Finals

I'm out for a bit more than week for finals. Enjoy.

Song of the Day

The Wrong Reasons

After the President announced his plan to leave Afghanistan in three years (unless he doesn't want to do), some feminists decided that was wrong. Dana Goldstein reports:

In the wake of the address, a number of prominent women’s and human-rights organizations have declared themselves disappointed—not only by Obama’s choice of words, but, more significantly, by his plan to begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan in 18 months, which they say is far too little time to improve the situation markedly and turn women’s rights efforts over entirely to the Afghan government and NGOs.

“It’s more than perplexing,” says Eleanor Smeal, founder and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which runs a Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls. “It’s perplexing, disappointing, and I don’t understand why.”

Why? Maybe because the government is so corrupt and so weak that no Afghan supports it. Maybe because the war has cost a little over $200,000,000,000. Maybe it's because violence keeps increasing and more soldiers keep dying. These are all better reasons to leave than protecting the rights of Afghan women is or staying. Moralism does not mix well with foreign policy. You can yell at the Chinese all you want about Tibet and human rights abuses, but don't be surprised when they refuse to help you out on North Korea, Iran, or your mounting debt to them, three things that matter more, to the United States, than the internal matters of China. That's the important phrase here; it puts everything in perspective. What do the rights of Afghan women mean to the United States? Little to nothing. The US can save blood and treasure by leaving the hopeless cause that is Afghanistan, and yet it should stay because of the rights of Afghan women?

Hassan argues that the United States owes Afghan women open-ended support to make up for America’s history of financing and training the mujahideen, tribal fighters who resisted the Soviet Union during Cold War proxy battles of the 1970s and 1980s. Branches of the mujahideen became the Taliban, whose policies against women were considered the most repressive in the world.

The US owes them nothing. The word "owe" does not exist in foreign policy. The US doesn't owe the Japanese for nuking their country. The US doesn't owe the Iraqis for bombing and sanctioning their country back to the 1800s during the 90s. The US did these horrific, sometimes needless things because policymakers thought it was in the interests on the US. Every other state in the world has done and still does the same thing and they owe no one for how they act.

Song of the Day

Green-Eyed Athiests

Bill O'Reilly has a groundbreaking discussion on atheism with intellectual light Margaret Hoover and theologian Gretchen Carlson:

Intellectual light Margaret Hoover, upon studying the atheist ad in which a man wears a Santa hat and phrase "be good for goodness sake" appears, theorizes that atheists dislike the cultural traditions of this country, specifically Christmas. Theologian Gretchen Carlson concludes that atheists have chosen to attack the idea of god during the Christmas season because Christmas is the most sacred time of the year for Christians, not Easter, when Jesus is said to have conquered death by being resurrected after he sacrificed himself for the sin of humanity. Bill O'Reilly gets to the heart of the matter by asking this pertinent question: "why do they loathe the baby Jesus?" Theologian Gretchen Carlson posits that it's because atheists feel like they can convert good Christians with traditional values to atheists by insulting the baby Jesus. Bill O'Reilly then settles the matter, determining that the atheist ad was run because of jealousy. Truly a meeting of the minds.

Song of the Day

Why Don't You Just Yell It?

Heather Havrilesky complains about the lack of subtlety in "Glee." This complaint seems spot on:

The dialogue, although mostly clever, occasionally veers into the same obvious territory. Take this really bad exchange between Finn (Cory Monteith) and Kurt (Chris Colfer) about Finn's plan to tell Quinn's parents that she's pregnant with his baby.

Finn: My father was brave enough to fight in some desert thousands of miles away, and I can't even go over to Dudley Road and tell the Fabrays the truth.

Kurt: Your father didn't charge into the breach empty-handed, he had a weapon.

Finn: You think I should bring a gun?

Kurt: No, I think you should use your greatest weapon: Your voice.

No, please, bring a gun instead. We need it.

Seriously. Bring on the different, please.

The Golden Years

Kevin Drum implies (or maybe I'm inferring) that Sen. Orin Hatch is suffering from senility:

The 75-year-old conservative has repeatedly been confused and cantankerous in recent months, repeating obvious falsehoods after being confronted with facts, and recently threatening to kick progressive activists "in the teeth."

