Friday Frivolity: The “Happy Birthday to Me” Edition!

These frivolous posts are not supposed to be terribly deep and I admit this has to be one of the most shallow.  I have been watching a lot of old shows on my Netflix.  I worked through the entire catalogue of the original Star Trek episodes.  I’m not a hard core Trekkie.  I watched all the original episodes twice when I was in high school and then put them away until... um, let’s just say it’s been a lot of years and leave my exact age out of it.  So enough time had passed that I was curious as to how my more mature eyes would see them, and they had the added bonus of updated special effects.  Actually, they are kind of odd, because they treaded a tough line, making it look much better than the original, but still really fake.  And they couldn’t do anything about the giant Space Lincoln that appeared toward the end.

Let’s face it, that was the moment the original series jumped the shark.  See that look on Sulu’s face?  He’s saying, “dude, that the frak?  Seriously, what the frak, man?”

But still it was interesting to watch them all again, and especially to see how they originally envisioned Captain Kirk.  Originally he was actually much more reserved, much less hammy, and portrayed in Starfleet Academy as being a nerd who had his nose in the books all the time.  Which of course is very different from how he was depicted even in Season Three, or the movies, and especially the most recent Star Trek, although in the last case that difference can be justified by the change in continuity that occurs in that movie.  In the new timeline, Kirk loses his dad as he was being born, so he grows up rebellious instead of nerdy.  It makes reasonable sense.  Certainly more sense than Kirk being marooned on a planet and just happening to run into “Old Spock.”

I Read “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell So You Don’t Have To!

This isn’t a full on fisking (though it is close), but Derrick Bell’s famous story The Space Traders is in the news again because of Obama’s association with him.  I had actually seen that HBO short based on the story and found it to be racist crap at the time, and continue to hold that opinion.  But I admit I never got around to reading the original.  But you can and I did, here.

The basic set up is that aliens come here in the far-flung year of…  2000!

And admittedly some of the fun here is looking at what Bell thought the year 2000 would look like as he offered the set up:

Those mammoth vessels carried within their holds treasure of which the United States was in most desperate need: gold, to bail out the almost bankrupt federal, state, and local governments; special chemicals capable of unpolluting the environment, which was becoming daily more toxic, and restoring it to the pristine state it had been before Western explorers set foot on it; and a totally safe nuclear engine and fuel, to relieve the nation's all but-depleted supply of fossil fuel. In return, the visitors wanted only one thing-and that was to take back to their home star all the African Americans who lived in the United States.

Stratfor Personnel Guess bin Laden Was Not Buried at Sea and Somehow This is News

Back in my Patterico days, both I and Patrick were very hard on Obama’s decision to have bin Laden buried at sea, supposedly out of respect for Islamic tradition (except it wasn’t) before there was any independent verification that we actually killed him.  We felt that doign it that way robbed the families of the 9-11 victims of closure, and gave fertile ground for conspiracy theories.  And so now today via Althouse we get this article from the Wikileaking of Stratfor’s databases:

Leaked: Bin Laden not buried at sea, body moved on CIA plane to US

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Wow, holy crap, that means the Obama administration was not as dumb about this as I thought.  I take it back, I mean...

Except, um, wait a minute:

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says.

(Emphasis added.)  Um, he believes?  As in he isn’t sure?

The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony.

"If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi's ashes," Burton commented in another email. Eichman was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and, tried in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean.

“Which I doubt” means he is speculating...

Why Limbaugh’s Comments are Not a Fluke

So for the last few days there has been a dustup because Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about how she was a law student at Georgetown Law and she and other students had trouble affording birth control pills and the school, which is a Jesuit school, didn’t provide coverage.  Then Rush Limbaugh said this:

"What does it say about the college coed who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?" Limbaugh continued, “It makes her a slut, right?  It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex."

And then he said this:

“So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

And now we see that Limbaugh apologized, which I think is right.  Using birth control does not mean she is a slut, unless you think a woman is supposed to be chaste until marriage.  And no, this is not prostitution under the D.C. Code or any other jurisdiction that I know of.

