But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make.
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed.
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now.
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see.
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond.
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like.
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t.

Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant.

For some reason, much of the news describes this as only a shooting, but beyond that it seems quite clear that it was also an assassination attempt. The merits of calling it a terrorist act are less evident — terrorism naturally has a goal of instilling terror to alter views, whereas this seems much more like removing a powerful person with dissenting views, something quite horrifying but perhaps not terrorism. Nonetheless, this is a horrible act and one that should, and is, being roundly condemned.

Unfortunately, I can’t expect the actions of today to effect the decisions of tomorrow for the Republic machine that routinely attacked the Democratic party’s policies with rhetoric calling it un-American, anti-Democratic, telling their constituents to be “Armed and Dangerous,” and building a hit-list of Democratic congresspeople.

I make no claim that the shooter was a Republican, or even that he heard these extreme statements — based on what Gawker has collected about him, he was a genuinely insane fellow — but it has to be said that this is a toxic environment to live in, one that can push a mentally ill person over the edge. But nobody on that side wants to say that¹. There’s a great deal of condemnation of the act, but nobody seems to be expressing regret over their phrasing or tone or the Manichean lies they used in attempt to jockey for political power.

People that make this connection are already being accused of political rhetoric, but actions have consequences irrespective of politics. Obviously, I mourn the people murdered today, and I hope for swift recoveries for those injured, Congresswoman Giffords included, but to ignore a sad truth seems wrong especially at a time like this when a madman seeks to remove a voice they dislike from the world.

Footnotes

1. It says even more that, when a clearly disturbed individual is able to legally buy a gun, the topic of gun control is seemingly verboten.

In 1975, Pepsi unleashed “the Pepsi Challenge,” a blind taste test where subjects threw back an ounce of each beverage and reported back on their favorite. Their favorite was Pepsi.

You already know what happened next: Coca-Cola developed a more Pepsi-like product called “New Coke.” America rejected New Coke. Coke came back with “Coca-Cola Classic.” America celebrated the restoration of the country’s carbonated identity, and Coca-Cola’s disastrous decision ended up entrenching its original product.

Behind all this was a problem with the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Pepsi more in small increments. They liked Coca-Cola more when they had to drink a can of the stuff. And this, I think, is going to prove a problem for Chris Christie.

Arguing that Pepsi had a “flashier” taste that doesn’t stand the test of time sounds like a Coke fan going on the defensive over the obvious results of a blind taste test¹. But seeing as I prefer Pepsi, it would be useless to quibble over that point. Taste is totally personal. However, his post ignores a well-known fact about New Coke: people did prefer it².

In all the taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi as well as Coke Classic. Unfortunately, brand identity was such a huge factor in Coca-Cola’s dominance, consumers took the rebranding and reformulation as an affront to their national history.

It may be that Chris Christie is best taken in small doses, but that has nothing to do with the Pepsi Challenge or why New Coke failed.

Footnotes

1. A taste test that convinced America. Before the Pepsi Challenge, Pepsi was struggling, now it’s a formidable opponent to Coke.
2. Ezra could still argue that winning taste tests has no relevance to real world drinking, except that Diet Coke is quite popular, for both its flavour and its calorie cutting, and its formula is based on New Coke.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

It seems now that Andrew Sullivan found the post and is using it to continue his crusade against Palin despite contradicting the spirit of the post by continually posting her nonsense tweets on his blog. He defends his actions by saying it’s his responsibility to “keep tabs on the lunacy.” That might be more compelling if he hadn’t posted less than a day ago one of her tweets verbatim and without comment.

I’m no fan of Palin, but Sullivan’s continued coverage of her is more tiring than anything else; maybe it’s because Sullivan has bit into this particular piece of meat so fervently, or maybe it’s because of the Trig pregnancy conspiracy theory he likes to push on occasion, but every time he starts to talk about Palin I zone out. Luckily, Weigel is still covering her, and doing so without calling her out as a sign of the apocalypse.

The first is that Obama is a super-genius 11-dimensional chess master who has been setting up all the pieces to knock them down precisely to accomplish health care reform without these two progressive policies in place.

The second is that Obama can swoop into the Senate, jiggle a few carrots, whack a few sticks, and everyone would fall in line and health care reform would pass with the exact requirements of Obama and his White House without further complications.

Anyone who ascribes to either of these positions is a fool, or really digs the DC universe.

I personally think Obama should have done more to pressure moderate Democrats to toe the line on this issue; I don’t think it would have done any good, but at least Obama would have demonstrated some position. As nice as it is to have a White House administration more interesting in passing legislation than jockeying for power, it doesn’t hurt to bluster on occasion.