A month ago, he described health care reform as an elaborate, "diabolical" scheme to destroy the "two-party system." Soon after, describing the debate, Hatch said, "It's going to be a holy war." This week, he gave a speech on the Senate floor, insisting that the length of the health care bill is "enough to make you barf." A day later, he said Democrats are "doggone stupid" because they believe government stimulus can improve the economy.

It's never pretty when politicians are past their prime. Strom Thurmond's decline was particularly ugly. He collapsed on the Senate floor, physically he deteriorated, needing aides to help him walk, losing his hearing, and mentally he became confused and forgetful. Former Ku Klux Klan member, Sen. Robert Byrd has been repeatedly hospitalized and resigned his chairmanships.

Song of the Day

Unaccountable Military

"G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" is an awful, stupid movie.

I'm not really going out on a limb saying that. But I want to address a certain reaction to the movie, that of the offended anti-militarist. "G.I. Joe" is about an unaccountable military force that protects the world from Cobra, a group fighting for world domination. The part of that story that would offend anti-militarists is obvious. The idea of, let's say, the CIA or special forces doing things around the globe without the permission of Congress or the President or the countries in which they are operating frightens anti-militarists. So we get reactions like this from Tim Robey:

Not what anyone would call playful, this film’s passion for weaponry and covert ops springs from a disturbingly sadistic and joyless place - all it lacks is waterboarding.

Or, this from Alyssa Rosenberg:

No such high-minded messages can be attributed to this summer’s G.I. Joe, which tells the tale of pair of U.S. soldiers who abandon their original allegiances in favor of membership in a secret international military organization that gives them cool toys and lets them chase after hot babes. I had believed that it was impossible to make a stupider, uglier, and more incoherent movie about the American military than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. G.I. Joe’s sole virtue is that it proved me wrong.

...

G.I. Joe also shares with Green Berets the conviction that in war only the bad or extraneous people die, and that the military best operates without oversight or checks from the outside world.

Or, this one from Richard Corliss:

G.I. Joe is not a man but an international paramilitary force, kind of like Blackwater but without all that messy scandal.

We can all pretty much agree with this basic principle: the military shouldn't be allowed to what it wants without the say so of civilian leadership. I don't, however, understand the offense taken when unaccountable military force is presented as good in movies. There's the problem of taking cultural study too far. Yes, the products pop-culture gives us some idea of what is and is not on the minds of the people creating and consuming them. The key phrase there is "some idea." Pop-culture cannot tell us enough for us to know what's going in people's minds. Sometimes we read too far into the products of pop-culture and that's what happened here with "G.I. Joe." Do you really think that the heads of Paramount Studios conspired with writers and a director to convince the American people that paramilitaries are good? Do you really think Americans would be duped by such a un-serious movie?

Song of the Day

That Was a Question

TPM and HuffPo are celebrating this college student for supposedly telling the President to legalize drugs.

These are the headlines from TPM and HuffPo: "Student: Hey, Obama, Legalize It!" and "Student To Obama: Legalize Drugs To Help Economy." The kid never said anything like that. If fact, he never even made a declarative statement or told the President to do anything. This should be the headline: "College Student Wonders Outloud If the President Has at Drug, Prostitution, and Gambling Statistics," sub headline: "Because He's a Wuss." I'm all for ending the Drug War, but let's not celebrate a kid, who looks like a stereotypical college stoner and doesn't have the guts to actually tell the President to legalize at least marijuana.

My Favorite Scene

This was the best scene in all of television this season.


And, oddly enough, this is the runner up.

Sarah Palin a Birther?

Of course.

Song of the Day

Back with the Politics

I've been avoiding the fact that I started this blog to write about politics with diversions like sci-fi movies and video games. Well, let's see if I can fix that. DiA hits Republicans for going after ACORN but not the, at least, equally partisan FreedomWorks:

Republicans have been straining for years to get enough dirt on ACORN to take it apart. They have found evidence of some wrongdoing—thousands of fake voter registrations produced by part-timers were thrown out and never resulted in any fraud—and, more substantially, collected a series of "Punk'd"-style videos showing staffers offering advice on housing fraud to a couple pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute. The latter videos are serious and disturbing, and if there is evidence of real crimes, those crimes should be prosecuted.

