Who Is America?

Slow holiday weekend, and I fully plan on indulging myself by doing as little as possible -- finishing up a couple of books, playing guitar, knocking back a beer or three, maybe doing a little writing (political and otherwise). So we're getting a free weekend of Showtime, featuring the Season 1 marathon of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest project.

Baron Cohen is a bit of a mixed bag for me; at times his cringe-inducing brand of comedy can be uproariously funny, at other times merely gross. Who Is America? fills both bills adequately right from the start, opening the first episode with SBC's southern conservative journalist character (complete with motorized scooter, natch) baiting Bernie Sanders, following that with a segment featuring SBC playing a paroled prisoner who "paints" with his own feces and semen, pitching his "art" to a credulous gallery owner.

I guess I'd give it a qualified recommendation -- there are few genuine surprises to be had, but that is probably in part due to the fact that we now live in a world where truth isn't truth, a demented old bastard runs the country, and nothing is really surprising anymore, primarily because we've all been forced to confront how said demented old bastard got into office. Reminding us that there are morons and assholes among us, many of them in positions of power, is no longer funny or cathartic. Irony suffered a mortal blow after 9/11, but now it's dead and ground into sausage.

That said, clearly a lot of work has gone into this, mainly in the variety of characters SBC has crafted to gull the dupes into revealing themselves. It's worth watching just for that, though again some segments are more worthy than others. Your mileage will vary, and you enter at your own risk.

One of the more relatively innocuous segments occurs in the second episode, where some interchangeable Bachelor dingbat gets tricked by the decadent Italian billionaire photographer character into doing a PSA for child soldiers. [rolls eyes] Yes, you read that right.

What makes this slightly more interesting is when a teevee critic decides to get in on the hijinks, and decry the seeming fish-in-a-barrel quality of the segment:

What is this segment trying to satirize, exactly? That a woman who’s already been used as a tool in multiple TV ratings ploys would make a fool of herself again? That she’s absurdly compliant with the demands of celebrity, to the point that she’ll go along with any script she’s given? At its most damning, the segment is a swipe at how happy Olympios is to be on television, and what exactly she’s willing to do for publicity.

....

But the segment does raise questions about Who Is America? and its goals. Why is this reality star a target? Why is the assumption that it’s hilarious to watch a powerful man manipulate a fame-hungry, clueless younger woman?

Those are an awful lot of questions that fail to see the (to me, anyway) rather obvious point of it all: what sort of "culture" routinely makes these random idiots famous and wealthy? Obviously, from movie B-girls to music and sports groupies, the entertainment industry has always used young women willing to do anything (and I mean anything) for what? Fifteen minutes of....well, it's not exactly fame, but let's call it attention of a sort.

The girl in question struck a very dim glimmer of memory, of someone perhaps seen in the "Entertainment" section of the Google News aggregator, a section that becomes increasingly irrelevant as it is overtaken by the children and stepchildren of one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers in his trial a quarter-century ago for murdering his wife and her friend. [Ah, fame! -- Ed.]

And indeed, Corinne Olympios first achieved the glories of name recognition when she caused the dating show she was on to be investigated for allegations of sexual misconduct, when Olympios got one of the male contestants to perform oral sex on her.

You want the epitome of meta-cynicism, folks, there you have it -- a cynical audience watching a cynical exercise in which cynical idiots pretend to be competing for love, filmed and edited to be as cynically manipulative as possible, and to encourage moral judgments from the audience. I've always considered myself a hopelessly cynical bastard, but this sort of shit is a depth beyond me.

Is it possible that that is at least part of what Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to send up here, using a character that is a crude, vulgar distillation of the gaudy Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless bullshit that captivated American couch potatoes for years? That's yet another level of cynicism that we've all just taken for granted for decades -- this idea that people who actually work for a living would like nothing more than to have their noses rubbed in the mostly unearned and inherited excesses of tacky swells and net-worth assholes.

In fact, that might have been the one way for SBC to top the routine meta-cynical excesses of the Bachelorette types, and the rotten, soulless anti-culture that's sprung up around it. There is a clear cultural connection between that sort of mindless Ow My Balls! bullshit, and its current political by-products. Maybe the teevee critic's error was in assuming that Baron Cohen was only interested in duping the Roy Moore types, and not thinking that maybe people like Corinne Olympios also participate in something that is ultimately harmful to the mental health of the people who are hooked on it.

When everything turns into a cheesy wink and a nod, a joke that we're all in on but continue to beat into the ground long after it stopped being funny or interesting, it can't be too surprising when we eventually get what we have now. Random jerkoffs with no discernible talent "monetizing" their side hustles on Instagram and YouTube, hoping to parlay that into some "reality" teevee bullshit, and thence into some Kardashian-Jenner quadrant of Satan's asshole, pimping collagen creams and taint waxes and such like.

Given the longstanding prevalence of this nonsense, it makes a certain perverted sense that a fake tycoon with fake hair and skin and a third trophy wife, a man who brags that he shits in a gold toilet in a marble tower, would be received by a sufficient number of certifiable dipshits as an authentic hero of the working class.

Failed State

In the seventy-two hours since 'murka sorta learned a bit about what a mentally-ill conspiracy troll Roseanne Barr really is (and her "Planet of the Apes" nonsense isn't even the third-worst thing she's said on her Twitter feed this week), several other things happened, all of them infinitely more important. I swear, it's true!

• A Harvard study conservatively estimates that the death toll from Hurricane Maria is more than fifty percent higher than that of 9/11. In response, the failing New York Times put that story on page A13, so as not to distract from the Roseanne hoof-clomping on the front page.
• A journalist critical of the emperor's daddy found himself in Putin's crosshairs. So the Ukrainian police, having gotten a heads-up on the assassination plot, helped him fake his death, and then helped him show up at a press conference the next day. Take a second and think about how amazing that is, as well as the obvious implications.
• Interpol, which is currently headed by a Russian internal-security specialist, attempted to arrest Bill Browder in Spain, for extradition to Russia, where he would certainly die. Fortunately, after bringing him in, the Spanish police released him. But shit is getting serious and weird on that whole story, as Browder is of course the Rosetta Stone to the whole Russia collusion narrative, if you dig back far enough.
• Princess Snowflake got thirteen trademarks awarded to her by the Chinese government, who just happen to have sunk half a billion dollars into Daddy's next building in Indonesia, and for whose security-violating tech company ZTE is going the extra mile to help. It's simply an amazing series of coincidences!
• The emperor has decided to start some weird trade war, with pretty much all of our allies, starting with steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico and China, to proposing a ban on German luxury cars -- many of which, of course, are actually made in 'murka. It's as if he doesn't realize that Mercedes-Benz is the sponsor for the brand-new Atlanta Falcons football stadium.