But I’m not going to sit here and argue what others have: that Obama is essentially talking a good game in public but sneaking wry grins in private as his plan to limit health care reform unfold. These sorts of extremes do nothing but persist the idea that the executive branch not only does but should have a choke hold on the rest of the government. Quite frankly, even if Obama did have the power and clout to wrangle the Senate into line, which I don’t think he does, shouldn’t we be glad he isn’t doing that? I thought Bush was hated for his abuse of the office, not because he abused it to get things we didn’t like.

Many different progressives have been reminding Glenn that the President isn’t all powerful and that expending his political capital trying to push obstinate senators toward a more progressive bill would almost certainly result in nothing, or worse a deeper obstinacy from senators feeling bullied.

He cites the example of the White House pressuring freshman Democrats with what is essentially ostracism if they don’t vote for a war funding bill as proof that Obama can play hardball with the legislative branch when he really wants something done. But I think this ignores some depressing realities within Congress.

Obama can pressure freshman congressman to support a war bill because they are likely on the left, and people on the left need the support of the DNC and the Obama Administration. But on health care, Obama would have to push people from the Right towards the Left, something for which he can offer no incentives.

Nelson won Nebraska despite Obama losing, not because of it. There’s no pressure he can apply in that situation. And Lieberman is a petulant child who wants only to punish progressive policies. Maybe Obama could have tried the hardball tactics here, and maybe it would have worked, but these two scenarios are not comparable except in the most superficial way.

The fact that Democrats overwhelmingly feel that Obama wants it more is a little troubling. Terrorists (and freedom fighters, if you so choose to think of the Taliban in such terms) do outrageous things for their causes. Like, for example, fly jet planes into building and strap explosives to themselves. I’m sure Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, if only for the political capital it will give to the Democratic party after seven years of Republican negligence in Afghanistan, but I think claiming he ‘wants it more’ than the Taliban stretches the point a bit too far.

A fair point that can be made is that the poll specifically targets the ‘Leadership of the Taliban,’ who might not be willing to strap bombs to themselves so much as they are willing to strap bombs to other people in an attempt to build their own power. I don’t really know enough about the hierarchy of the Taliban and such groups to say if there’s a difference in the radicalism of the leaders vs the ground soldiers, but even targeting the ‘Lords’ of the terrorist movements seems incredulous. When it comes down to it, I can’t imagine Obama worrying that the Taliban will eventually kill him, except in some existential abstract manner, but America wiping out every last Taliban member seems like it would be a fairly realistic worry.

It’s probably premature in Obama’s case but he’s certainly got a few things he can cite as evidence that he’s been an agent of peace. What has Neda done? She got shot. I don’t mean this as a knock on her sacrifice or her nation’s desire to be free of a theocratic dictatorship, but that’s really all she did.

Ignoring the obvious rules regarding posthumous Nobel prizes I sincerely don’t understand what anyone is thinking when they espouse awarding a Nobel peace prize to a young Iranian university student who happened to get shot during a political protest.

What’s more, the idea of granting it to one of the reformists in Iran seems equally vapid. While it can be said that Obama won the Nobel primarily because he’s not George Bush, I think we forget how negatively the world viewed President Bush. The simple fact that America is represented on a global scale by Barack Obama has already vastly shifted the rhetoric regarding America world-wide. Add in his accomplishments with respect to nuclear proliferation, and his national-level climate change legislation, and his (supposed) desire to end the Bush administrations abuses of human rights, and we’re a lot closer to world peace right now than we were just a year ago. I still think it’s premature for Obama to win the Nobel, but to consider Neda, or her fellow reformers, as a better choice seem laughably parochial.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

Footnotes

1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.”
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing.
4. On both sides of the discussion

His most recent New York Times column, for example, extols the “romantic excess” that liberals seem to lack. He claims that “modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.”

Except he doesn’t think modern relationships are passionless, he think modern liberal relationships are passionless.

Our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect.

…

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

…

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess.

Ignoring the self-pitying Douthat sneaks into that first sentence, as all proper right-wingers must, it speaks to a massive misunderstanding on his part of the difference between passion and responsibility. To say that I’m not passionate because I’m capable of putting a condom on or willing to not pick up the first girl I see at the bar — not that either of those statements apply to me personally; for the moment, I’m speaking for other liberals with more game — is an utterly foolish thing to say.

The idea that something is not passionate unless is it reckless and stupid and embarrassing, exemplified by countless romantic comedies over the years, is a childish belief that most liberals have grown out of. Put bluntly, passion isn’t a quickie marriage, it’s a safeword.

Piling on, I’m not sure why Douthat is cheering on reckless marriage, frivolous divorce, and bastard children (I’m a bastard myself, so no insult intended) seeing as he’s the conservative between the two of us. But, let’s not get bogged down with logic. There’s columns that need writing.