Surely neither FreedomWorks nor ACORN should enjoy 501(c)(3) status, since they are both clearly partisan. But the targetting of ACORN alone raises questions about the motives of its accusers. Is the real concern housing fraud and prostitution (which did not seem to be the focus of yesterday's hearing)? Widespread voter fraud (which seems to have no basis in reality)? Or an increase in the number of voters who are likely to choose Democrats?

"Raises questions" is putting it kindly. This has never been about prostitution, anymore than it has been about voter fraud as an intrinsically bad act. It's about voter fraud leading to Democratic votes (the prostitution is just the salacious icing on the cake) and ACORN legitimately registering voters, usually Democratic voters. That Republicans would attack ACORN and ignore FreedomWorks is not surprising. Look at this bit from Republican Rep. Lamar Smith reported by Dave Weigel:

“President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, and presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter,” said Smith. An old picture of Obama in an ACORN office was posted near the hearing stand to bolster his point. “The president’s ties with ACORN taint any conclusions the Department of Justice may reach with regard to whether or not to investigate ACORN employees. That’s why I’ve requested that the attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ACORN.”

This is par for course guilt by association. You can hear this line of attack anywhere. Glenn Beck says it damn near every day. But that's the point. Republicans don't want Democrats winning, so they'll use any attack they can. Republicans even go so far as to blame ACORN for the recession. How does that not color their other, frankly legitimate accusations? No one is suggesting that those ACORN workers aiding prostitution are not wrong or should not be investigated. But to blame all of ACORN for those workers is a classic fallacy of composition. If I blame the entire Republican party for Sen. David Vitter's patronage of prostitutes, I'd be engaging a fallacy of composition. So, it really can't be a surprise that Republicans like Lamar Smith would ignore FreedomWorks because their intent has never been to achieve justice, but to delegitimize Democratic victories. And, it's working...sorta.

Song of the Day

The Best of Overlooked Sci-Fi, Part 3

Image used under creative commons license courtesy of beastandbean.

Cloverfield was released last year and it's already been forgotten. It's an interesting take on your run of the mill monster movie. The plot is simple: A group of people are celebrating one of their own as he is about to leave for Japan. During the party a rumbling is heard. The group of people run into the chaotic streets. A massive creature is attacking the city, and now they have to find a way out.

I hate the technique of the shaking camera, but it is perfect for this movie. The camera is part of the story, a prop of the characters, a first person perspective into the chaos. As such the idea of a monster attacking the city being ridiculous takes a backseat. The only thing that really matters is the characters and how they react to the situation they find themselves in. In this, the presence of the camera lends weight as well. The grief and terror of everyone is real and well expressed. Even the random people met a long the way feel real. The looters, the victims, the voyeurs with cell phones, the soldiers, all of them add to the realism of the movie. The monster is purely mysterious at the beginning of the movie. The only thing you see at first is a tentacle. Then you see more and more as the army and media begin to swarm upon the monster. The monster also has smaller parasites that come along with it, which are freaky as hell, especially what their bites do. As you see more of the monster it almost becomes less recognizable as it doesn't fit with the form of any other animal. This leads the characters to wonder what it is.

There's a side of me that wishes they never showed the monster. Not everyone in a disaster knows what led to it and since this movie goes for realism in a surreal situation, I kindof wish they left the monster shrouded. The look of the characters threw off the realism, too. Everyone in life is not stunningly beautiful. Each of the characters, except for the comic relief guy, could pass as models. I'm not saying you can't have pretty people in a movie, but don't go overboard.

This movie is at its core a realistic take on the monster movie and it accomplishes that with flying colors. Other than tiny annoyances here and there, this movie deserves to highly regarded by lovers of sci-fi.

