists should not have to teach people the importance of feminism; it’s their responsibility to educate themselves.’ Perhaps it is. But they won’t educate themselves. No one will make the world a just place but us. That’s why there is such a thing as feminism. The struggle exists precisely because the world does not fix itself and its people do not educate themselves. That’s such a basic statement of political principles it frightens me that it has to be said at all,” – Freddie DeBoer.
After droppinghints earlier this month that it was reconsidering its longstanding ban on blood donations by gay men, the FDA adopted a new policy last week, easing the lifetime ban but still requiring men to abstain from sex with other men for an entire year before being eligible to donate. Mark Joseph Stern is unsatisfied:
This is, no doubt, a step forward. But it’s a very small one. The one-year deferral policy is still rooted in an outdated, insulting vision of gay men as diseased, promiscuous lechers. A gay man in a decades-long monogamous relationship with his husband will be forbidden from donating blood. So, too, will any gay or bisexual man who consistently practices safe sex. Meanwhile, straight people who routinely have sex with multiple opposite-sex partners—whether or not they use condoms—face no deferral at all. A straight man can donate blood the morning after participating in an unprotected, anonymous orgy. A married gay man cannot donate blood at all.
“I predict blood donation drops because it’s way less embarrassing to lie about being gay than to lie about being celibate,” one observer remarked. It’s a great line, but also highlights the complexity and the absurdity of a policy that is already based on a wayward honor system of sorts.
As many have noted, the new policy conforms with that of a number of countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, and Japan, all of which use the one-year ban.
Nevertheless, as Elaine Teng pointed out, the one-year deferral puts gay or bisexual men on the same donor pool as “heterosexuals who have had sex with someone who is HIV-positive, and heterosexuals who have had sex with a sex worker.” In other words, the standard for gay identity is equal to action for heterosexuals.
Current HIV tests can detect the virus now with just an 11-day window for incubation. So a permanent ban preventing gay and bisexual men from donating blood is overkill. But even the one-year ban seems extreme, given the science. AIDS awareness group Gay Men’s Health Crisis calls the new policy useless and essentially a “lifetime ban” for most gay men. But this one-year ban matches the rules for other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. According to one study, letting gay men who aren’t getting laid donate blood would add 317,000 pints to the blood supply in the United States annually.
So I’m working on my script treatment for a gay “indie” romantic comedy about two lonely men who meet while donating blood and have to get over whatever personality quirks have been keeping them from getting some action. Steal my idea and you’ll be the one needing blood donations.
Only about two in 10 blacks say that police treat whites and blacks equally, compared to about six in 10 whites. Among white Republicans, the fraction is more than eight in 10. The poll revealed similar disparities in opinion on the use of force by police, relations between law enforcement and communities, and whether the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. were isolated cases.
Relatedly, Michelle Conlin recently spoke with African-American NYPD officers to get their perspective:
Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Thought #1: Police officers have an intrinsically tough and violent job. Split-second decisions about the use of force come with the territory. Ditto for decisions about who to stop and who to keep an eye on. This makes individual mistakes inevitable, but as a group, police officers deserve our support and respect regardless.
Thought #2: That support shouldn’t be blind. Conlin reports that in her group of 25 black police officers, 24 said they had received rough treatment from other cops.
This fun reader thread is a good way to balance out the heavy one on corporal punishment and also a prime example of the collective wit of our readership. A reminder of what an eggcorn is: “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing or misinterpretation of another, an element of the original being substituted for one that sounds very similar or identical.” The thread started when the Guardian called me out for using “leash on life” back in 2007. The resulting avalanche of eggcorns from readers is here. Below are many more new examples:
Don’t know if this is an eggcorn or malaprop, but a student in a quiz just referred to the apostle Paul doing something “by the seed of his pants”.
Another reader:
I saw this phrase in a user email from Bill Simmons’ NFL Week 15 mail bag. A question from a Cleveland Browns fan used this hilarious eggcorn, which I’ve never before seen. I didn’t even finish the paragraph before rushing off to email The Dish. Here’s an excerpt of his email with the gem of a phrase in context (italics mine):
The Browns will win just enough games next season to regress back to their yearly average of five wins, and Jimmy Haslem, tired of scamming truckers and cross-country-vacationers and other middle class pee-ons, will throw a temper tantrum, clean house, and repeat this miserable cycle until the team moves to LA and wins a Super Bowl.
Another:
Until very recently I thought that a Hobson’s Choice (a choice where there is not choice at all “take it or leave it”) was actually a “hostage choice.” Personally I think my version is far more descriptive.
Another:
One of my friends, describing an interaction with his ex-wife: “… and then she went bombastic on me.”
And another:
My friend and his son see a dead bird, and his son asks him if birds can get to heaven, since they don’t have any skin. My friend says, “First of all, they do have skin – underneath their feathers – and second, what does that have to do with heaven?” Son: “because when you get to heaven, Jesus takes all of your skins!” This is an atheist family – he has no idea how his son learned about Hannibal Lecter Jesus.
Another religious misfire:
Courtesy of Scott Walker: “Molotov” in lieu of “Mazel Tov”. It seems that he may be taking the idea of the stern, vengeful diety of the Old Testament a bit too far.
The Dish 