I am eager to spend money to slow global warming. Still, I question whether a crippled cap and trade bill will make it harder to pass decent legislation later on.

But quite frankly, something is better than nothing. Joseph Romm seems to agree with me — put more honestly, I agree with Romm — and offers this useful tidbit:

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times.

So let’s do whatever we can get away with, in terms of climate change. Maybe it’s not enough, but if the choice is between something or nothing, that’s a no-brainer.

As much as I’d like the Washington establishment to do an about face simply because a lot of young people were interested in politics last fall, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to fight for every inch. So let’s start with this. All avalanches start somewhere.

I maintain that the things Scientology have done, ranging from domestic espionage to extreme litigation to the death of church members due to negligence, are not acceptable. But I also maintain that they are not unexpected. Religions in their growth pangs often commit horrific acts in an attempt to establish themselves. You need only look at the violence, corruption, and manipulation of the Catholic church in the middle ages to see evidence of that. And the holy wars of expansion of early Islam are just as telling; no religion has a monopoly on such offenses.

Similarly, Scientology’s “wacky” beliefs, like the multi-trillion-year-old universe and Thetans and the like are no more bizarre than the base beliefs of the Abrahamic religions. The difference is that we’ve grown up in a civilization centred around Moses carrying divinely inscribed tablets dictating the rules of the faith, around Noah building an Ark that carried his family and every single species on the planet for 40 days and 40 nights, around Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back upon Gomorrah, around a man who was a god who was martyred and resurrected and ascended to heaven. These stories are not less outlandish, they are more familiar. They don’t carry the stigma of the Space Opera.

None of what I’ve written defends Scientology in any way, but I don’t attack it for doing exactly what countless other churches has done in our history. It’s a double standard that makes no sense.

I know you’re thinking right now that the crimes of other religions are in the past and that because they happened in the past either a) it was ok because it was moderate for the time or b) it’s useless to chastise them for acts they no longer commit.

The first point is wrong, in my opinion. Morals are morals. I don’t care if it was done in exceptional circumstances. Wrong is wrong.

The second point is more valid, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But Scientology hasn’t committed domestic espionage in the recent history, so to attack them for it is equivalent to attacking the modern Catholic church for the Inquisition or the Crusades.

In the end, I think that, if Scientology survives this initial growth to become an actual religion, it will become less hard line, but that won’t happen due to external pressure. If anything, the continual attacks on the religion from the outside will allow the church to establish a line of defence, just as Iran’s Supreme Leader has for decades by invoking the spectre of American Imperialism. Over time, Scientology’s member will force the church to change. Or it will collapse on itself. And the rest of the world isn’t going to do anything to affect the outcome or its time of arrival.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

Most of this is targeted at Andrew Sullivan, who has been working with a great level of dedication to get the news about Iran out while the mainstream media did little to cover the story. I agree with John that changing the colour scheme of a website does nothing to contribute to the Iranian people’s fight for a fair democracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a meaningless gesture.

I’ve followed this story from its early stages, unable to look away, desperate for any new photo or bit of news out of Tehran. I feel the pain of the Iranian people, and I wish I could do something to solve their problems. But I can’t. Their problems are theirs. All I can do is watch and hope that they win the freedoms every man, woman, and child deserves. Quite frankly, writing about their bravery — these people who are fighting battles our forefathers fought for us, so that we could live in a world with the tacit understanding of legitimacy — is all we can do. To lift up our voices and echo the cries for freedom. We need to let them know that while this is their fight, they do not stand alone. The world is watching.

Anybody that watches all of Babylon 5 knows that the primary arc of the series is tied up by the end of season four. In fact, the series finale was written and filmed at the end of the fourth season in case the fifth season wasn’t approved. So it’s easy to say that season five was filler, something to pass the time until the brilliant and beatific finale. But I say nay.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime¹

First of all, if there was never a fifth season we wouldn’t have the fourth season’s finale, which examined the history of mankind for the million years following the end of the series, with a few glimpses into the fifth season, and ruminations about the fate of mankind now that the elder species have left them to their own devices.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history

Second of all, if the show ended with the series finale aired after the fourth season, the show would’ve had a distinctly typical, almost Victorian, ending with an additional epilogue. Season four ends with all the hard work ahead of them. Earth has been freed from tyranny, a new interstellar peace has been established, and the old ones have headed beyond the rim. As the opening credits claim, it was the damn of a new age. And while Babylon 5 would be a brilliant television show even if it told only the story of that first sunrise, it went beyond that to tell, at least in part, the consequences of those moments.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone

Season five is when Garibaldi’s alcoholism relapses, when G’Kar leaves his people behind, choosing to be a person and not a prophet, when Londo Mollari’s years of good intentions finally brought about his inevitable fall. Season five is the season of consequences. When the Shadows left, their followers continued their chaotic mandate. The telepaths were created by the Vorlons in their endless quest to defend their evolutionary philosophy, and those actions have to be dealt with and managed by those left behind, the younger species. The remnants of the past, fresh wounds from the recent wars, and damage yet to come collided in a story that took the simplistic image of the future that many may have had after Sheridan announced the Interstellar Alliance and delved into the nuances of life. And there are no easy answers.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint

Without season five, we would have a pretty story wrapped up in a bow — and it would be a glorious story, one worth re-telling through the ages — but only a story. With season five, we see the consequences of the story, we see the ending after the ending. We wrap these stories up to please ourselves, to delude ourselves that once that pivotal threshold has been crossed, the war is over; but history, and our current politics, tells us that isn’t the case. We see that nothing really ends.

Footnotes

1. Fragments of a Reinhold Neibuhr quotation found on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Glenn Greenwald has been following, and closely scrutinizing, the DOJ’s positions in the hopes that Obama’s campaign rhetoric would lead to real change in the department most disturbed and malformed as a result of Bush’s corrupt administration. There have been advances, none miraculous. But what’s more troubling is the movement towards some of Bush’s positions rather than away. Obama’s Department of Justice continues to strengthen the abuses of power put in place by the Bush administration.

I was sympathetic at first. So early into his term, we shouldn’t be so demanding. Indeed, many of the problems the DOJ is faced would inflict wide-spread collateral damage. But the DOJ is doing more than asking for more time to consider the proper solution, they are fighting to ensure the unjust status quo remains. Get with it, Obama. Fix this shit now.

I’m generally slower writing my reviews than most TV blogs because I have a full time job and other real world responsibility whereas most bloggers have blogging as their job. This is a detriment to my work because it can often seem like an out of date topic by the time I get around to publishing. At the same time, I also get a chance to read other reviews and comments on those reviews. This can both colour my view and also give me a chance to crystallize rebuttals and confirmations of those discussions. Of course, sometimes I have these thoughts independently and it seems like I’m parroting others but what can you do. Other people can be right sometimes too.

A decent chunk of the discussion from the last few episodes, especially from io9 and its commenters, has been focused on the saccharine innocence of David, without recognizing that that is a necessary part of his character. I said last week that this show reminded me of Carnivàle, but it was for more than the use of prophetic dreams and religious destiny. They are both telling the story of the birth of a hero, in the classical sense. I can imagine these same cynics, who criticise David’s virtuousness, rolling their eyes when, early on in Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins uses his empathy to coax a grief-stricken mother to give up her dead child from her hand to be given a burial.

Carnivàle does a better job of this, obviously. Ben is introduced as a man on the run for murder, and that past follows him throughout the two year run, but at the same time, there is hardly a moment in the run of that show where Ben Hawkins is not perfectly virtuous or at the very least fighting desperately the temptations offered to him. But the journey is the same. Ben struggled with this role while being tempted until he ultimately grew into a more mature role and accepted his quest to kill Brother Justin. David will follow a similar path, because both stories are of the Hero chosen by God. So to criticise his virtuous origins is, I think, to completely misunderstand the story that is being told to you. And now onto the show.

The big thing I took away from this episode was that the Queen rules much more than anyone knew. Silas may have catalyzed a broken people, but it was her work in building and designing the monarchy that keeps their people strong and vibrant. Having something greater than themselves kept them believing in the dream of Shiloh in the long arduous years before the glistening city was built. And now that the years of war and conflict are over, the people of Shiloh need to see their royal family. The premiere of the ballet, around which the episode revolves, that the queen cares about. “We are the performance,” she says. The thing to inspire the people, and also to remind them of who is in charge and why. There’s something to be said for exploring that. Often, democracies fall into dictatorships and empires because particularly compelling and inspiring leaders come about. It’s just as reasonable that a modern day monarchy, one created recently not one long ago established and only retained for nostalgia’s sake, would require those same “larger than life” characteristics to remain viable.

Of course, in this episode Silas is doing his own work to maintain that larger than life persona, by abandoning his mistress and her son, possibly permanently; a sacrifice God demanded, it seems. His bastard son is once again sick, and this time it doesn’t look reparable. And, so his recent spat with Reverend Samuels be damned, he seeks Samuels’ counsel and wisdom. What must he do to regain God’s favour? Why must God constantly punish him? First by giving him a son who desires men, then by giving his people a greater hero to worship, and now by taking his younger son’s life. After Samuels offers little comfort, Silas’ truck flips over after colliding with a deer. Seeing the deer slowly dying on the ground before him, he realises that he needs to make a sacrifice in his life and quickly snaps the neck of the deer. He then returns to the hospital where his son lays near death, and goes to sleep. When he awakes, his son is better and he takes that as a sign that his decision from the night before was right. He leaves them both behind for his decadent, and solitudinous, royal life.