And yet, chances are that you've seen at least ten or twenty times as many mentions to the other thing, either to the cultists' reaction to their slob goddess getting pushed off because her toxicity finally got bad for business, or to their renewed passion for librul scalps.

I like Sam Bee, but she obviously could not have picked a worse time to call Princess Snowflake the dreaded c-word. (A better c-word for Princess would have been "criminal". Just like dear ol' dud.) She only compounded the problem by apologizing. If there's one thing libruls should have learned from these toxic motherfuckers by now, it's never apologize. Double down, tell them to go fuck themselves, or just ignore them, but never ever apologize to them for anything. It's an admission of weakness, and they don't deserve the consideration in the first place. It's not as if such a thing would ever be reciprocated.

To put this as crudely as possible, Bee is going to get fired anyway, but now she first got on her knees for them, and let them blow a porn-size load in her face and hair. (I may be understating the case a bit.) Assuming TBS lets her have at least an episode or two before they pull the trigger on her (perhaps making it look like summer started, and they just opted not to renew), she should just do an entire episode on Princess' grifting, and her entire scumbag family using the office and residence of the chief executive as profit centers.

In the waning months of the Fredo Arbusto reign of error, this country had been taking on the classic signs and symptoms of a failing state. As the Dow plummeted and the banks went under, financial metrics (particularly debt-to-GDP ratio and insane financial leverage ratios) kept pointing toward doom. Obama tried his best to alleviate the situation, and was successful in some regard, but it would have taken at least a decade even with a cooperative congress. But things were at least sputtering in a generally forward direction.

Obviously, even that bit of incremental progress has been halted and reversed, and it's going to particularly affect all those rube farmers that voted for him because they wouldn't know a competent, honest bidnessman if they saw one. And it's going to be worse this time around, because in response to Preznit Chocolate Thunder, an entire industry of cultural grievance-stoking started and thrived and evolved, compounding the coming economic fuckery with a plurality of the public addled by fake news and ritualized performative outrage. That is a potent combination that will make even returning to the halcyon days of 2015 nearly impossible for the foreseeable future. And you know that the next iteration of these animals will be smoother, slicker, less obnoxious and boorish, but more adept with the dog-whistles and code words.

These people have weaponized the cultural grievance, put it into practice at the executive level. Picture any drunk at any barstool at any dive bar across the country, the dumber and drunker and dive-ier the better. How does such a person in such a place typically sound? At best, they're always right about everything, even though they're spouting nonsense, and they cannot be reasoned with. The bartender is just praying that the asshole will pass out or leave before he starts a fight or spills a full tumbler of well whiskey.

That's not only who we have in the White House, that's his staff, his supporters, his rabid retard fan-base that chants his empty slogans back to him, like the semi-trained pinnipeds they are. The sheer ugliness these mutants communicate with is bad enough, but the willful stupidity is what cinches it. They would have to work at getting up to a "deplorable" ranking; the vast majority are simply irredeemable.

And I hate to say it, and I am counting on the midterms to at least begin to pull us back from the brink, but these incomprehensibly stupid, worthless "cultural" arguments convince me more and more that the damage is done and the race is run. It doesn't matter if they die off, enough of them have adult children who have been raised and steeped in the nonsense, and are just as aggressively stupid as their parents. Eventually Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will die, and not a moment too soon, but they all have adult kids who have been groomed to take over and keep the propaganda pumping.

It's turned a lot of people, who might otherwise be at least somewhat idealistic in nature, into nihilists. Part of me wants to watch those farmers lose their family farms when China breaks off a retaliatory tariff in their fat asses. Part of me wants to watch us stumble into another disastrous Middle East war, so gasoline goes to seven bucks a gallon. Part of me wants to watch Clownstick and his scum family continue to grift right out in the open, defying someone, anyone to do anything about it, just to expose the craven, gutless observers for what they are. Part of me wants to watch the bastards win again, overwhelmingly, so there's no mistaking where this country is at.

Again, did the election change this country into something vile and ugly, or was it there all along, just waiting to be unleashed? I think we're in the long, torturous process of finding that out right now.

Eventually these nihilism fugues run their course, and the numbers and logic kick back in, and the cycle renews. Most of it is because all the action is on one side of the table -- shit-for-brains struts and preens and rubs his insult-comic bullshit in everyone's faces, and his dipshit cultists repeat it verbatim, and the propaganda machine rolls on. And I want them to lose, badly, and to know that they caused their own misfortune. To know why they failed is vital to them ever having any hope of getting their heads out of their asses at any point.

Being a toxic, spiteful asshole should come with a karmic penalty sufficient to deter future such behavior. Unfortunately, life and the universe have never worked that way. Each of us, singly and collectively, has to decide if it's all worth it, if we even want "it" back, if Lady Liberty just turns out to be a rabid internet conspiracy troll with a dumb show that never should have been rebooted in the first place.

We are getting closer to finding out. Every election is billed as The Most Important Evar, but it's tough to deny that this time, it really might be that crucial. Not just because of the political aspects, but if we've decided to let the Bachelorette-huffing culture morons

Don't West Your Breath

There's something hilarious watching culture critics trying to get a handle on Kanye West's newfound bromance with the one and only Fuckface Von Clownstick. Because they are who they are and do what they do for a living, these critics contort themselves in order to frame a scenario in which a "genius" like West strategizes his public love for Archie Bunker in a Bozo the Clown wig.

It doesn't occur to these dumbasses that maybe West was never a genius in the first place, as we have amply chronicled here over the years. He's certainly a special combination of cynical marketing asshole and borderline retard, scamming his moron fans with $120 plain t-shirts and 52-page "books." It makes sense that he would align himself with a fellow money-grubbing dirtbag, gulling the rubes who are simply too dumb to know the difference between actual human intelligence and mere animal cunning.

More and more it seems that "critics" are merely hacks operating without any context -- historical, cultural, or even musical -- for bolstering their empty assertions. West is not a "genius" simply because he says he is, or because they say he is. If anything, it serves as a dead-certain indicator of sheer incompetence and total lack of critical thinking skills to bestow the g-word on a fucking clown with a bad rhyming dictionary and an AutoTune machine.

This is the natural consequence of everyone having access to the internet -- there's going to be a certain percentage of "writers" who are simply too stupid to know how stupid they and their insights really are. I keep seeing these digital scriveners jabber with all sincerity what a musical genius West is, without ever providing salient examples.

