The Oncoming Hope

I've struggled to record my exact feelings on yesterday's acquittal. The court delivered an awful verdict that suggested that certain key questions are beside the point: What is the crime? Who committed it? Why? How?

Apart from the racial aspects of the case, which others have covered far more eloquently than I could, I'm disturbed by the way the final decision failed to reflect an actual crime. Isn't the whole notion of Western justice based on cause and effect? Crime and punishment?

We're left with the fact that a man was murdered, but hey, that's cool, just an annoying gnat of a fact irrelevant to the case at hand.

No one seems bothered by the proportionality of Zimmerman's act. That a man with a gun shot a kid without a weapon of any kind. That a guy who wilfully ignored police orders should not be allowed a gun in any circumstance.  That even when you strip away all the politics around this, the facts remain: a man with a gun shot an unarmed teenager.

A man with a gun shot an unarmed teenager, and apparently that's ok. What is our justice system even worth when that kind of core simplicity can be flim-flammed away?

This verdict is a travesty, and even if Zimmerman's acts are perfectly lawful, then we have to question the substance of the laws themselves.

Let's see how the civil trial fares.

The United States Democratic Review must be one of the strangest publications in our nation's brief history. A strong proponent of Jacksonian democracy (and the ugliest aspects of Jacksonian democracy - annexation and manifest destiny), it also published work by a number of humanist and transcendental thinkers. Despite an editorial position that constitutes the worst of American jingoism, brilliant (and prescient) pieces, like the one below, snuck in.

I've referred to the original periodical, and cannot find an attribution. The logical assumption, then, would be that the editor wrote it, but its strong support of human rights, and the rights of a "lesser species", suggests otherwise. The Sepoy rebellion is a classic case of the victor writing the history - as far as the British Imperialists were concerned, it never happened. But to everyone else, the act was plain - one man killed a missionary, and the British army slaughtered 30,000 Indians and called it "civilized".

You don't need to look far to see recent incidents that mirror this. Anyway, read it and play along in the comments.

Abuses of Victory - British Morals in India (Dec. 1858, in the United States Democratic Review)

In exploring the annals of history, on almost every page is seen a record of the triumphs of one nation over another nation - of one race over another race. If this record is prepared by the victorious party, it is filled with exaggerations of the magnitude of its triumphs; teems with eulogy of the victors, and with detractions from the vanquished. If, on the contrary, the record emanates from the defeated party, a very different picture is drawn; then the pencil of the artist paints the character of the victors in deep crimson, and the pen of the historian draws black lines around their memory. In this manner successful brutality and force may be placed before the world in the light of heroism and patriotic achievement - sometimes even robed in the mantle of Christianity - while an unsuccessful effort to maintain the right, and defend the innocent, is stigmatized as barbarous and infamous; - and this is history. Prejudices as deep as these, it is feared, have controlled English writers in recording the events consequent upon the war of their country with India.

The history of that war, while it does but simple justice to the bravery of Englishmen, is a sealed book to the impartial truth of what has really been enacted in that distant country by British officers and soldiers. An occasional account of the doings of the English army in India reaches us through other sources than their own, and a recital of their deeds chlills the blood of the most cruel, as did the statements of the butchery by the infuriated Bengal Sepoys of foreigners who were in India at the commencement of hostilities.

The halo of glory that should have decked the brows of the heroic Havelock, Lawrence, Neill, and Nicholson, was dimmed by the blood of a hundred thousand defenceless natives in the subsequent conquests and brutalities by the British army. The wrath and indignation of the civilized world were justly aroused when the barbarous Sepoys waded through seas of Christian blood to secure the heads of two or three missionaries whom they regarded as their enemies; but no word of reproach is heard against the British soldiery when they form a catacomb of the corpses of thirty thousand Sepoys, whom they slaughtered in cold blood, for no other cause than that one of their number was guilty of a barbarous murder; and he had been delivered to the English for execution when demanded, but this could not appease their thirst for revenge.

Were the true history of this devastating war written, many barbarous exhibitions of this kind would be recorded to the shame of British victories in India. After conquering their degraded and imbecile foes, they assume or acquire the instincts of the blood-hound, and trail them wherever they flee, until the native soil of India is saturated with innocent blood - and this brutality the proud nation of Britain calls "civilized warfare. To use their own language, they

"Through SOFT degrees
Subdued them to the peaceful and the GOOD."

If the British historian who attempts to illustrate the humanizing and christianizing influence of the war in India, by the lines just quoted, was a mere satirist endeavoring to create in the public mind the most sickening disgust for the inhumanity and heartlessness practised by the conquerors of India, he coul d not find two lines better adapted to his purpose. "Through soft degrees" indeed - through the cannon, sword, rifle and the bayonet - they "subdued them to the peaceful and the good!"' Such hypocritical cant was never before employed by any writer claiming respectability, in discussing a subject of such solemn importance as that attached to the extinction of a nation, who, although not far advanced in civilization, were enjoying a large share of independence and contentment, until invaded by British rapacity, and by unscrupulous adventurers, who first sought their wealth, afterwards their liberty, and finally, their lives.