The solitude of Michelle Benjamin continues at the gala following the ballet, where she hopes to run into David — who was abruptly uninvited by the queen due to his rising star — but instead gets hooked up for a play date with a childhood friend, who is now a financial success, by her mother. She uses the situation to her advantage to obtain financial backing for her long suffering health care initiatives. Which will likely introduce a romantic rival for David as the story progresses. Speaking of, David is invited by Jack Benjamin to club hop and have a good time in general. Jack, having been ever so subtly pushed by his mother to take David down a peg or two, gets his female friend to get him to do dirty things in public places. Of course, David fights the urge and so the paparazzi only get a shot of him making out with her rather than shots of him fucking. But mackage is mackage, and Michelle sees the story online the next morning.

There are a few nuances I’m ignoring or glossing over here, but I can bring them up later on when they’re more relevant. Maybe I’d seem smarter if I mentioned my personal thoughts on these little scenes now and they come to fruition later, but I’m fine with leaving some of these details out when there’s no strong need to discuss them now. Overall, it was a good episode, and the show’s trajectory is interesting and quick thus far. The writing is strong and lyrical, and I don’t expect it to degrade. However, this is, I believe, the last episode directed by Francis Lawrence, so we’ll have to see if the visual beauty of the show can be maintained without his hand behind the camera next week.

I can do little but agree with this. It is the mark of a great man¹ that he says what people don’t wish to hear, that he pushes for the things the silent majority wishes to remain silent. And by this metric Obama is, for the most part, not a great man. He is an inspiring man. He is an articulate man. He is an intelligent man. But he is also a pragmatic man. And pragmatic men do what they think they can get done. Obama knows that to push for the legalization of marijuana, even timidly, would create a backlash that would distract from the work he has to get done.

Is his stance cowardly? In its own way, it most certainly is. And Webb is a braver man for the fight he brings to the Capitol. But that is, I think, something for which Obama has been previously praised. His pragmatism is what allowed a first term African-American Senator, with the middle name Hussein, and a Muslim father to get where he is. He wouldn’t accomplish much at all if he was pushing for the wild-eyed quixotries of others. Unfortunately, his visual and cultural radicalisms limit his ability to be truly radical politically.

But this is not to say that he follows this actively. He simply is a political moderate man. The liberal arguments that he is secretly for the legalization of marijuana don’t hold any weight for me, any more than the conservative arguments that he is secretly a Muslim. He may not be someone fervently for the prosecution of casual users, as evidenced by his recent mandate that the DEA no longer raid state-run marijuana farms and his support of medical marijuana, but I don’t think that equates to legalization, or even decriminalization. His past usage is not compelling in this respect to me either; hypocrisy at this level among politicians is hardly new.

It’s disappointing to me that President Obama is unwilling to address the unpopularity of the marijuana and hemp laws, but it’s not entirely surprising. That’s not to say I support this position. I do not support it, nor do I respect Obama’s reasons, but I do understand it is a part of his politics.

Footnotes

1. A great woman as well, but let’s not get into neutral pronouns today, m’kay?

Maybe Fox will have to move American Idol one night out of the week, maybe some other network will have to switch a show. But in reality, any show which is sufficiently popular won’t suffer too much from a night switch. We often blame networks for constantly switching time slots of quality shows leading to their inevitable cancellation, but in reality it’s poor marketing of those new time slots that kills the shows. Any show they want people to keep watching they market the shit out of to inform its audience that it’s changed times. So give Obama his variety hour. And stop the fucking whining.

But whatever else is true, it is a weak, decaying and insecure nation that beats its chest and relies on ugly threats to establish its “toughness” and “credibility” with the world, while the mark of a strong and confident nation is the willingness to take a first step like this one towards its adversaries.

This is true in many respects, most especially in our modern society. But it’s that temporal qualifier that makes the sentence true, a qualifier Greenwald excludes. At the height of the Byzantine Empire‘s reign, it was a military force to be reckoned with, sacking the cities of any nation that dared cross its border. But as its power and wealth dwindled, new invaders like the Saracens exploited that weakness. Ultimately, unable to defend themselves they resorted to buy-offs, providing their enemies with millions of pounds of gold to maintain their territory. As their star faded, much of their power was retained via political back channels, using conspiracies to wage their enemies against each other, and ceding territory for the sake of peace. But their true power was gone¹. It’s true that the truly great emperors of the Byzantine Empire also ruled justly, but that does not belie their military acumen and its use.