Surely there must be a snippet of remarkable lyrics or music to serve as demonstration of this supposed visionary greatness. You start to wonder after a while why we're just supposed to accept it as a given. And how does this nonsense end up in supposedly respectable publications such as the New Yorker?

The fact is that West and Clownstick were made for each other. They're two peas in a pod -- shallow, ignorant, narcissistic, obsessed with materialism and with their own delusions of greatness, stuck with trophy wives who are nearly as useless as they are, completely unable to see how mediocre they truly are.

The late great Sam Kinison once said in an interview about Whoopi Goldberg, "A nation decides not to hurt someone's feelings." That was unnecessarily mean on Kinison's part, as Whoopi Goldberg actually does have some talent and has said her share of sensible things over the years. But that nasty shot applies really well to Kanye West and his new orange butt-buddy.

The world would be a lot better off if we had never heard of either of these fucking buffoons. The best parts of both of them ran down the crack of their mothers' asses and ended up as stains on their respective mattresses. They can't fuck off soon enough.

You'll Need More Snowflakes for That Avalanche

Any day these useless closet cases get outnumbered 2-1 is a good day. It's hard to get outraged when they are, as a heckler noted, "the Cleveland Browns of political movements." Still, one hopes at least that they finally receive an important message from the universe:  You are a bunch of fucking losers, each and every one of you. Shame on you. Go home and get some sleep, think about what you're doing with what passes for your lives.

And that's really all there is to them:  tubbies and morons who have already failed at life, bigly, and have nothing left but to occasionally take their armchair tough-guy static into the real world with some cosplay. They should go back to re-enacting WW2 and the Civil War as nazis and confederates. That's the best way for these chumps to work out their issues.

But, to return their favorite bullshit back on them, if they hate this country so much, why don't they get the fuck out already? It would be their fondest desire to start up Nazilvania or Kekistan or whatever, but good luck making a go of it when your main imports will be donuts and cheeseburgers, and the exports will be the choicest whines.

Days of Whine and Poses

Edroso, as always, in on the right track here:

This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.

But I have to disagree, ever so slightly. "Conservatism" as we olds -- say, at least old enough to recall Saint Reagan's tenure clearly and in detail -- understood that word is long dead. It found itself temporarily supplanted by "neo" movementarian goons whose sole goal was to get us into Iraq (and this was before 9/11 gave us a convenient pretext). But one the neocons' war games became, well, inconvenient to their professed intemellectual strategery, the money guys got their Citizens United ruling, took a look around, and realized that what a nation full of reality-teevee-besotted retards really needed was some Real Housewives types to go to Washington, flip some tables, pull some weaves.

That engine is now being driven solely by full-blown, unapologetic reactionaries. And what reactionaries do more than anything else (as you might guess from the label) is complain. They react. And that's the problem with these assholes. They don't know how to govern, because they don't know how to take action. They only know how to rhetorically position themselves against what their sworn enemies do. They are not for anything, except destroying things. They don't have any true volition of their own.

I mean, Roy's base point is absolutely correct -- they are a bunch of fucking crybabies. And that's annoying. But the really scary thing is realizing that that really is the only song they know anymore. It was always a factor in how they defined themselves and differentiated themselves from, let's say, normal human beings. At this point, it appears to be about the only way they define themselves.

It cannot be pointed out too often how completely devoid of simple logic the conservatards' culture model really is. In their mythos, Evil Hollyweird, land of queers and jooos, forces their warped "values" on helpless reg'lar foke, who want nothin' more than good wholesome entertainment, like Hee Haw and such. (Never mind, of course, that the redder the state, the higher the divorce rate and the porn rate and the substance abuse rate, and on and on.)

Of course, none of this remotely squares with their endless jabbering about the Free Market and the Silent Majority -- or, in Dinesh D'Douchebag's case among so many others, Morality. In other words, per their pet theories, if the clear majority of the sainted 'murkin populace were really all that het up about the librul elites pushing them around at the box office, and the free market works its ineffable magic in response, then why aren't they putting these smut peddlers out of bidness, and putting their own stuff in?

I mean, did it ever occur to these culture monkeys why, of all the available networks, a show like (to cite just one notorious example) Family Guy airs on the network owned by the same asshole that peddles their propaganda on another of his networks? That maybe this is all just a long con, and they've always been the real marks?

Got Woke

Jim Wright has far and away (afaik) the best and most complete take on (cue cheesy Ludlum title generator) The Kaepernick Kerfuffle. Kaepernick's rabid Facebook detractors proclaim that the song and flag worship that introduces professional sporting events is all about Respect. Well, clearly Kaepernick -- and now professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe -- feel that respect is a two-way street, that is something that must be earned, and not given mindlessly. And sometimes individuals might feel that they're not given the same respect that is demanded of them by their country.

The idea that the flag or the anthem stand for freedom and liberty is a nice one, but one that falls on its face when it's only for approved freedoms and liberties. The right to dissent or protest is even more important than the right to simply go along with the rest of the stadium. Anyone can do that; it take guts to decide not to do the (ahem) politically correct thing.

Now, to play devil's advocate, one should also note that if Kaepernick is trying to start a "conversation" or a "dialogue," there were and are any number of better ways to go about that. He is, after all, an NFL quarterback who came within thirty seconds and a dropped pass from winning a Super Bowl just a few years ago. Any number of reputable Bay Area journalists would have been happy to sit down and interview him, if he wanted to start a discussion on race. Performing provocative stunts like wearing socks with pigs wearing police caps, or pointedly sitting down through the national anthem, tend to (you'll be surprised to find) provoke something other than reasoned discourse.

Crapfest

There's a reason I rarely bother to venture onto Facebook anymore, and today is a perfect example of why, post after post after fuckheaded rant about how Colin Kaepernick should be "deported" or fired or what-have-you, for the high crime of expressing his opinion.

I think some people need to be reminded of what the great things are about this country. Perhaps the most important feature is that every citizen has the inalienable right to be wrong, and even to be a jerk about it. Without that basic right, nothing else matters, we would all just be slaves to the swirling winds of mob rage.

I'm just cynical enough to believe that Kaepernick, who had been on the verge of being benched in favor of Blaine Gabbert, is trying to get traded to a team that will start him, although there are certainly better ways to go about that. Perhaps Kaepernick is utterly sincere in his sentiments, in which case there might be better ways to communicate that. We don't really know, and it's not really important.

What should be important is that, after a year-plus of listening to Fuckface Von Clownstick paint this country as a festering hellhole for his adoring throngs, it's more than a mild coincidence that the most ardent of the anti-Kaep screamers are also the most devout Clownstick acolytes. This is the conservatard mythos writ small -- the conservative can complain about the gubmint interfering with his ability to make and keep his money, but the second someone complains about how they're treated by agents of that same gubmint, these people come unglued.