The writer referred to, and who penned the lines above extracted in eulogy of the British administration in India, admits that the nations, at least those inhabiting the country of the Five Rivers, were in the enjoyment, at an early period of their history, of a system of government well adapted to promote their interests as an independent people. He says, "Its form of government was a federation of chieftains, each independent of others, who met together at intervals to provide for their common safety, and furnish each his armed contingent for the public service."  Their motto was Wa Gooroojee ha Kalsa - Victory to the state of Gooroo. In their religion's creed they taught that all men were equal in the sight of God - that distinctions of caste were not a principle of faith - that differences of religion did not debar men from a common charity. Socially, they occupied a fair position,--industry and frugality were visible everywhere among them. This, in brief, seemed to be the condition of the people of India previous to being oppressed by taxes, and despoiled of their lands and their liberty by the conquering army of England, urged on by a ministry as false to its own nation as it was heartless and cruel to the inhabitants of India.

But it is not our present purpose to enter into a discussion of the merits of this war, nor would we have referred to it at this time, except for the fact that the latest advices from India seem to present a condition of moral degeneracy among the people, growing out of British influence and conquest, which is unparalleled in infamy in the the most barbarous ages.

"Housewives! You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout!"

Published by the Albany Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage. What makes this even more odd is that one of the main contributors to this organization was Mary Arthur, better known to you as the sister of President Chester Arthur.

About a month ago, Gap released a special series of GQxGap crossover designs by Mark Mcnairy, who GQ dubbed one of America's "Best New Designers." While it's concerning that a man who writes white letters on t-shirts can be consider a "best new" anything, we're not here to talk about design. We're here to talk about manifest destiny.

The charitable view suggests that Mr. McNairy does not know what the term means. Let's let the originator, one John L. O'Sullivan in 1845, explain his phrase:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

So what did this mean? The Belle Jar explains what this means better than I could (I would just sing a tune of GENOCIDE! GENOCIDE!):

Manifest Destiny and the philosophy behind it are responsible for a whole bunch of really terrible things. It was used to justify the Mexican-American War, the War of 1812, and, most appallingly, the Indian Removal Act. Manifest Destiny was used to vindicate the myriad abuses suffered by people of colour at the hands of white North Americans. It’s the philosophy that lead to our continent-wide reservation system , not to mention the residential schools created for the Aboriginal peoples of Canada.

The effects of Manifest Destiny can still be felt, in the poverty and degradation suffered by American and Canadian people of colour, and in the deplorable conditions found on many reserves, both here and south of the border. The ideas behind manifest destiny still exist in our white western consciousness, as much as we might be loathe to admit it; they come up every time our (largely white) government asserts that it knows best when it comes to First Nations issues, or every time someone complains about how much freaking money has already been spent on Attawapiskat only to have their community still be in a state of crisis. Manifest Destiny is apparent every time someone chooses to be bigoted and wilfully ignorant about non-white immigrants, or tries to deny the far-reaching effects of racism; it’s apparent in the mindset of all the people who never take a moment to wonder why or how so many white people ended up owning so much fucking land.

Unfortunately, social media proves that he's very much aware of the phrase's significance. After one student created a Change.org petition against the shirt, Mcnairy replied with a tastefully crafted tweet (now deleted, of course):

Yes, survival of the melanin-deficient folks with the big sticks that go boom.

Gap (and McNairy) probably aren't trying to start a race war; they probably think that "ooh! this is a phrase that someone cool once said, maybe even the sort of hipster who wears black t-shirts with white lettering!" Or even more charitably, "let's reclaim the phrase for capitalism! We're promoting the destiny of lawbooks!"

But Gap is one of the guiltiest parties in subverting human rights by using sweatshops overseas. Even in markets with rigid anti-sweatshop laws, like South India, the conditions are appalling - open sewage streaming out into unpaved streets in remote factories, 12 hour days even when the monsoon floods the workroom floor.

This is manifest destiny today. That it's ok for the "not-we" to suffer so Americans can have cheap clothes.

The lingering effects of manifest destiny, well, they linger.

Mark McNairy has issued an official apology. Gap has removed the shirts from the website, but they're still available in stores. Make of that what you will.

When the so-called silly season rounds the bend of silly and enters into a world that might kindly be described as completely absurd, I turn to the master of the absurd himself: one Samuel Clemens, née in your mind as Mark Twain.

As serendipity goes, I happened to be reading Penguin Books' collection of Marky Mark's "Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches," which features a little gem called "A Presidential Candidate", which ran in the New York Evening Post on June 9, 1879.

There's more than an element of Jonathan Swift here: "Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages!," he prescribes, as tasty a recipe for canned workingmen as can be found anywhere.

But I'll distract you no longer. Laugh/grimace away.

"A Presidential Candidate", by Mark Twain

I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated. Now I am going to enter the field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why -- let it prowl.