But in a way, Obamacare and its mandates make this kind of thing inevitable.

We’ve all been there, 17 or 18 years old, and we get into a fight with our parents or maybe a sibling does.   “You can’t control me!” the near-adult says.

And the parent says, “as long as you live under my roof you will do what I say!”

For two hundred years we have understood intuitively that “freedom” and “independence” are closely related concepts.  Hell, when Destiny’s Child wanted to make a feminist anthem for the movie Charlie’s Angels, they called it “Independent Woman.”

Gerald Ford once said that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”*  It also means that the government gets to scrutinize everything in your life.  It’s inevitable.  If someone has to pay for something, they are inevitably going to ask basic questions, like 1) where is this money going to, 2) is this the most economical way to spend the money, and 3) do you really need what I am being forced to buy for you?

Let’s take a less explosive example: Lipitor.  It’s a drug that reduces cholesterol.  If there was a mandate requiring Lipitor coverage for every single person, then the questions would start.  Why do you need it?  Are you eating right?  Are you exercising?  Or more rudely: why would I have to pay for your unhealthy lifestyle.

Or it might get really rude:

(Language warning.)

Friday Frivolity: The Joustin with Justin Edition!

So apparently there is an app in the iPhone called Joustin Beaver!  Here’s a pic of some of it:

Apparently the idea is that it is a light parody of the life of Justin Beiber where... well, let’s Kotaku explain it:

Joustin Beaver is about a beaver, who looks as much like Bieber as a cartoon beaver can, floating down a river swatting paparazzi and signing autographs, all the while trying to avoid being sucked into the “whirlpool of success”

You can even watch it in action, here:

(“Beaver Exposed”?  Really?  You had to go there?)

Yeah, so it’s kind of the usual silly stuff you see in the iPhone all the time.  I mean it’s not exactly Angry Birds or Jetpack Joyride (which is silly, but also a lot of fun).  This just looks silly and like a waste of a small amount of money.

So then Justin Beiber’s lawyers sent the game company a cease-and-desist letter and the game company responded by suing Beiber and his lawyers.

Now first you might rationally wonder “can they do that?” as in, can they sue preemptively this way, and the answer is yes.  They can do that to obtain a declaratory judgment—essentially what we would normally call an advisory opinion, but of course the courts have refused to give out advisory opinions so we call them declaratory judgments.  It’s a huge difference.  (Note: sarcasm.)

And I suppose there is value to that.  Would you invest in this game company knowing that they faced the threat of being shut down by Beiber’s lawyers?  So the game company has a good reason for wanting to get this issue settled.

But at the same time, this seems kind of dumb on the Beiber camp’s side.  The game is just enough “parody” to be protected speech, in my humble opinion, which means that I don’t believe their chances of winning are very good.  But in doing this, they have given something to the game company infinitely more valuable: publicity.  I am willing to bet that since the suit has been filed, their sales has been at least doubled.

This is what we talk about when we talk about the Streisand effect.  It means that the attempt to suppress speech ends up generating publicity that harms your ultimate cause.  And it is funny that it is a common enough mistake that we have a term for it.

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On the other hand, if you have a smart phone you should check IGN’s mobile site all the time.  They have constant app store updates telling you about tons of apps that are absolutely free that make this game look like the POS it probably is.  My favorite free game right now?  Jetpack Joyride, although I wish it had some of the humor of Halfbrick’s other classic (which also stars Barry Steakfries), Age of Zombies.  Seriously, there is very little reason to pay for most apps on the iPhone unless it is really vital to doing something important.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

On Breitbart’s Death: Why Do They Do This?

So today we get the news that Andrew Breitbart has passed away.  I’ve never actually met the guy, indeed only corresponded with him once, after an interviewer implied he was an alcoholic, and just asking a few follow up questions about that.  He wasn’t in my orbit, so much as in the orbit of people who are in my orbit, if that makes any sense.  I mean it is no great disclosure to say that Patrick Frey and Mandy Nagy are friends of mine.  I know Patrick is in shock, and I suspect Mandy is, too.