They loves them some Drumpf because he's sooo un-PC, but the fact of the matter is, these people are as PC about their own pet causes as the most tiresome SJW tweeting from their safe space. I tend to agree with them that their country is lost, but it's lost because they are moronic, intolerant rageaholics who probably need a diagram on how to wipe their asses properly.

No Release

Hey, if we're keeping Leslie Van Houten behind bars for the rest of her life, the least we can do is keep this old bastard locked up until he's a moldering corpse no one would take the time to piss on, right? Blanton escaped justice for nearly forty years, remorseless for his actions, for murdering four little girls for some demented lie. He needs to know that he will never breathe air as a free man again.

And yet, if he lives long enough, it's entirely possible that Thomas Blanton might conceivably be released. Prisons have been undergoing drastic demographic shifts, with larger numbers of elderly inmates, that the prisons obviously are not equipped to care for. So "compassionate release" has become more and more commonplace, understandably so in some cases.

Generally speaking, symbolism is one of the more useless things in our benighted material plane, the idea that something is rendered somehow more important or meaningful simply by what it supposedly "means" to certain people or groups. But it must be noted that while there has always been a consistent undercurrent of racist, insurrectionist, and "white power" movements (ably chronicled by my old sparring buddy from the forum days long ago, Dave Neiwert), these groups and individuals have found themselves "empowered" by the rise of Herr Drumpfski.

Nihilism

Britain's vote to leave the EU has everyone in a panic, and it seems almost certain to cost them (as it has already, between stock losses and the pound dropping like a stone). Larger questions like whether Scotland will re-vote for independence (probably) or other countries may start opting to the leave the EU (probably not) are open to speculation for now. In the meantime, the country already seems like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, only to realize that it has no idea what to do with it.

What's perhaps more interesting is the apparent parallels in voting "philosophy" between "Leave" voters and American Drumpf voters. The socioeconomic contexts appear to be very similar, in that the people likely to be hurt the most economically by those respective policies are the most enthusiastic for them.

While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they ‘benefit from the EU’ in regulatory terms, it is quite another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of this generosity, but arguably because of it. This isn’t to discredit what the EU does in terms of redistribution, but pointing to handouts is a psychologically and politically naïve basis on which to justify remaining in the EU.

There have been any number of similar assertions from Drumpfsters interviewed over the past year, many of them bizarrely attesting that Drumpf is "one of us". Presumably "one of us" in this context can basically be taken to mean, much like "speaks his mind", something along the lines of "not afraid to be a toxic asshole".

When You Assert, You Make an "Ass" Out of "Er" and "T"

Salon continues its long slide to bien pensant clickbait irrelevancy with this extended argument by assertion regarding the supposed "slut shaming" of poor Bristol Palin. The strange thing is, if you mouse over the many hyperlinks, the only one supporting said assertion is, um, Facebook, which is perhaps second only to YouTube for inane comments consisting mostly of jabbering incoherence.

Let me be more clear, so there's no mistaking by some misguided SJW:  Bristol Palin is not, as far as I have ever read, a slut. I have never read even nasty innuendo indicating that she's slept with an inordinate amount of men (or indeed, any other than Levi Johnston and Dakota Meyer).

The problem is actually the opposite -- that aside from being an over-privileged idiot and hypocrite, Palin herself is a slut-shamer by association, making good money by aligning herself with, and "authoring" hortatory rhetoric for organized slut-shamers, people who would legislate control of women's sex and reproductive lives if they had a chance.

Bristol Palin deserves to be (verbally) smacked around just for that transgression, for enabling and profiting from people whose very industry is making women and girls feel bad about their choices. There is no need to imply that she is a slut as well. Maybe she's just a fertile Myrtle, as they used to say -- had sex with two guys, and they both knocked her up. If only there were available means to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

"Hypocrisy is not an excuse for abuse."

Bullshit. Hypocrisy -- especially involving lousy reasoning and backward assumptions in the first place -- is probably the best excuse for abuse. But the fact of the matter is, the article fails to provide a single solid example of said "abuse." I don't think most people give a shit; I certainly don't except insofar as Bristol Palin has been inexplicably given a profitable, highly visible platform in which to propagate her nonsense, nonsense which it turns out she can't even abide by herself.

It's important for self-styled pwoggies and libruls to pay attention to this sort of rear-guarding, especially as Bernie Sanders starts attracting larger crowds and making inroads. Because this is really just Nader-baiting of a different stripe, cloaked in a fog of sloppy thinking and unsubstantiated assertions.

Them or Us

It's interesting, and perhaps revealing, that from what I've seen so far, the most incisive and in-depth coverage of the Duggar scandal seems to be coming from "gossip" oriented sites such as Gawker and Jezebel. Not in the "hey, let's revisit the creepy details of teenaged Josh Duggar fingering his sisters while they sleep" sense, but in the much more important "do y'all know what these fucking people fervently believe and preach" sense.

And while of course it's sad and awful about the specifics of what Josh Duggar has admitted to doing, the fact is that the sisters in question are all adults now. They can leave the cult any time they want, get away from the parents who chose their brother over them, simply because he has a penis and they're just females, pure chattel. That they so far have chosen to stick with it is proof that Stockholm syndrome is a thing.

Probably due to these sites' typically snarky, irreverent tone on virtually any and every subject, they are much better suited to tackling this sort of story than any network news org would bother with. Looking not only at the Duggar family but at the individuals and organizations that underpin their belief system, as well as the entire Quiverfull cult (it's a "movement" much like the eight-pound growler I had after surf-and-turf and oatmeal stout the other night), and understanding what their overall goals really are is critical.

The Invisible Scalps of the Marketplace

Random surfing on a lazy Sunday afternoon:  over at Cole's jernt, some low-hanging fruit got me thinking a bit (I know, I know, throw your worst at me). Normally, watching some bien pensant fool get hoist on his own petard after giving low-wage food service staff a hard time would give me a pretty fat outrage boner.

But this is nuts -- as ham-fisted as this schmuck's attempt to Do The Right Thing and speak Truth To Power turned out, he lost a $200K/year job, $1M in stock options, received a bunch of death and bomb threats, and now lives with his wife and four kids in an RV, on food stamps. All for a dumb two-minute video he shot almost three years ago.

Meanwhile, if you're a butt-hurt cheapskate pastor, you can get an Applebee's waitress fired over a shitty comment on a receipt, involving a $6 tip, and still peddle 27-page self-help books at ten bucks a pop. (And take your tax write-offs, of course, no doubt including the aforementioned meal.)