In the first place, I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850. He was old and inexpert in climbing trees, but with the heartless brutality that is characteristic of me I ran him out of the front door in his nightshirt at the point of a shotgun, and caused him to bowl up a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have another grandfather. I am as inhuman now as I was in 1850. I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of imitating Washington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be Napoleonic in its grandeur.

My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.

The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice?

I admit also that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade with that region. I shall recommend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: "Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages."

These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the country. If my country don't want me, I will go back again. But I recommend myself as a safe man -- a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.

Two episodes of Political Animals have left me with less of an opinion on the show itself, which is a sort of feel-good trashy romp with a facade of political relevance, but with more appreciation for the narrative construction of The Good Wife.

Superficial comparisons abound. While Political Animals explicitly bases its lead on Hillary Clinton, The Good Wife uses the story of the jilted political wife to deliver a deep dive into how politics, relationships, professionalism tie in with the consistently difficult task of being a woman.

So while the story has to go through some of the same beats (the iconic image of the wife standing by the husband on the podium as he admits his faults, the horror of discovery, the complexity behind the decision to stay or leave), it's telling which beats each story omits.

The Good Wife doesn't spend a lot of time on the tears; when we meet Alicia Florrick, she's competent, she's independent, and she's completely certain of what she needs in her professional life. The Good Wife focuses on how she moves forward, not what brought her to this point. We're shown exactly why Alicia doesn't leave Peter as yet, and we realize that in the end, dealing with Peter's the lowest priority in Alicia's life, given that her whole world has come down around her. In fact, it isn't until season three that we get the scene where Alicia first learns about Peter's indiscretions.

Political Animals, on the other hand, seems totally mired in the relationship between Bud and Elaine. One major problem with the show so far is how Bud seems to have such a hold on Elaine's life, even though there's no evident reason why she would ever have loved him, why she would have stayed with him, and why she relies on him now. We're shown, again and again, that she doesn't really need him in her personal life, so allowing him back in doesn't seem true to the character.

I'll allow that few shows get off to such a strong start as The Good Wife. It almost seems churlish to compare the two: TGW is a novelistic tale that teases out very serious themes, while Political Animals aims to be trashy entertainment (and succeeds admirably). Nor should they be more similar; Alicia and Elaine, despite the surface similarities, are very different women. If anything, Elaine's more of an example of when the world crashes down on a Diane Lockhart.

All that said, Political Animals does manage to mimic my personal favorite aspect of TGW: the Alicia/Kalinda. As with that favored pair, PA features a wonderfully prickly but respectful relationship between Elaine and Carla Gugino's fabulous reporter. It seems that in this show, too, the tensions between their deeper solidarity will drive the show forward. And I can't wait to see where it goes.

The climactic scene in Thor takes place upon the cinematic equivalent of Mario Kart's "Rainbow Road." This is an unfortunate allusion for the filmmaker to make, given that the characters in Thor are drawn with even less depth than Mario and Luigi.

vs.

A microscopically drawn love story between Thor and Ugh!GardenState apparently provides the basis for Loki's terrible decisions in the last third of the movie. This from a character whose machinations are so invisible that no one should be able to sense them. That the Asgardian courtiers do sense them makes the movie about a million times more difficult to enjoy. He's smart, and he's thoughtful, but hey, that must mean he's evil.

Basically, Thor's the kind of guy Asgard would have a beer with. Despite no evidence whatsoever that he's anything but a warmongering dilettante, the Asgardians wet their pants at the very mention of him, forgetting that his decision-making capabilities rest ever so slightly above that of your average houseplant.

I'm not saying that Thor doesn't deserve character growth or redemption, but it's frankly ludicrous that anyone would place their faith in him before he earns his redemption.

The movie's total commitment and belief in Thor's frat-boy wonderfulness undermines everything else that actually works in the movie, like the underlying themes of brother vs. brother, which were explored with such great success in The Social Network.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's drawn to geekdom because the winners are rarely the pretty, the popular, or the strong. Genre fiction tends to favor the clever, the ones who use their brains and their wits to get by in the world. In this post-colonial world, do we really need another hero whose only functional attribute is a toothy grin and the ability to beat the shit out of his lessers?

There's no choice involved in Thor being Thor. He's born with his kingdom, and wins it back from Loki with nothing more than a little violence. Even Tony Stark, blessed with his millions and his brains, makes the moral choice to use his power for good. Same with Bruce Wayne. Thor? He's just born with it. Why would he bother to be a just ruler at all? And more to the point, why does anyone believe in him as a ruler?

Things I DID Like:

• Kat Dennings
• Kat Dennings
• Kat Dennings
• Darcy
• Tom Hiddleston's performance as Loki

They say a picture (such as the one above) is worth a thousand words. And yet, few things are as well said as 140 characters of Teju Cole. "The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm."

And hipster white dudes! We must all celebrate the entrenchment of heinous stereotypes because, hey, we didn't know there were child soldiers in Africa. And not just any country in Africa, by the way, but obviously the conditions are exactly the same throughout the whole dark continent.

Creating a false narrative (and therefore a false consciousness) will create lasting barriers to effective action from other individuals and organizations.