Song of the Day

A Bad Year

Scott Thill hits a bad year for sci-fi:

CGI spectacle ruled this year, from the box-office-busting Transformers and Harry Potter sequels to J.J. Abrams’ stellar Star Trek reboot. But did we really need another terrible Terminator installment? Did the mind-numbing apocalypse of 2012 really need yet another of Roland Emmerich’s fractured families brought together by disaster? Did we really need yet another X-Men flick probing the backstory of Wolverine? Didn’t the first three already do that just fine? Other than Duncan Jones’ Moon, Shane Acker’s 9 and Neill Blomkamp’s gritty District 9, there wasn’t much room for smart sci-fi this year. When the top-grossing sci-fi film of the year — Transformers 2, somehow — features racist robots with gold teeth, a major organ of the pop culture dies. (That would be its brain.)

Yeah, this hasn't been the best of times for sci-fi. The fourth Terminator movie only proved that the series rightfully ended, as was intended, with the second installment (a James Cameron movie, for those who are paying attention). 2012...all I can really say is that I hope big, CGI-laden disaster movie has nuked the fridge. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was another in a long line of movies and TV shows that have misused a great character. A lot of X-Men geeks had complained about this, but I wasn't one of them...until Wolverine was released. No movie I have ever seen demanded the question "why?" more than Transformers 2. Like, why is everything and everyone in the movie a transformer? Or, why are the transformers we were introduced to in the first movie either killed or missing? Or, why is more than one McDuffin in this movie (the cube shards, the energon source, the Matrix of Leadership, the worst name for anything in a movie ever)? And, why are there two racist transformers?

But, this hasn't been the worst of times either. Star Trek, District 9, and Moon were great movies.

Greatest Cat Ever?

Song of the Day

The Best of Overlooked Sci-Fi, Part 2

I can't talk about my favorite overlooked sci-fi movies without mentioning Sunshine:

There are two ways you can look at Sunshine: as an allegory for the competition between science and religion or as a movie where a bunch of people try to restart the sun. The allegory is powerful despite the religion v. science subject being trite. The conceit, the sun is dying and a bunch of scientists are going to restart it, is absolutely ridiculous. It sounds more like The Core or 2012 than anything, you know, good. What Sunshine excels in are these beautiful, terrifying moments. There's one scene (unfortunately I can't embed it) where every crew member stops to watch Mercury travel between them and the sun. Beyond movies, when has anyone ever stopped to consider the planet Mercury's existence? Sunshine forces you think about that pathetic, little planet as it's scorched by the sun. The scene then manages to address every crew member. In order of appearance, Kaneda, who holds the crew together, Searle, fascinated by the power of light, Mace, focused only on the destination, Capa, uninterested and not mystified by the cosmos, Harvey, lost in himself, Cassie, finding existence wondrous, Corazon, motherly and protective, and Trey, naive in his boldness. Just as Mercury is beyond our consideration, the crew is beyond a point of return. Then there's Capa's jump:

After Capa's blown all the air out of the ship so that he could live just long enough to complete the mission, he surveys the remains of the vessel that was supposed to bring him home alive. At this point he's literally on a suicide mission. Some people question Capa tripping, as in "why does Capa trip at all?" I've always felt that it introduces a touch of realism into this moment. Capa is still human, he still makes mistakes, he is not a hero, and he remains small. The use of silence or the absence of Capa's voice, gets at his smallness in the face of the sun.

There are dozens of these scenes in Sunshine. I recommend it.

How Is This Hip-Hop?

I'm not one to police music genres and, other than the war crime that was hick-hop, I usual don't do this, but how is this hip-hop?

I've heard techno songs that sound less techno than that. In fact, I've heard techno songs that sound more like hip-hop than that. Listen:

Maybe this is why I hate auto-tune so much: it's slowly been blurring the lines between techno and hip-hop and not in a good way. Now we're in this netherworld where hip-hop sounds more like the techno I don't listen to, because it's terrible, and the techno I do listen to sounds like it always did. What the hell? I probably wouldn't care as much if the hip-hop stars would stop calling themselves hip-hop stars. They are no longer hip-hop, nor are they R&B; they're something else. We need to name that thing so I can hate it more eloquently. For now I have to turn to Jay-Z, who I've come to like much to my surprise, and underground hip-hop for my fix.