I'd say Adam Smith paid a huge price for a relatively minor transgression, and that these viral incidents happen randomly, and without proportion. People get away with being raging assholes to waitstaff everywhere, all the time, while others lose their careers because they said something stupid.

And yet Donald Trump continues to fester in the public eye, a turgid, nasty reminder that karma really is just a fiction we tell ourselves, to reserve the hope of justice in an entropic, indifferent universe.

What got Smith dinged up is that he chose to insert himself into a politically contentious issue, one that clearly has its share of potentially violent bozos. But it's not even the bozos and weirdos that were the problem -- the problem was the mere potential that Smith expressing his opinion and pissing off a bunch of emotionally retarded people could be bad for business.

Corporations and their sponsors rule the world now, and perceptions and marketing matter more than ever. Sometimes that works out for the best; as Arizona found out last year, and Indiana is about to find out soon, gay people buy stuff, and so companies are loath to piss them off. Who knew?

Watching the video, Smith's uncalled-for smuggery and his abuse of the staff stand out. While he was polite enough to Rachel the fast-food worker, his senseless trolling on what he gloated was a busy day was shitty and unnecessary. What did he think was going to happen, that Rachel was going to get on the phone with Dan Cathy and tell him that his unkind comments about gays cost them a free cup of water for some rich douchebag?

But again, he paid a more-than-harsh penalty, for what virtually any food-service worker will tell you was a comparatively minor transgression, and it was mostly because he aggravated an interest group that are organized and skilled at intimidating their opponents. You hear of Phil Robertson getting any bomb threats, losing any part of his livelihood, over all the hateful shit he's said over and over again? Me neither.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that Smith's story has resurfaced because he -- wait for it -- put it into an e-book, which has been amazingly poorly received, and whose description shows Smith's unfortunately thin skin.

[Pro tip -- never put this sentence anywhere near the product you're trying to sell:  Update as of 3/27/2015, 6:45pm, PT, regarding the many 1-star ratings my book has received today and yesterday, I would like to note that I have only sold 17 digital copies thus far, yet there are 23 1-star ratings on my book. This fascinates me! LOL!]

Then again, after the disproportionate punishment they've received for their high crimes, it would be understandable if Adam Smith or Justine Sacco came off as a bit sensitive.

First World Problems

I guess this is a sign of just how far out of the loop I am on some things -- swear to the sanctified pasta soul of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was entirely unaware of the phrase "trigger warning" until today. Frankly, I wouldn't mind being still unaware of its existence and use; it still makes very little sense, and I'll be goddamned if I can figure out what value it might add to the pursuit of an actual life.

Even though it's the norm rather than the exception, it never fails to amaze how many people act as if it's their inalienable right to spend their entire lives without ever being offended, without ever having to actually listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint. I don't mean the usual onstage back-and-forth jabber of talking points posturing as debate, but to actually listen, and disagree, and assess the situation afterward, and decide if that disagreement merits an equivalent response, or is something to vote against or write or speak out about.

Of course there are many things in this wicked world that all of us can and should speak up about when the opportunity arises. Societies where women are treated like property, bloggers are beaten in public, adulterers are stoned or beheaded, or any number of awful things going on right here at home.

It just seems odd that in a country whose economy is mostly rackets, whose criminal justice system is a cruel joke, and so on and so forth, that seemingly intelligent people would rather choose to police subtle grammatical inflections, bandying words such as "cisgendering" and "othering", words which have zero practical utility outside the walls of academia.

Maybe this ankle-biting type stuff is just what they think they can win, if only by attrition and the fact that most people will just back away slowly from some stranger trying to strong-arm them over their mansplaining. It's not that there isn't some truth to the complaints about the nature of the white male heteronormative power structure, it's that this sort of nanny-policing tends to have a polarizing effect -- it's only going to work on people who are inclined to agree with it in the first place, and will drive everyone else further away, because of its nagging nature.

But then, that's been true of political discourse in general for quite some time; when was the last time you heard of someone "converting" because of something they heard or read? Virtually every ex-lib-turned-con has some self-serving road-to-Damascus story about The Man over-taxing them, over-spending, letting criminals off, etc.; while people who change in the other direction do so because their job got outsourced around the world, they got shit-hammered into bankruptcy by a usurious medical bill, whatever.

In my first go-round in college, right out of high school back in the '80s, I found the campus political correctness folks to be somewhat annoying, but generally harmless, and more or less willing to stir the pot. Which should be the idea -- you come from where you're raised with a certain outlook, and go to a place where that outlook gets challenged, in good ways and not-so-good. Pure ideologues are the ones you need to watch out for; most sensible people are generally syncretic, whether or not they realize it.

Going back to grad school in my early 40s was the exact opposite for me -- since nearly everyone in our weekend-warrior MBA cohort was at least 30 and had some sort of career, they tended to be more conservative, with the couple of 20-somethings being even more conservative. But we all mutually understood, without having to explicitly say so, that it was okay to see the world and its issues differently from one another. We could engage in principled disagreements without having to worry about someone getting "offended". (Then again, while there were some women in the cohort, everyone was still part of the white heteronormative paradigm, so there's that.)

If the "microaggression" concern-trolling serves to at least create some small measure of awareness and tolerance on someone else's part, great. The more likely case is the kids get out into the real world and have to find a decent job or three in a depleted market, and realize that university is about the only place in the world where any of that stuff has any traction.

Ladies' Man

In the wake of the Isla Vista killings a couple days ago, it's certainly not shocking but might still catch some (including yours truly) unawares that there is something called a "pick-up artist [PUA] community." If you have the stomach to wade through such guff, you're a better person than me, but from the Slate article one can still glean the basics -- that these communities are populated by men who hate women (or at least view them as things to be acquired by any means necessary) and probably hate themselves and each other as well.

Certainly there are "alphas" and "betas" in this world, and the trope of the "nice guy" getting "friend-zoned" by his heart's desire is the staple of many a rom-com over the years. This is not in dispute. I suppose my puzzlement with this "community" thing of stratifying and stat-ifying "the game" is that, while it is a game, the rules are simpler than these doofuses seem to understand.

[Edit:  I had a half-dozen or so common-sense "rules" worked up for your entertainment, but decided to punt because it came out sounding uncomfortably close to these bro-douche PUA assholes. The basics of it should be obvious to anyone who isn't emotionally or socially stunted -- go out with your friends once in a while, because that's how you meet new people; don't overthink it or fixate on a person you barely know; be self-aware of things you may need to work on.