I don’t mean here to criticise President Obama’s policies, in fact I agree with his tact regarding Iran, for the most part. But it is a tact of its time. Which is a good thing. Our world is changing, the solutions of the future are not the solutions of the past, and America now has a President that understands that.

Footnotes

1. I apologize if I’m grossly wrong about any of the history of the Byzantine Empire; I’m mostly working off of memory for this, and even then my knowledge and analysis is mostly cursory.

A senior engineer at General Motors, who shepherds the production of a new hybrid vehicle that will turn out to be a best-seller, shouldn’t get a bonus for that. Really?

Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan, who has managed his company’s assets adeptly and kept it mostly off the taxpayer’s dole, is no more deserving of a bonus than an AIG crook. Really?

An mid-level investment banker at Morgan Stanley, who works her butt off to persuade her bosses to facilitate a deal for a new wind-power company that turns out to be a big economic and environmental winner, should have her incentive compensation taxed at 90%. Really?

An administrative assistant at PNC, who is volunteering to work 70-hour weeks because of cutbacks in the company’s staff, deserves a Christmas Bonus — unless her husband happens to be a lawyer earning $250,000 per year, in which case it should be taken away. Really?

$500,000 in salary for an employee that performs badly is perfectly fine, but a $500,000 bonus for one who performs exceptionally well isn’t. Really?

I’m sensitive to these issues, and I don’t know a lot of the details of the bailout process. In fact, I’d even be willing to concede that this legislation probably should’ve been limited to AIG due to their brazen shamelessness with regards to public outcry about these outrageous bonuses.

That said, fuck the bonuses. Do senior engineers even get bonuses when their products succeed? None of the engineers I spoke to when I was studying to be an engineer gave me that impression. Do successful companies need to take bailout money? If not, then no one at JP Morgan deserves a bonus, because their company on the whole didn’t succeed. If JP Morgan is “mostly off the taxpayer’s dole” it’s still on the taxpayers dole, and it’s there because of their failures.

This is ignoring the strawman inherent to a lot of these discussions. A senior-engineer creating a hybrid vehicle; an investment banker facilitating a deal for a wind-power company; a woman working 70 hour weeks while her husband makes more than $250,000.

Have the American automotive companies really shown any interest in hybrid or electric vehicles? The electric vehicles that were shuttered nearly a decade ago despite consumer demand tell me otherwise. Maybe that will change given the new incentives enacted by the Obama administration, but do we really want to pay out of both hands by giving bonuses to people working because of these industry-wise incentives?

And if there were any low-level investment bankers financing wind-power, it probably wouldn’t need a multi-billionaire like T Boone Pickens to get the marginal level of support it currently has. If wind power doesn’t succeed it won’t be because a low-level investment banker — who should do his fucking job, I don’t get bonuses — okayed a wind-power company, but because the government forces the industry into making it a success.

The assistant working 70 hour work weeks — volunteering them no less — has a husband that makes a quarter million dollars. First off, why is she volunteering to work these arduous hours? Because she’ll get fired otherwise? I don’t think that’s legal. Because she wants the bonus? Her husband makes $250,000, does she really need that third big screen TV?

None of these examples are both realistic and sympathetic, at least not to me. Even if they were, those people all still have a job, and not just a job but a well-paying job. Which is a lot more than a lot of the people whose lives were destroyed by the myopic mismanagement of all of these companies.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

First of all, the cabinet of a presidential administration is not there to meet racial quotas or to pay back favors done during the campaign. They are there to advise the president, and ensure their mandates are implemented. (I’m grossly simplifying this because I barely know American politics, and yet I still know this guy’s stupid)

If you think there are more qualified people that should be in Obama’s cabinet that’s a perfectly fine criticism, but they can’t be more “qualified” because of the race of the parents. You fucking idiot.

Second of all, Obama was not a good choice because he’s black, and Gonzales certainly wasn’t a good choice because he’s Latino. The fraction of people that voted for Obama simply to breach a racial barrier in politics is not what won him the presidency. It was his political acumen, in collusion with the economic meltdown and an infamously bad sitting president. I’m sure his race helped him in some groups and hurt him in others. But in the end, he won primarily because he was the best person for the job.

Basically, that guy’s a douche and a moron. He also defends Bush’s appointment of a Latino to Commerce Secretary and immediately follows it up with a rebuke of Obama because he appointed Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary. The guy’s a moron, people.

It’s shitty half of the time because it’s cloying and cliche and the other half of the time because it’s deceitful. The first half is the stuff you see in one minute mini-infomercials late at night. The second half is the stuff that makes it out of the core Christian Rock culture and into mainstream rock.