And by the way, guys, as Visible Children points out, Invisible Children's finances are public:

Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production.

Even Foreign Affairs takes umbrage with IC's myopia, stating that it:

“manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.”

In other words, it's racist.

I leave you with Cole's rather provocative (and infinitely less sarcastic) 7 thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.

The internet as it exists today is the living embodiment of a libertarianism/near-anarchy that Americans sometimes dream about, a land as open and free as the wild west, only without that pesky native problem. Still, others want to impose their own laws on citizens of the web. Unsurprisingly, the internet is fighting back.

Free speech advocates and civil agitators around the globe regularly emphasize how internet access opens up opportunities for dissent. Voluntary service disruption by internet companies is a wholly new method of dissent, this time from the world of business, who don't typically use populist tactics to achieve their aims. Let's call it what it is: wikipedia, reddit, and all the rest, have basically just gone on strike.

Digital disruption seems like the apotheosis of civil disobedience, despite the fact that the companies involved are not breaking any laws or physically challenging anyone.

They are corporations who are refusing to provide a service, in the name of a cause. If corporations are people, then they damn well have the right to act like people, to draw attention to their causes and to even cause disruption.

The fact that this disruption occurs in a realm that was practically fictional until a decade ago seems both climactic and anticlimactic. Universally disruptive protest now is in the areas that we resolutely can live without, and in fact did live without for centuries. Will the wikipedia blackout lead to worldwide starvation or even civil inconvenience? Certainly not. A few thousand high school students will be at a loss for whom to plagiarize.

And yet, this form of protest seems the literal definition of "hitting them where it hurts." You can occupy a dozen Zuccotti Parks, you can challenge inumerable City Halls, but in each instance, you're only affecting the local area. For whatever reason, we have all opted into this ridiculous airy-fairy wireless internet space, and so we are all affected by its vagaries. And have we really been exposed to its whims and fancies until now?

These blackouts are partially a victory for Anonymous. They may not be an organization to praise, but their extremist position has forced many neutral entities to take a stand of one kind or the other. They proved, to the surprise of many, that you can disrupt real lives simply by shutting websites down. For every social network that sells itself out to dictatorial governments, for every currency exchange that bows down to illegal censorship, there are dozens of companies fighting for free speech, if only to protect their own right to exist.

Hegemonic websites like Wikipedia are aware of their power in people's lives. In a rare event, these anarchic internet behemoths are on the same side as the people, against even larger media corporations who are looking only to protect their status quo. So what happens when other web companies start protecting their own interests in this manner? How about if WebMD goes down to protect women's right to choice? Or Gmail blacks out in protest of the Patriot Act? These are powerful political tools, and the government has no legal basis to force these companies to resume service.

I was saddened to hear about the passing of Vaclav Havel, who's a bit of a personal hero. A playwright and a politician, an essayist and a revolutionary, he used art and words to fight totalitarianism.

Havel led a movement that exemplifies one of the core ideals of The Oncoming Hope: that acts of peace can be just as aggressive as acts of violence.

In a century when Czechoslavia became a pawn in all the major geopolitical wars of the 20th century, Havel relied on the most old-fashioned weapon: words.

His words followed four main themes: that every human being has personal responsibility to make the world a better place. That even the tiniest white lies can lead to intellectual dishonesty. That you cannot govern from ideology, only through care and responsibility. That power must not be used in service of preserving that power.

Most importantly, he championed the notion that ideals cannot and should not be compromised for the sake of expediency, or you poison the well entirely.

These are the ideological bases for non-violent revolution. Like Gandhi, he protected principle at all costs. Unlike Gandhi, he lived to govern the nation he helped to liberate, and governed its peaceful transition into two states.

I've had the pleasure of visiting both the Czech Republic and Slovakia in recent years. There's something in the air in both of those countries, something intangible, a freedom from the guilt that mars the history of so many European nations. A forward motion, perhaps, that comes from the immaculate conception of their nationhood.

As our political culture devolves into something almost as mature as a children's playground, Havel reminds us that politics should not be treated as an end unto itself, it's a tool to protect our free and just lives as humans.

I leave you with his motto: "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred."

Do yourself a favor. Read Reason's account of Havel and how he was inspired by the Velvet Underground and other rock acts.

Good morning to you all on this fine Thanksgiving day! Today I'm going to bite the bullet and write about Occupy Wall Street. I haven't written about it until now, mainly because it feels like wading into a vast quicksand that might swallow me whole.

But it's time to step in. I still have reservations, but they are allayed by two simple observations:

a) It's absolutely amazing to see a unified protest movement come together in the US, even if they aren't coming together for something specific.

b) I cannot put it better than Lemony Snicket: "It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view."

So while I lack the necessary conviction to actually join the protests or support them materially, I am still thankful to them, for one reason in particular: they have turned the media rhetoric back onto the government instead of the silly personality coverage the MSM's been obsessed with for the last year.

I may be watching from afar, but what I see horrifies me. When the police adopt military style tactics on the behest of the government, that is a violation of our social contract. State and local government officials attempting to silence 1st amendment rights? That's a violation of our social contract.