The Best of Overlooked Sci-Fi

For your consideration:

I think the best way to start such an endeavor is to assemble a list of contendors, and then put them to a sort of public debate. So let's start with my initial ideas - the 15 titles that sprung from my imagination, in no particular order: “Brazil," “Solaris” (Soderbergh), “Predator," “Strange Days," “Time Bandits," "eXistenZ," "They Live," "A.I.," "Dark City," "Fantastic Voyage," "The Fountain," "Let the Right One In," "Sunshine," "Silent Running," "Primer," "Sleeper."

All of these are pretty good, but I nominate Aliens:

"It's war," is right. Alien was a sci-fi/horror movie. Aliens is essentially a sci-fi/war movie. Starship Troopers tried doing the same thing and failed miserably. What that movie got wrong, and Aliens got right, is that the aliens should be scary. Aliens achieves this by hardly ever showing the aliens. You see brief first person camera shots that only relay the chaos and confusion of the fight, or you hear the constant beat of the motion sensor (there's no music during those scenes) making you aware that danger looms, but you can't see it. Anyone who says Jamers Cameron sucks should watch this movie. His choices are perfect

Aliens also has interesting and fun characters. It all centers around Ripley, one of the most badass characters ever. But, instead of just being a one dimensional badass, Ripley plays the role of a parent, friend, and commander. You rarely find complex characters in an action movie. After Ripley are the marines:

A major part of the war movie is the featured military unit. The group of soldiers has to have its own inside jokes, its own way of acting. They can't be strangers. Aliens provides the sense that these soldiers have been fighting together for a while in spades.

Aliens, without a doubt, is my favorite sci-fi movie. It's all too often looked over as just a sequel to Alien, when it's a completely different movie.

On Games

It appears this blog is further devolving into a gaming blog (I just don't have it in me to write about politics right now) and so I bring you Conor Friedersdorf and Peter Suderman discussing games.

First things first: Mario Kart 64 was one of the best "good games" ever. By "good game" I mean it was fun to play, anyone could pick up a controller and have at it, and it brought people together to play. Simple, no steep learning curve, great multiplayer, all things a game needs to be at least good.

Now that that's out of the way, onto Suderman's point about games being the medium of the future. More specifically, they will be the medium of the future because they are interactive narratives. I agree with the assertion, but not the reasoning. Not many games nowadays are interactive narratives and even what games Suderman seems think are interactive narratives aren't interactive narratives. Take the game Suderman refers to: Bioshock. Bioshock presents the player with little in the way of choice when it comes to narrative. So, the player isn't really interacting with the narrative. The player is instead experiencing the narrative and going along for the ride. That's not interactivity, unless you define interactivity in gaming as "playing the game." Or take the Final Fantasy series. FF games have amazing narratives, some of the best in gaming history, but you could never say that they are interactive just because the player is required to play the game to experience the narrative. Contrast that with Mass Effect. Mass Effect's narrative completely changes based upon the choices and actions of the player. The player is required to interact with and shape the narrative. Furthermore, some of the most popular games have no narrative at all. The games that Suderman says are popular amongst women, Popcap games and Wii games, are not narrative based games.

Now, about women and gaming, my theory about the whole thing is that the gaming community is full of douchebags. Douchebags that may or may not be misogynists but will use misogyny to insult female gamers. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a game of Halo on Xbox Live and as soon as some douchebag realizes there's a girl in the room every other word he says is bitch. And, it gets even worse when a female gamer is kicking the douchebag's ass. As soon as the douchebag to normal guy ratio equals out, or is weighted towards the normal guy side, women will show up. This of course is not to mention that game developers have usually only tried to appeal to men.


Partisan political games? I don't see at any other level than the poorly produced and completely unfun. I just don't think gamers will play a conservative game that lauds Sarah Palin like Friedersdorf describes. Why? Because gamers are not a political bunch. The most gamers have to deal with politics is when some parents group or feminist group says they can't play a certain game. All gamers ever really want is for politics to stay out of their games. And think of political movies. Movies like Jarhead or Rendition, though well made, were flops. Conservatives will tell you that because they were "liberal movies." They flopped because they were political movies. That's not to say politics in movies is always bad, it just usually is. The same will be true of political games. No one will play them.