Switchfoot. POD. Seventh Day Slumber. This Beautiful Republic. Christian Rock bands generally have really lame names. And if you run across the music of any of the bands that “pass” as regular rock, you’d probably like it enough to listen but not enough to love it. It becomes a part of the din of songs that get played on your local rock radio station. But, for me at least, when you find out they are a Christian Rock band, suddenly every time their songs come on you can hear nothing beyond their hidden evangelizing.

It’s not that I dislike that they infuse their music with their religious beliefs; the best music comes from your most strongly felt emotions. But those bands go about it in a deceitful way. When interviewed they claim they’re not “Christian Rock” even when they began their career in the highly accessible Christian Rock tours that can really raise the profile of up and coming bands. I understand that the label of “Christian Rock” has a dirty connotation to it, but it has that because of bands like those that deny the meanings behind their songs. Rather than admit that they’re praising God, they pretend the song is about a girl.

The less notable segment of Christian Rock isn’t much better. With their over-the-top references to Jesus and God, they go beyond simply expressing their feelings and thoughts and head into the world of evangelizing. And when your songs are little more than evangelical chants wrapped in rhythm, you not only lock yourself into the Christian base, a base which doesn’t need evangelizing in the first place, but you reduce your credibility as an artist.

I’m an atheist but that doesn’t mean I detest religion; I simply have no need or desire for it in my personal life. But many of my favourite shows and movies have religious and mystical concepts at their very heart. So don’t think I hate Christian Rock simply because it involves God. I hate it because it involves God poorly.

An example of a band which is not Christian Rock but has lyrics which discuss God and Jesus very openly (and earnestly) is Page France. I’ve listened to most of Page France’s “Hello, Dear Wind” and overall the album’s a little weak, but the tracks that I find myself returning to since the initial listen — the opening two tracks (Chariot, and Jesus) and the closing track (Feather) — all contain various levels of religious and Christian symbols. But the key is that those songs talk about Jesus and God in novel ways, and they appear to be not an active part of their music. Their songs don’t include God because they think their songs should include God, but merely because the songs they end up writing include him.

I said Christian Rock sucks, but the truth is that Christian Rock shouldn’t even exist. Like the “Pro-American” parts of America Sarah Palin talks about, Rock music isn’t something to be chopped up and spread among ideologies. Music which contains religious references isn’t Religious Music. Categorizing music is fine, in fact I Love it, but there’s a difference between an adjective and a noun. A noun is what you are, but an adjective is simply a modifier. Much like the difference between calling a gay person “a gay” and “a gay person” it seem nominal at best, but the difference is staggering in its connotations. And far too many people don’t treat “Christian Rock” as an adjective followed by a noun.

Footnotes

1. With apologies to Daniel Tosh

I don’t know if Penn supports McCain or Obama, or if perhaps he’s going to write in Ron Paul to assuage his Libertarian leanings, but his comment on voting from ideals implies to me that he’s going for McCain/Palin and the only way to intellectually justify that was for him to say “vote for ideals, not capability.” (Of course, if that was his rationalization, he probably should have also looked at the extreme religious views of Palin, which would likely disqualify her in his mind)

I respect Penn Jillette, because Penn and Teller: Bullshit is a great show. I don’t agree with everything they say on their show, but on the balance it’s a public service that they talk about these things that tend to go unnoticed or unchallenged. That said, I think that voting exclusively from ideals is lunacy.

Now obviously policies matter. If you’re a strict Libertarian, you’ll probably never vote for someone who wants to increase the size of government or introduce anything remotely socialistic, but that doesn’t mean you should vote for the incompetent guy just because he wants to give you a tax cut. I’m just saying, let’s not be idealogues about this. There are numerous things that should factor into any decision you make, and the decision as to who will lead your nation for the next four years especially should not be so oversimplified.

This doesn’t belittle what he accomplished. He was willing to fight obscenity laws when no one else would. He attacked establishments like the government and the catholic church and wasn’t afraid to call them on their corruption and greed. But at the same time, he said some pretty stupid shit.

While discussing pornography and obscenity laws, he claims that pornography and obscenity laws are there to stop entrapment of wholesome people by prurient interests. His defense of what he does and other so-called obscene and pornographic works of the time is that they are not as a whole prurient in nature and so should not be judged by those laws. I’m OK with that part, but along the way he accepts and endorses the initial claim that pornography is essentially entrapment, that people are unable to resist material which arouses them. Seriously?

Are we expected to believe that someone can come across a magazine rack with a Playboy on it and be unable to maintain his composure and act like a rational human being? This seems like an absurdly backward view for Lenny Bruce, someone I’ve always understood to be a very forward thinking man, to have.