Ironically, given its name, Occupy Wall Street reminds us that the problem isn't one entity or sector. The problem is the realignment of our relationship with the government, which has been steadily moving in the wrong direction for almost 50 years. The U.S. government has ceased to be "by the people, for the people," and has become preoccupied with self-perpetuation and preservation of power. This has been the number one preoccupation in foreign policy for the last century. Unfortunately, this ideology has now taken over domestic policy as well.

I firmly support the principles of democracy and capitalism. But we've allowed the rules to change, and they've been changed to serve those who are already in power and deny agency to those who don't have it.

Representational democracy only works if the representatives take their responsibilities to the people seriously. The influx of money, lobbyists and corruption is making it impossible for representatives to focus on the needs of the people who elected them.

Capitalism can't function in a vacuum. It needs rules. You can't blame the financial sector for pushing the boundaries when the boundaries are so lax in the first place. We also need to find a way to reconfigure capitalism so it doesn't rely on unfettered materialism.

There aren't easy answers to any of these questions, and any movement that purports to have easy answers should not be trusted. We have suffered so long from the impact of black-and-white thinking that we need to clear space for serendipity.

The system as it stands isn't working. But that doesn't mean we should turn back to ideologies that have already failed in the past, or continue to fail elsewhere in the world.

We need to approach this problem like the founding fathers did: thinking through the situation logically, arguing loudly when necessary, and most importantly, considering the future and not just the short-term.

You don't have to support or like Occupy Wall Street to recognize that it's caused a genuine cognitive shift in the media and amongst intellectuals. And for that, I'm thankful.

Well, let's see: Asian man in blackface performing voodoo stereotypes, chasing after the virginal white woman who beats the native threat with the salvation of Jesus. That's not racist at all! Take a look:

There is literally nothing about this video that isn't steeped in the most dangerous colonial stereotypes. Florence is explicitly styled as a Pre-Raphaelite Mary Magdalene, and we witness her literal fall. Her safe relationship with God is threatened by the evil natives and their evil religion.

It's everything that's terrible about European colonialism over the centuries, all wrapped up in a very ugly bow. It's not even a specific native that's threatening her, it's a composite native. An Asian in blackface!

Let's forget the fact that blackface is never ok, unless you're making a specific point about the wrongness of blackface (see Mad Men, Tropic Thunder) or you're playing the role respectfully.

Let's ignore the fact that this video engages with specific racial stigmas that have been used to downplay the autonomy of natives in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Let's even ignore the rabid anti-feminism at the very core of the plotline.

What's MOST offensive is the fact that this concept went past the artist, her musicians, the director, the sound crew, the film crew, the lighting tech, the CGI people, and the record company executives and NO ONE PUT A STOP TO IT.

Flail away in the comments.

John Derbyshire, writing in the National Review, begins his latest screed with this wonderful opening line:

Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing?

Yes, the man who's written such wonderful pieces for The Corner as "Did Feminism Kill Nursing" and "What Happened to Hot Stewardesses?" has added sexual harassment denialism to his arsenal of idiocy.

The former has gems such as this:

Nowadays. of course, things have gone much further, on both sides of the Atlantic. You can now take a Ph.D. in nursing — for example at Johns Hopkins University. The average large American hospital has more administrators than had British India. Feminist theory has fixed its clammy grip on the whole nursing enterprise, and the old notion that nurses (mostly female — in Mother's day male nurses were assumed to be homosexual unless they presented convincing evidence to the contrary) were the handmaidens of doctors (mostly male) is Jim Crow to the new generation of nurses. Keeping the patient clean and comfortable has given way to "analyzing and transforming health care data into information that can be used by health care providers to evaluate patient care and economic outcomes," as the Johns Hopkins course brochure puts it.

Learning from empirical data! The horror!

Meanwhile, the latter article defies logic, reason and relevance with this:

Much was made of the hotness of Amanda Knox after four years in an Italian jail; but when the family-reunion pictures appeared, it turned out her sister was even hotter. What are the odds?

John Derbyshire adds fire to a long-standing theory of mine: the worst Republicans are the British ones.

Not many nations have a state-sanctioned death penalty: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, China and the United States. Now that's what I call hallowed company.

36 states in the United States allow the death penalty. That's 36 too many.

I can repeat facts until I'm blue in the face, but that's not the problem here. The problem is fundamentally with how we view "justice".

Troy Davis was sentenced to death for a crime in which there are now serious doubts. His conviction was based on the testimony of 9 witnesses, 7 of whom recanted. One of the remaining witnessses is the man that the other witnesses said actually committed the crime. There was no physical evidence tying Davis to the crime.

Troy Davis was left lying on a gurney for 5 hours yesterday as the US Supreme Court considered his last minute appeal. Here's the problem. He was convicted because, at the time, there was no reasonable doubt about his guilt. To get a conviction overturned, there must be no reasonable doubt about his innocence.

Now that's pretty twisted.