Perhaps most importantly, talk to women as if they're human beings, and not "objects" of your "affection." See previous advice about being self-aware. And relax -- you're trying to get laid, not come up with a cure for cancer. Look at some of the other folks getting laid. How hard can it be, really?]

You look at the self-inflicted trauma of someone like Elliot Rodger, and all you can do is wonder. Here's a kid who had money and toys at his disposal, and at least some connections that women would dig. But, uh, I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate that anyone who barfs up a 140-page manifesto about he's going to torture and slaughter the whores who didn't see what a knight in shining armor he was, there's someone who could have benefited from the above Obvious Rules.

Same with the PUA guys. These poor bastards have channeled their inability to self reflect into this weird obsession with developing a method or process to snagging that smokin' hot babe. This sense of entitlement permeates popular culture; every year, there's a number of popular movies and teevee shows featuring some fat schlub punching way above his weight -- say, Kevin James married to Salma Hayek. Notice that this never happens in the opposite direction; you are never going to see a movie with, say, Melissa McCarthy married to Brad Pitt.

This gets reinforced and conditioned over the years, until you get a particular strain of tool who thinks he's entitled to the hottest chick in the room. These guys (okay, okay, I did check out the PUA site a bit; I had to rubberneck at the 50-car pile-up), once you drill down a bit, really seem to be motivated by the urge to "get back" at the cute chick they obsessed over in high school, but who failed to see their awesomeness and drop to her knees forthwith.

So they buy into this "neuro-linguistic programming" schtick, and think they can basically hypnotize or convince any woman they talk to into jumping their bones. Inevitably they are disappointed when they try out their "game" and it doesn't work. Or it does work, and they get laid, but fireworks and rainbows don't shoot out of her ass, and they feel gypped. After all, they were entitled to having their greatness validated.

Just as rape is not really a crime of sex, so much as a crime of power and assertion, so does this PUA thing come across less as an effort to find love or sex or even an emotional connection with another human being, but an attempt to claim status and peer recognition. Where most Americans have been properly conditioned to self-actualize by acquiring money and toys and jacked-up four-by pick-em-up trucks to compensate for lack of penile girth, these twits have convinced themselves that they need to overthink what, for even average guys, is one of the easier things in life to do -- get laid.

On Golden Pawn

Ahahahaha. I bet you're all shocked that tealoading welfare rancher Cliven (not to be confused with Al or Ted) Bundy turns out to be just what you could easily assume -- an old racist cracker. The militia movement is not known, shall we say, for its holistic outlook toward non-whites. This was entirely predictable.

The stupid-ade to made from this particular bushel of stupid is the fun of watching all of Bundy's erstwhile conservalibertarian buddies at Faux News and in Congress running away from him even more quickly than they tried to hitch their rhetorical wagons to his "cause". Even better is Bundy's apparent confusion -- not only has he no clue what he said that might be objectionable, but he doesn't yet understand what his role in this really is.

As barmy and self-serving as I found the video of Bundy ridin' the range wavin' a giant US flag -- again, you know, the banner that represents a gubmint that Bundy has pronounced to every microphone and knothole that he don't believe in, consarn it -- it provides the most important clue to what makes this clown tick.

Bundy seriously believes that he is the hero of his personal saga, his kampf, his jihad (settle down now; both those words mean the same thing: struggle), and so when people like Sean Hannity and Rand Paul flock to his side in a show of support, it validates Bundy's narcissism. It confirms his thesis, that he (Bundy) is an avatar of absolute good and right, while the gubmint and its nefarious agents are soulless minions serving an ineffable evil.

It will sink in through the five gallons of shit in the ten-gallon hat at some point, that Bundy is simply a totem of convenience, a game piece to be used for teevee ratings, to help burnish the libertarian small-gov street cred of a probable presidential contender. It served their respective purposes to attach themselves to Bundy's grievances, for their own perpetually aggrieved audiences.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro.” Yeah, there's no way for anyone to start an idea with such a sentence, and have it end well. Some people just insist on being damned fools, determined to make asses of themselves at any given opportunity. But Bundy, unfortunately, vocalizes a sentiment and assumption that of course has much traction in certain circles.

For people constantly on the hunt for welfare cheats and grifters, lounging in their skivvies and cranking out litters of dependents, these sorts of passive-aggressive, more-in-sorrow-than-anger claims provide small cover for their incipient racism. Now, to be sure, there certainly do exist some folks who, across multiple generations, indeed have been enabled by Great Society programs into a cycle of dependency. I work in social services, and I've seen such people, talked to them, seen their files. I've seen entire families who have been almost completely on the dole for four generations.

But here's the thing -- in the county where I live and run across these folks, they're mostly white. In fact, on the national level, recipients of services are almost equally split between white, black, and Hispanic. So Bundy's comment and assumption is disgusting not just on the obvious face value, but on multiple levels.

What would Bundy's advice to a white family who lives in the squalorous, idle conditions he decries? He can't "wonder" aloud whether they'd be happier, freer, more productive under a system of legal torture, rape, and murder. Probably tell 'em they just need them more Jee-zus, the sure cure for everything from layoffs, to working three jobs to keep your rat-infested apartment, to the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Hopefully this episode helps take the piss out of these would-be secessionist assholes, as well as the demagogues who try to utilize them for their own opportunistic schemes. You know it won't, it never quite does, but the next one of these jerkoffs that pops up will get more well-deserved scrutiny of their underpinning sentiments. Let's not kid ourselves -- a good chunk of these groups, whether they'll ever admit it or not, really just want to break away into their own all-white enclaves.

[Update 4/24/14 10:45 PDT:  Credit where credit is due. Krauthammer makes it absolutely clear why Cliven Bundy's (repeated) statements are so execrable, front to back. The guy is finally (and rightly) getting hung up on his racist sentiments, but the fact is that his traitorous jabber should been identified as such well before that point, by people who should have known better. In a just world, this would at least put a fat dent in Hannity's ratings and career as well, but you know it won't. He'll just burble some half-assed "I didn't know, and besides, the BLM are still dicks and thugs" non-apology. Anyway, good for Charles K on this one. Hell, even Glenn Beck (no small thing, as Bundy is a fellow Mormon) seems to have gotten out in front of this one.]

Offensensitivity

Perhaps because the majority of the country has changed so much and so quickly on the issue, "gay marriage" is developing a set of meta-issues, and rather absurd ones at that. Now the question is longer whether discriminating against gay couples bears the same nasty whiff that discriminating against interracial couples did 40-50 years ago.