At least with pornography he defends most cases of it by virtue of its artistic merit, or the difficulty of objective analysis of artistic merit. But when it comes to drugs he’s just plain fucking nuts. He made the claim that there really are no drug addicts aside from the dozen or so the various law enforcement agencies have on the take. He describes heroin, in spirit if not in exactly these words, as a drug that no one uses. Maybe its merely that Lenny Bruce has the disadvantage of being dead and therefore unable to update his facts to modern day, but heroin and cocaine and other such hard drugs are a huge problem and their users are many.

Lenny Bruce was vastly influential — and without him we might never have had George Carlin or any of the other idols of modern comedy — but from my limited exposure to his work he doesn’t seem like a particularly great comedian, and his political stances, which are the core of his comedy, fluctuate wildly; maybe his own addictions tainted his responses on drugs, maybe the fact that he liked to swear and the fact that his job required not swearing guided his opinion on censorship. Either way, Lenny Bruce was a deeply flawed man, who managed to incite a revolution. Because of his work, obscenity became less obscene. Because of him, and others of that time, I can say “fuck” or “shit” or even “cunt” whenever I want. And that’s a freedom, like any other for which we’ve fought in the history of civilization, we should never take for granted.

First of all, Bill Clinton’s speech was really good and was the best so far at explaining the core problems of the republican party. Some of the online pundits are saying that his arguments against the last 25 years of Republican policy would have been better if focused on just the last 8 years, but I think that the very problem is that they’re trying to sustain decades old policies without reevaluating them based on new evidence. Obviously, Bush’s policies are broken, but they’re not broken solely due to Bush’s incompetence, the deeply entrenched problems of the Republican party clearly contributed.

I do think that Hillary’s speech last night, or what I saw of it, was a bit better in its rhetoric, a bit more lyrical and driving, but Bill Clinton’s speech had more depth, more reasoning, much more information about why McCain was the wrong choice and why Obama was the right one. And of course, he let fly those magic words: “Barack Obama is ready to lead.” and hearing that coming from a former president carries a lot of weight.

I see the Clintons’ two speeches as a one two punch. The first telling Hillary’s supporters to really think about why the voted for Hillary and why they shouldn’t vote for McCain. It was a very feminist-oriented speech with many references to the suffrage movement and the great strides her campaign made to eliminating the inequalities between genders our society still grapples with. The second speech was much broader, attacking the Republicans for claiming that Obama is too inexperienced, just what they said about Bill in ’92. It also touched on why our foreign policy needs to change, and that part of the speech left the best most quotable line from his entire speech where he said that America should lead by the power of their example and not by example of their power.

After Clinton, I saw a bit of John Kerry’s speech but not the whole thing. While it did bring up some good points and continued the attack on McCain, I found myself having trouble listening to it because Kerry’s delivery was lacking. Basically, even though I agreed with what he said, he still sounded like a tool.

Finally, Biden closed out the night with a retelling of his and Obama’s life stories, emphasizing the decisions Obama made to get to this position, letting the people know that this is someone who cares about the nation and genuinely wants to fix it and isn’t just some politician seeking power. In regards to his attacks on McCain, I thought the first was bad and reminiscent of McCain “that’s not change we can believe in… [disturbing chuckle]” speech — though not as bad, half because of Biden’s delivery and half because the audience was willing to at least feign excitement — but I thought the second was really good and probably connected with many more people. For weeks and months now people from every corner of the political realm have been questioning Obama’s judgment and ability to lead the nation. Biden’s repeated refrain of “McCain was wrong. Obama was right.” was really good at showing that just because McCain’s been in the game longer doesn’t mean he’s the better man for the job.

I also want to make a special note of Beau Biden. His introductory speech for his father was amazing. It truly and honestly moved me and I welled up a few times. That guy’s going places if he wants to.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the speeches from the DNC so far and thought they’ve painted a compelling argument against McCain as much as it has been for Obama. And watching all of this convincing compelling rhetoric demanding change and improvement for our government definitely got me fired up and ready to go. I can hardly wait for Obama to turn these four nights of speeches into a Grand Slam.

I don’t talk politics all that much on this site, but the fact that McCain is gaining ground on Obama despite being the poorer choice for every rational metric is driving me crazy. The image above is one of the most telling images about the disparity between McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns.

At first glance, McCain’s seems better because he just drops all taxes across the board. But you will then quickly notice that not all taxes are equal: the rich get huge tax breaks, and the poor get hardly any. Meanwhile Obama taxes the top 1% richest people more and gives the poorest much bigger tax breaks. 60% of tax paying citizens, the bottom three tax brackets, save anywhere from 3 to 50 times more money under Obama’s plan.

So the super-rich lose more of their income, but retain their super-richness, and the poor and middle class families get a tax break, all while losing less money overall allowing for the massive country deficit to be recovered faster. How is anyone still supporting McCain?