In this case, justice has been treated as the correct and proper adherence to procedural norms. Creating procedural norms is a well-established technique used by countries who wish to institutionalize atrocity.

Once you have a legal framework that allows execution, you can slowly expand the reasons that justify execution. That is actually what has happened in the United States. There are now 41 crimes for which the death penalty is acceptable.

One of them is trafficking in large quantities of drugs (18 U.S.C. 3591 (b)). While drug trafficking hardly counts as a victimless crime, I don't think anyone could equivocate trafficking with murder.

Killing someone for killing someone else is not justice. It's revenge. The taking of one innocent life is too many. But by giving the state the right to execute any citizens at all, we have surrendered too many of our freedoms.

Another day, another twitter fight. These twitter fights have clear rules:

-The initiator clearly did not think through their initial post.
-The initiator takes offense when someone points out that they may have said something wrong.
-The initiatior heaps abuse on the rebutting commentator, and often draws in troops of followers to magnify the abuse so much that no one remembers what they're fighting about.

If you treat Twitter like your high school gym locker, you deserve everything you get thrown at you, even if I share your political/societal/media beliefs.

I'd tell you more of this particular fight, but unfortunately, I don't even feel right revealing who started the fight, given that the initial tweet violated someone's privacy in a frankly heinous fashion. (You can delete tweets hours after you write them, but an hour is a lifetime in social media. The damage is done.)

I'm not looking to turn this site into a gossip column ("Can you believe she said that?"). I'm commenting on this only because this is the third time this has happened this week. Three times now, there have been two people, who seem to be on the same side, who suddenly get into an argument and invent a fictional gulf that cannot be traversed.

In all three cases, the arguments ended with cat-calling, which is frankly embarrassing for the people involved, all of whom are respected political and/or feminist commentators.

In my more pessimistic moments, I wonder if all these new methods of connection and communciation are actually offering distant people more opportunity to abuse each other.

I also wonder if our increasingly uglier national conversations are seeping into personal conversations, normalizing abuse and unfounded accusation and responses made out of anger.

You see, I've always felt that part of the magic of the written word that you can edit out the insults, you can trim the fat and excess, you can reduce your response to the most naked poison if you choose to, and you can do so without cheap insults or expletives.

You can lay out your argument logically and persuasively, and you don't need to demean yourself in the process.

Would anyone have put down Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" because it was vulgar or rude? Of course not. They would have read until the end, and then, maybe, realized they should be offended. That's what writing is. It's a sleight of hand.

Even with hot-button communication methods like twitter, there's always a hesitation before you press enter; if not, there should be.

What burns me is something my mother has told me again and again: you can be saying the right thing until you're blue in the face, but you have to say it the right way, or no one will listen to you.

It really burns me (every pun intended!) that we really ought to be having a national conversation about HPV; women in this country need objective information about how you get it and what can happen if it goes untreated. But namecalling and saying that "Well I have HPV and cervical cancer and therefore I should have the loudest voice" doesn't help anyone. It just tunes people out, and it makes them less receptive to the facts.

The media's abuzz with talk of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which feels like a party I'm obliged to attend even though I really don't want to go.

Part of my revulsion stems from the fact that celebrating the the birthday of such a terrible event feels profoundly...un-American. Can you think of any other tragedy that we actually celebrate? Again and again, we lionize the evil men who committed this heinous act. I've heard interviews with Mohammad Atta's former roommates on one network, and other journalists are talking about what a coup it is for Obama we finally killed Osama bin Laden, one man that it took nearly a decade to find, one man who started a cycle of violence that goes far beyond himself.

We talk again and again of those who lost their lives on that date, denying families the chance to grieve privately, preventing the nation from moving on from this tragedy.

We focus over and over again on the act itself, and we forget about people, real living people. The first responders, who've finally been given health coverage, still don't have coverage for cancer treatments. I'm thinking about them.

All the people who've lost their lives subsequently, in the name of 9/11, I'm thinking about them.

So why are we celebrating the point when so much ugliness began?

What new lessons does anyone believe we can learn today that we haven't learned in the decade since?

In our discourse, 9/11 has become a destructive entity, a black-hole that denies any meaningful analysis outside of its impact in numbers. Mentioning it precludes any discussion of what led to the attack, and invoking it makes any criticism of ensuing national security policy seem unpatriotic or even treasonous.

We can only repeat the facts: the number of deaths, the names of the ringleaders, even the names of the dead. We've heard these info-bytes so many times now that they've lost all meaning.

We experienced 9/11 and we recovered. Why isn't that the story? We didn't succumb completely to fear, we didn't completely surrender the ideals of our nation, though we have veered dangerously close. Why isn't that the story? The message should be of resilience, not of loss.

I am hopeful that the tenth anniversary puts a period on this era where politicians and pundits used 9/11 to exploit America's greatest moment of weakness. They continue to deny that America is a strong nation, that in the most basic definition of safety, America is safe.

I'm running this post a day early so that all those who actually lost beloved friends or family on that day can mourn in peace. But America should not let herself be defined by one tragic event. When we wake up on 9/12, I hope we all work together to create a new narrative.