I question whether the participatory nature of games should make us scrutinize them more than movies or books. I know of more books and songs that have played a role in violence than video games. Read the way Lev Grossman describes his Modern Warfare 2 experience:

What really crushed me were the urban combat missions. They start out simple: somebody smacks you, you light him up and put him down. But the further you go the harder and more screwed-up it gets. See, the enemy isn’t wearing uniforms, so you can’t tell them from the civilians. And the level designers have so carefully replicated the tangled, twisted layout of a Middle Eastern city, with all the rooftops and alleyways and balconies and market stalls and such, that you can never tell where the fire’s coming from. After about 5 minutes of this you don’t even care anymore who you’re shooting. You’re so terrified you’re blowing away anything that moves.

You can't have that kind of experience if you're worried about video game violence. The violence is necessary to tell this story, to cause those feelings. In that way, removing violence from games is like removing misogyny from hip-hop. It's a reality that should be represented.

Song of the Day

I Need One

During my many hours of procrastination, I found the wheelchair gun rack. I've never gone hunting, but I assume people typically go in groups of two or more to hunt. So, if the guy in the wheelchair is there with another able-bodied guy, why doesn't the able-bodied guy hold both guns? That's my big question for the day.

Song of the Day

Fool Me Once

When Mitt Romney speaks, I feel it's the responsibility of any Massachusetts resident that lived through the Romney governorship to call attention his disingenuous nature. Well, yesterday Romney authored an op-ed through Politico about the President's mistakes in Afghanistan. Now if you were wondering where Romney got the experience or knowledge to talk about Afghanistan (did he serve in the military? has he ever been called to make a foreign policy decision? has he studied the AfPak region?), the answer is nowhere. He's just layman like you and me. Except he's a layman that running for the presidency. This is Romney leading indictment of the President:

What followed this bold and definitive goal was the classic failing of people without real leadership experience: the inability to do what is necessary to achieve one’s objective.

If Romney could explain what the objective is in Afghanistan beyond "fight the Taliban and establish a government," I might actually listen to him. Romney can't do that because no one knows what the objectives are in Afghanistan, not even the President. There are no stated benchmarks, no definition of "winning." But, then, this op-ed isn't about making critiques of the President's Afghanistan policy, it's about attacking the President. It's about establishing the bonafides of the businessman that Romney was. Look:

The president refused to focus on what was most important. He took on so many tasks that he underinvested in the most critical ones. The restructuring of the entire health care system and his cap-and-trade proposal eclipsed the economy and the war. Investor Warren Buffett, the “sage of Omaha,” counseled him against such a foolhardy agenda, but Buffett’s wisdom was no match for the heady prospect of all-encompassing change.

Who knew Warren Buffet's investing skills made him an expert in governance. On the list of things that are wrong with this country's politics the assumed respect for the businessman ranks somewhere below racism and above identity politics. That's always been Romney's pitch: "I'm a businessman, so you can trust me." (You can never trust Mitt Romney). Having once been a businessman does not mean you know how to fix Afghanistan. I know this because AfPak experts themselves don't know how to fix Afghanistan. That won't stop Romney:

While he was busy campaigning in the U.S., the president ignored the election in Afghanistan and took wholly inadequate measures to ensure a valid outcome, even as he must have known that a legitimate government was essential to our success. Because Obama left so critical a matter to chance, we are left with a fraudulently elected regime, which is accused of rampant corruption. Thus, the prospects for our success have been greatly diminished.

I love the use of the word "accused" as if the fact of Karzai's corruption is up for debate. I don't know what kind of power Romney thinks the President has, but he can't just wave his hand and ensure that the corrupt Afghan government conducts an election without corruption. Karzai doesn't care what we tell him to do because he knows we'll be there forever. Furthermore, Karzai has allied himself with various warlords because he can't not do that and still have a "government." Corruption is the way of life for Afghan politicians. The President didn't leave the Afghan elections to chance because there was nothing he could do about them.

Mitt Romney is a snake and liar. Nothing he says or writes can be assumed to be what he actually believes. He has changed positions so many times and used important policy issues to score politics so unflinchingly that it's shocking anyone takes him seriously.