The most recent and persistent epiphenomenon is the martyrdom meme, perhaps best characterized in the self-imposed travails of Duck Dynasty honcho Phil Robertson and Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the latter who was forced to resign for his contribution to California's Proposition 8 campaign back in 2008. So now Conor Friedersdorf's correspondent seems to epitomize the sort of person who feels aggrieved at whatever chilling effect is supposed to have taken place, as far as "allowing" what the aggrieved feel is legitimate difference of opinion.

And so it is, to a certain extent. Ostensibly, one of the great strengths of this country is that everyone has the right to be wrong, and even to be an asshole about it, so long as said opinion picks no pockets and breaks no arms. And that's where the problem arises, since in more than half of US states, you can be fired just for being gay in the first place, forget trying for a supposedly meaningless equal right to get married.

Nothing in life is absolute, and this applies to the Bill of Rights as well; you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't bring an assault rifle into a courthouse. There are balances that are struck all along the way in these sorts of debates, and hey guess what -- the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies and places of work. You can be an asshole, and other people can call you such. That's how it works.

That means that you can -- and should -- be fired from your job if you, say, host a website that advocates race war or features the crushing of small animals for the amusement of fucking creeps, even if such things happen not to be against the law (inexplicably, in the latter instance). You can, in fact, be fired from your job just for saying something impolitic, if your boss happens to feel that said speech costs the company sales and revenue. This is not exactly a secret or a surprise, and yet here you have grown-ass adults genuinely shocked that their sincerely, deeply held spiritual beliefs do not automatically grant them immunity from the consequences of discourse.

That's at least part of the reason why so many of us choose to blog in relative anonymity -- not to completely absolve ourselves from any and all consequences of what we might say out here on the internets, but because we are aware that even if we say something that is logical and accurate, we can still be held liable for it, if it has an adverse (or even a potential or perceived) impact on any organization we might be part of.

This particular issue is an opportunity to examine the idea that one's beliefs, no matter how sincere, do not automatically immunize them from participating in the same verbal scrum as the rest of us. I promise you, the small hint of opprobrium, of "hate" and "fear" as the CF correspondent put it, is a drop in the bucket compared to what "outsider" groups have felt even in the last generation or two, from gays to atheists to civil rights and antiwar protesters.

I think those folks and many others would find the idea hilarious, that someone could say something they have a pretty good idea will hit a significant portion of people the wrong way, and still expect to be exempt from even legitimate criticism (as opposed to, you know, the discrimination and violence that many dissenting groups have routinely faced). It may not be 100% "fair" to ostracize or fire someone for voicing the "wrong" opinion, but it is also not the duty of the rest of society to wait around for these people to start unpacking their ideological baggage, and letting it go, once and for all.

The Party of Ideas

Shorter Republican Party:  We got nuthin'.
Look, I don't think that a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic dynamic is particularly useful or beneficial for anyone, except the two families and their associated claques and hangers-on. It's a reminder that the political process is hopelessly debauched, that you have to be something of a skeevy bastard to raise the unholy amounts of money it takes just to run. To the extent that there are substantial operational differences between the parties, they both need to develop deeper benches, rather than running back to the same people every election cycle.
And yes, the idea of a president getting his cock sucked by a subordinate at his business desk (not to mention finishing off in a sink -- because blowing a load in her mouth would have been wrong) is, to say the least, off-putting, regardless of which party. That Billy Jeff was impeached by hypocrites was certainly no surprise; in retrospect, he should have been impeached for repealing Glass-Steagall.
But what's done is done, and been done for quite some time. Anyone who is still actually upset over the Lewinsky thing is a lot like the goofballs that show up en masse every Roe v. Wade anniversary. It's done, it's settled. The idea that this is a battle ever worth revisiting, much less when there are a multitude of real issues affecting our lives that need attention, is bizarre.
Of course, these are just midterm talking points anyway, only the most fervid and bereft polimonkeys will be jabbering about Monica by 2016. But midterms rely on low turnout, primarily by old people who have nothing better to do, and who would have been shoved out onto an ice floe in earlier, simpler days. So they'll rant amongst themselves about that awful thing Billy Jeff did, nearly a full generation ago now, and connect it to his grasping lesbo wife, and then go pull the lever for Scott DesJarlais and Mark Sanford, without a trace of irony or self-awareness.

Plus Ça Change

Just what you needed -- yet another paean to small-town foke givin' Teh Man the ol' whut-fer. Christ on a stale cracker, like anyone should fucking care that some backwater latrine whose population dropped from 668 in 2010 to 654 in 2012 (presumably from some combination of old age and common sense) seriously thinks that pointlessly erecting a Ten Commandments "monument" (pictured below) is some sort of heroic act of defiance to a brutal dictator.



I wrote extensively about this particular phenomenon several years ago, in the context of a book review, and near as I can tell, only the specific locations have changed, the predictable useless yahooisms have remained intact. Yes, Obama has only visited the state twice, once to speak at a memorial for a mining disaster (but fuck the MSHA and EPA, amirite peoples?), and later that same year (2010) for Senator Pork Robert Byrd's funeral. So there is, as they say, some resentment building in West Virginia, as they perceive a lack of sufficient response to their plaints.

It doesn't seem like anyone wants to break the cold, hard truth to the ruggedly independent Mountaineer State, so let me take a humble stab at it -- you people need to pull your heads out of your fucking asses, m'kay? There's no way to put a cherry on this turd cupcake, folks. When you have a state full of goddamned moochers, who sponge from the system far more than they contribute, who produce a single commodity whose vocational utility is rapidly diminishing (for a variety of reasons -- diversification of energy sources; mechanization of coal extraction; diminishment of "easy" extraction sites), who have disproportionately large populations of medical and welfare benefit recipients, there's not much point in doing meet-and-greets in Cooter's Gulch.

Not to mention the fact that barely one-half of one percent of Americans live in West Virginia, and it becomes quite easy to see why no one wants to bother with it. Great, you produce coal. Awesome. But since many of us can simply run down to Harbor Freight and get of the grid for under a couple grand, and there are other exploitable energy sources as well, it is incumbent upon the self-styled individualists to explain -- in greater detail than some weird fuck-you Ten Commandments monument, mind you -- why precisely the other 99.5% of the world's largest economy is supposed to give more than three-quarters of a fuck about your failure to prepare, anticipate, or adapt to the tectonic change that the entire planet saw coming two decades ago.

It's not my intent to indulge in gratuitous hillbilly-bashing, I swear. I do have compassion for people who have spent their entire working lives performing difficult, extremely dangerous labor, and are either spent from decades underground breathing toxic dust, or have enough to get by but have watched their towns and communities collapse around them. West Virginia has probably had more news stories about its pervasive drug problems than anything else, which is a shame, since anyone who has read up on the state and its abundant natural resources knows that it's a lovely place full of beauty and wonder, comparable to just about any other place in the country. (Yes, even my beloved California.)