I hope that in the next decade we can all focus on rebuilding our economy and enabling those people and institutions that made the U.S. strong - our thinkers, our innovators, our scientists, our artists, our entrepreneurs, our workers, our families, our social workers, our teachers.

In the next decade, I hope we can recognize each and every person as an individual, not as cookie-cutter members of some "group".

I hope that, somehow or the other, we can return to governance based on compassion and human rights instead of governance based on politics.

More than anything, I hope we don't need to talk about 9/11 anymore, that we loosen its vise-like grip from our national consciousness.

The glory years of the United States are not in its past. I believe this. And I believe we can work together for a better future.

I may not be in the advertising business, but I still feel qualified to say that Rule #1 in advertising should be: Do Not Make People Feel Sick to Their Stomachs, For They May Turn Away in Revulsion.

Check out the trailer for a little game called Slavery: The Game:

"Buy slaves! Discipline them! Exploit them!"

Check out the weapons you may use to accomplish this discipline and exploitation:

Charming, no?

Controversy has steadily built since the game was previewed on youtube, until finall the people responsible stated the true intent of the game.

Just when you think we've hit the nadir of good taste, we learn that it's an ad for a tv program! An ad designed to "raise awareness for a documentary series airing on Dutch TV," according to The Independent.

So now, the game's website prominently displays "this is not a real game." Cause that makes it more appropriate, of course.

The problem is, as the youtube comments make dreadfully clear, there is actually an audience for this sort of gameplay. It won't be long before some enterprising gamemaker sees an opportunity for a quick buck and turns this game into reality.

Did the trailer at least fulfill its basic job of getting people to watch the documentary? I know that by discussing it here, I am helping it go viral. But as to whether it garners eyeballs? We'll find out next week.

But to me, this method of advertising basically suggests that the documentary will treat the issue of colonial slavery with the same delicacy as this trailer does. Which is to say, with all the subtlety of a spiked club.

Gloria Steinem has been involved with, guided and even transformed almost every major issue in the feminist movement, but there's something about her particular brand of feminism that seems to transcend any one issue.

I've been trying to think why that is. I really enjoyed HBO's documentary, which didn't feel sensational even though it covered a woman who was frequently, well, sensational.

So what makes Gloria Steinem so appealing? I admit, until I watched this documentary, she was very little more than a name to me, the woman who founded Ms. magazine and went undercover to expose the exploitation of the Playboy Bunnies (and I vaguely recall that, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, she's presented as the ideal woman by all the men. Can you imagine a mainstream tv show choosing a feminist as an ideal woman today? Maybe Parks and Recreation. But I digress).

I wonder if this is an institutional problem: in all my gender history related courses at university focussed on academic thinkers at the expense of activists, which is sort of the opposite way to how education covers other civil rights and human rights issues.

This is important to note because there are very real, substantive differences between academic feminism and real-world feminism, the chief one being pragmatism. Steinem carries herself as intelligent, not bitter. She wins crowds through humor, not through righteousness and anger. If she loses a fight she doesn't retreat, she thinks immediately of the next step.

Watch this interview about Hillary Clinton losing the Presidential nomination:

She moves quickly from explaining the significance of Clinton's achievement to why the loss is disappointing to the lessons Barack Obama can learn, and by the end, you feel she genuinely supports candidate Obama. That's an amazing ability, to be true to oneself and also find ways to be positive about an alternate future (or at least to come off that way). It's incredible that she can praise and bury Clinton and manage not to insult Obama in the process, not even in a back-handed way. That's grace, that's elegance.

But I'm not suggesting you take away good sportsmanship from the documentary, but something altogether more difficult: compassion. I believe she was able to unite so many people, to affect so many lives, because she didn't frame the feminist movement in terms of power but in terms of empathy and kindness. Again and again, she stresses the ideal end result: a world where both men and women can live lives reflecting their better selves. To achieve that ideal, you can't have discrimination. It's as simple as that.

In an era where Internet debate on gender becomes ever more rancorous, it seems valuable to remember that lesson: be compassionate, remember what you're fighting for, and do not act in such a way that belies that eventual goal.

For those of you who are interested, here's a great interview that Steinem did about the documentary with Maria Shriver: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/gloria-steinem/

Oncoming Hope, out.

P.S.

I can't find a clip, but in the documentary there is a horrendously awkward interview on Larry King Live from 1991 which seems to have inspired all the awkward humor you'd see today on Parks and Recreation or Arrested Development. Essentially, a woman calls in and says she's been waiting 15 years to talk to Gloria Steinem. Bright smiles all around. Then, you watch Larry King's and Steinem's faces fall as the woman proceeds to accuse Steinem of destroying the world and American society. It's horrible, but you almost can't help laughing.

As a Texas girl, I feel I should be able to offer some sort of special insight into hurricane Rick Perry. The truth is, the man is a complicated mix of occasionally competent and wildly dangerous. He's never met a special interest that he hasn't bowed to in exchange for money, a number of his published and stated beliefs are openly unconstitutional, and yet he handled Hurricane Katrina/Rita better than anyone expected.

