On Muhammed The Teddy

Dan Savage is the guy you want to read after the Sudanese outrage:

This whole mess cries out for a Teddy Roosevelt. Enough with the “expressions of displeasure” from the diplomats. Someone in the British government needs to deliver a “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” speech on Gibbons’ behalf. And mean it.

Before I go home tonight I’m going to pop across the street to the new Crypt, buy myself a buttplug, and name the fucking thing Mohammed.

The spirit of Pim Fortuyn lives on.

Torture In American History

Prologue1

It is, sadly, a simple fact that torture was once a deep part of the American way of life, inextricable from slavery and racism, for a very long time. It was worst in the South, but not unknown elsewhere – well into the twentieth century. The ease with which some in the new GOP reconcile themselves to it with respect to terror suspects, as long as it is directed at "the other," cannot be fully understood outside this context. "Waterboarding," for example, a torture technique the majority of GOP candidates cannot bring themselves to condemn and which the new attorney-general refuses to declare illegal, was used against African-Americans to extract false confessions in the South. And lynching was often accompanied by gruesome torture. A reader writes:

The ugly truth is that for the 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, this country committed torture against thousands of its own citizens.

White Southerners, faced with the specter of black economic mobility, developed a variety of methods to squelch these advancements, the most violent and dehumanizing of which was the spectacle lynching. The term lynching evokes a scene of spontaneous violence hastily committed by small group of hysterical citizens, but the sad reality is that a typical lynching was a deliberate, organized ritual that unfolded over the course of days or weeks, often in collusion with local law enforcement.

Newspapers advertised the event and thousands of spectators attended with wives and children in tow, snapping photographs, purchasing concessions and memorabilia, and eagerly discussing the means of execution. Hanging was the most common method, but lynchings incorporated a combination of torture techniques including castration, branding with hot irons, eye-gouging, severing of appendages and burning alive. In some cases, spectators rummaged through the leftover ashes searching for grim souvenirs.

At one particularly notorious lynching in Paris, Texas, the crowd numbered 10,000. Take a moment to let that number sink in. 10,000 men, women and children munched on popcorn and snapped photos as a black man was tortured and burned alive.

This is our legacy. And it goes a long way toward explaining the synthesis of "today’s Dixie-based, pro-torture, anti-immigrant GOP."

(Photo: The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood splattered clothes, white and dark paint applied to the face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victims head. Circa 1900, location unknown. From a real, photo postcard that Americans once sent one another.)

HuckaBible

David Brody writes:

The part of Huckabee’s answer that probably resonated with Evangelicals is when he said, "There are parts of it I don’t fully comprehend and understand, because the Bible is a revelation of an infinite God, and no finite person is ever going to fully understand it. If they do, their god is too small". Folks, that’s called speaking the language of Evangelicals because that’s exactly what many of them think and feel. It was spot on and at the same time a nod to moderates to say "Hey, we Christians don’t have everything figured out either!"

Except the Bible tells them that no one should have a right to an abortion under any circumstances, and gay couples should be stripped of all legal protections for their relationships. And neither is literally taken from the Bible.

Another Israeli Joke

A reader writes:

Four guys are standing on a street corner: an American, a Russian, a Chinese, and an Israeli… A news reporter comes up to the group and says to them:

"Excuse me…What’s your opinion on the meat shortage?"

The American says: What’s a shortage?

The Russian says: What’s meat?

The Chinese man says: What’s an opinion?

The Israeli says: What’s "Excuse me"?…

That LGB Poll

A reader writes:

You know, I’ve always been willing to cut the Human Rights Campaign the benefit of the doubt, both because of that cool bumper sticker (you know the one), and more importantly. because of their support for ENDA, which I’ve always thought of as more important than marriage. Hearing about this poll, though, really gives me pause. I have been out for 25 years now, and in all that time, I’ve met exactly two men who have consistently described themselves as bisexual. The rest of the handful of “bisexual” men I have met were in the middle of coming to terms with their sexuality and quickly dropped the term “bisexual” in favor of “gay.”

There is no possible way that that poll could be representative of reality. None. And I say that as somebody who has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, where we used to spend many a happy hour proving this kind of thing mathematically. If you tried to waltz this kind of sample past your dissertation committee, you’d be laughed at. Calling this a “poll” is like Vladimir Putin calling the exercise they’re currently engaged in in Russia an “election”—there are superficial similarities, but unlike the real thing, the outcome is too certain and the intent quite transparent.

I’m sure you could somehow find enough bisexuals to fill half a sample and call it the "LGB community", but it would be no more representative of any actual gay population than a bunch of Zoroastrians. Still, the poll managed to back Clinton, so it served its purpose.