But caves and geographic quirks are not enough, unfortunately, to turn a generational economic tide. The state's geographic and cultural insularity, as with many southern (and WV does pride itself on being the "most southern of the northern states, and the most northern of the southern states," among other directional superlatives), has finally caught up with it in that regard.

One branch of my family is a boisterous, insanely fun group of Irish Catholic Texans, so I know firsthand a little somethin'-somethin' about the suhthuhn culcha I routinely deride. Anyhoo, one defining redneck characteristic is the display of the confederate flag in some form, whether an actual flag or merely a bumper sticker. The redneck proudly informs dismayed passersby that his is a symbol of "pride" and "independence," as if it were up to one random simpleton to repurpose a highly objectionable emblem of rape, terror, murder, systematic subjugation. In our family, this fucking thing was regarded as nothing short of an American swastika.

But the reality of such a symbol, when one comes across it --and I did, this very afternoon, here in sunny NorCal -- is that its bearer is someone whom, as my East Texan great-grandmother would have put it, "cain't tell 'em nuthin'." No, indeed -- and that, ladies, fish, and gentlemen, is what you are seeing with your southern states, most of them (Texas and Florida notwithstanding, but even then only by economy of scale) unproductive moochers, culturally regressive, uncomfortable with the fairly major societal changes taking place, and not knowing what to do about any of it.

I wish I knew what to tell them, I wish there were easy answers for them. It would be nice to just be able to tell them to suck it up, take a few Khan Academy classes to get their shit together, and grow superhot peppers. [Ed. Someone has to give those hot-pepper guys a reality show. If people can watch other people open a goddamned storage shed, they can watch heat-seeking trenchermen grow two million Scoville unit peppers.]  But just as one cannot serve two masters, one also cannot be utterly dependent on gubmint largesse, and simultaneously expend precious scarce energy and resources railing against said gubmint. That's not politics, it's math.

Stockholm Syndrome, Blah Style

I have no idea what to make of this weirdness. A black man in the heart of Dixie who flies the traitor bumwipe without apparent irony is most likely the even more retarded progeny of Alvin Greene. Don't know, don't care; this fool's self-loathing is probably sufficient punishment.

But I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it, a southern black man championing the confederacy and its symbols, and apparently even saying that slaves deserved to be enslaved (see the comments in the Gawker link). Something's deeply wrong with this guy; no one expects him to be Malcolm X, but jebus.

At the very least it's heartening to see that semi-literate bozos are allowed to intern for U.S. Senators too. Someone has to get Tim Scott his coffee.

Even Dave Chappelle would have had a hard time coming up with this guy.

Spin City

Well, if Chris Dodd can do for the dry-heaving movie industry what he did for the ass-pounding predation of Wall Street finance, we should be balls deep in a huge vat of pig shit, torture porn, and reboots of comic book franchises in no time. You know, pretty much like we have been at the local cinemascope. CinemaCon indeed, these assholes work the long con, always.

This is how the movie industry functions:  for years they have been acting as if frowning at the portrayal of smoking a cigarette in a scene is a sign of moral fortitude. They might now do the same with the portrayal of guns, and the use thereof. [Ed.:  Good luck with that; are action heroes supposed to point a fucking banana at the villain and yell, "Bang!"?] This is known in the industry parlance as Being Seen Doing Something. Feel safer now?

The MPAA's supposed values have always been warped; a dozen people can get blown away in a barrage of gunfire in a PG-13 movie. You can have just shy of a metric fuckton of violence and maintain that rating, but Flying Spaghetti Monster help your sorry ass if the eff-word is dropped more than twice, or (gasp!shriek!) a nipple is viewed.

A female nipple, that is. Male nipples are fine, but apparently the sight of funbags, and the nozzle thereof, will send your tiny little brain into shock, and start an early rutting season. Why, even the shadow of areolae (probably the worst of the mid-'70s prog-rock albums) will get you the R, while as in the above linked example, you can pound a person's face into a table so that an implanted pencil rams through his eye, and keep that PG-13 rating.

Or again, consider the wave of grotesque torture porn schlock that proliferated through much of the last decade, assorted schlubs molested and butchered in the most gratuitous methods possible by unrepentant psychopaths, sometimes portrayed to be almost sympathetic characters. Same rating as the movie that showed a titty, or had a couple f-bombs. As bad aesthetically as it might be for a movie to have a scene where a kid fucks an apple pie, it seems somehow more benign than someone blowtorching a girl's eye out of her head. Yet those two movies have identical ratings. I am going to go out on an enormous limb and assert that if you want to lessen violence and improve people's happiness in entertainment product, make fewer movies about bright thing go boom, and more movies about Salma Hayek's prodigious cans (possibly NSFW).

Whatever's clever. What's a slam-dunk guarantee is that the MPAA, which is a lobbying organization cut from much of the same cloth as the NRA, will sooner rather than later skulk into Warshington seeking some sort of emolument or favor. This will be in return for its supposed concessions in this ricockulously arch aesthetic conceit, that if fewer guns are shown on-screen, if the violence is portrayed secondarily, that there will be some sort of societal benefit, fewer school massacres or what have you.

This is the same sort of moronic line of thought that, back in the '80s, presumed that heavy metal was "making" teenagers kill themselves, as if their shitty lives and meaningless futures had nothing to do with anything. The kids today, with their Call of Duty and their Grand Theft Auto, desensitizing their tiny little brains until they have no other option but to take Mommy's Glock to the local primary school and tune it up on a classroom of first-graders. Right?

We're all just easily impressionable automatons, hopelessly compelled to imitate our entertainment experiences, doomed to end up as YouTube fodder on Tosh.0 or Jackass, until some do-gooder asshole senator decides to Save The Children with a decree of holy writ that any entertainment product should be bowdlerized enough so that a seven-year-old can watch without getting traumatized. That seems to be the line of thought implicit in the actions and words of organizations such as the MPAA, which is infinitely more concerned about digital piracy of their lousy comic-book movies and public-domain retreads, than about anything else, such as whether their ratings system makes any sense in the first place.

This is your gubmint in a nutshell, friends 'n' neighbors -- mired in inertia and clutter, besotted by lobbyist pelf, they act as if they seriously think that taking some sort of pretend moral stand on gun violence might prevent actual gun violence. This is sort of like presuming that if they sought or even created newer and better source material, they would stop making the same shitty movies over and over again.