I've been trying to come up with something fresh yet erudite about Rick Perry, but I cannot best the evergreen words of Molly Ivins. She may not be with us anymore, but her barbs live on.

Unless otherwise noted, quotes are from her opinion columns in the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

Ivins on Perry's general snake-in-the-grass-ness:

Of all the crass pandering, of all the gross political kowtowing to ignorance, we haven't seen anything this rank from Gov. Goodhair since … gee, last fall.

Then he was trying to draw attention away from his spectacular failure on public schools by convincing Texans that gay marriage was a horrible threat to us all. Now he’s trying to disguise the fact that the schools are in free-fall by proposing that we teach creationism in biology classes.

The funding of the whole school system is so unfair that it has been declared unconstitutional by the Texas Supreme Court. All last year, Rick Perry haplessly called special session after special session, trying to fix the problem, and couldn’t get anywhere – not an iota, not a scintilla, of leadership.

Instead of facing the grave crisis that might yet result in the schools’ being closed, Perry has blithely gone off on creationism – teach the little perishers the Earth is 6,000 or so years old, that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs, and who cares if the school building is falling apart? (Jan 12, 2006)

Ivins on rhetorical strategy:

Ivins on Perry's incredible hair:

Bush was replaced by his exceedingly Lite Guv Rick Perry, who has really good hair. Governor Goodhair, or the Ken Doll (see, all Texans use nicknames—it's not that odd), is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But the chair of a major House committee says, "Goodhair is much more engaged as governor than Bush was." As the refrain of the country song goes, "O Please, Dear God, Not Another One." ("Shrub Flubs His Dub"—The Nation, June 18, 2001)

Any woman who calls herself a feminist believes in certain broad tenets -- particularly that women have the right to equal pay, equal access and equal rights both in marriage and in autonomy.

Lately there's been some controversy over whether you can be a feminist and be anti-abortion, and the general consensus is that no, you cannot. I don't entirely agree. Now bear with me here.

The problem is that, apart from the fundamental tenets I listed above, very little else is actually agreed upon within this big banner of feminism. Some believe pornography is always wrong (Dworkin and Mackinnon) while others believe it leads to healthier, stronger relationships (Tracy Clark-Flory). Some believe that any sexual relations with a man equals rape (Dworkin and Mackinnon again) and some believe that women should be free to have sex the way men do, freely and without consequences (Jezebel feminism).

So why then, is feminism so instantly exclusive of women who don't believe in the right to abortion, or who believe that an abortion actually constitutes the taking of a human life? I'm not talking about Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter or the women who believe in that "men are the head of the household and women should know their place" crap, but women who believe in equal access and equal pay but simply believe that abortion is immoral.

I'm going to state now that I'm adamantly pro-choice, but that doesn't mean I'm not empathetic to that position, whether I agree with it or not. In fact, I believe this position is acceptable within the big feminist tent, but only conditionally:

• Birth control options must exist that are 100% effective.
• All women old enough to conceive receive thorough sex education, not abstinence-only education.

As we all well know, these conditions aren't close to being met. Yes, we are pretty close to achieving the first, but we are nowhere near the second. You might even go as far as to strike condition 1 and prioritize condition 2, as it is only fair to expect women to face the consequences of their actions if and only if they are empowered to make informed decisions.

If ALL WOMEN are adequately informed and continue to make lifestyle choices that lead to unintentional pregnancies, then I think it is not inherently anti-feminist for you to have the position that abortion should not be allowed except in cases of rape or incest.

I won't agree with you, but that's fine. I don't agree with Dworkin/Mackinnon, and I don't agree with Jezebel either. People keep trying to make it so, but feminism is not now, nor has it ever been, about ideological purity. It's about achieving broad-stroke equality, and there is room for disagreement about the finer points.

But I maintain that, in a system where so many women are inadequately informed about birth control options and the actual, real-life consequences of sexual activity (not the "your soul will burn in hell!" variety of consequence), then it is anti-women to support an outright ban on abortion.

When 18-year old girls tell you about losing their virginity at some freshman party they went to and then whisper to you "it's ok, you can't get pregnant the first time," then how is it fair to make them beholden to the consequences? They may have made that decision to have sex, but they did NOT know what would happen as a result of their uninformed (misinformed, in this case) state.

You will notice that I have not mentioned a 3rd condition, which I consider the most important of all, practically speaking: Society must have the infrastructure to support women who are economically or otherwise ill-equipped to raise a child. If you are going to require a woman to carry a child on the grounds that not doing so is murder, then you have to provide for the child after birth, otherwise you completely ruin the mother's opportunity to achieve those fundamental feminist goals of equal access, equal pay, etc.

So to sum up, in order for an anti-choice position to be acceptable within the big tent of feminism, the burden is on society to provide both robust prevention strategies and post-birth coping strategies for those women you would disallow from terminating the fetus. In American society today, we are lacking in both. Until we have both, I don't even consider women's right to choice worth arguing within feminism.