And it is shocking.  He wasn’t shockingly young to die.  I mean at 43 you are definitely starting to get the warnings about diet and exercise, and so this isn’t like a twenty year old ball player dying, but it is still on the young end of the spectrum.  But it was still kind of out of the blue, and that is shocking.

And I think it is hard to believe because... you half expect him to show up on Red Eye tonight and explain that this is just a massive prank on everyone, like they suspected when Andy Kaufman died.

And of course like clockwork you see the ugly side of all of this.  You know it without me saying it, but apparently many on the left couldn’t help but dance on the grave of Breitbart.  I mean, look, I am not above dancing on the grave of a dictator.  I was positively overjoyed when Kim Jung Il died, even writing “may you roast in flames you evil son of a bitch.”  But he was a dictator, a tyrant, and well... even my state flag advocates for the death of tyrants:

But all Breitbart was, was a political enemy.  Not a tyrant but just a guy who engaged in speech some didn’t like.  And because of that, many on the left are cheering his death.

I am not going to quote this ugliness to you.  I mean if you have to look, you can find it here, here, here and here, but really do you need to look?  Do you have any doubt what kinds of things they said and will say?  Of course not.  It’s all “yippee! He’s dead!  A person I disagree with is dead!”

Yes, yippee a wife is without her husband.  And his four young children are without a father.  And friends across the country break down in tears:

And the predictability of this ugliness—dancing on his grave before it is even dug—robs me of anything to say.  It’s already been said in other instances where famous conservatives (or libertarians as was the case with Breitbart) have died, or been diagnosed with dread diseases.  And moreover when people have said these kinds of awful things, other people pointed at it and denounced their ugliness, so even that part is predictable.

So we know what they are going to say, and they know we are going to report it and denounce it and it is going to make them and the movements they represent look bad.  And they do it anyway. They know it is going to hurt their pet causes, but they still do it anyway.

And all one can conclude is that they can’t help themselves.  They feel so much joy at his death that even knowing it will hurt their cause, embarrass any publication they work for, and generally convince decent people that they are cretins, they have to do it anyway.

And maybe I am wrong in a way for not recording and reciting the vile things they said personally.  After all, as Jonah Goldberg said in that interview: “One of his favorite pastimes was to retweet all of the hate that people threw at him because he considered it a badge of honor.”  So somewhere up in heaven right now, Breitbart is checking his holy twitterfeed and smiling at all the hate being spewed at him.  And maybe the best tribute to him is to publicize this spewing of hate.

But I don’t have it in me to do that right now.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Julian Savulescu of the Journal of Medical Ethics Whines That All this Speech is a Threat to Freedom of Speech

So yesterday I told you about a horrifying piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “After-Birth Abortion: why should the baby live?”  In it they argued that well some babies are so deformed or whatever that they really shouldn’t be allowed to live and so we should be allowed to kill them and call it After-Birth Abortion to make it sound less horrifying than the correct term (which is infanticide)?

You think I am exaggerating?  Well, go and read the original and judge for yourself.

One aspect I didn’t get into in my original post is that, well, this shouldn’t surprise you but some people have had some very strong reactions to it.  So we get Julian Savulescu, Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics writes a piece entitled “Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion.”

Now he starts off reasonably enough talking about how they got death threats.  “This article has elicited personally abusive correspondence to the authors, threatening their lives and personal safety.”

That is undoubtedly wrong, and I hope they have reported such death threats to the authorities and that the authorities take it appropriately seriously.

But then he complains about “abusive emails” writing:

The Journal has received a string [of] abusive emails for its decision to publish this article. This abuse is typically anonymous.

I am not sure about the legality of publishing abusive threatening anonymous correspondence, so I won’t repeat it here. But fortunately there is plenty on the web to choose from. Here are some responses:

“These people are evil. Pure evil. That they feel safe in putting their twisted thoughts into words reveals how far we have fallen as a society.”

“Right now I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution under their code of ‘after birth abortions’ they want to commit murder – that is all it is! MURDER!!!”

“I don‘t believe I’ve ever heard anything as vile as what these “people” are advocating. Truly, truly scary.”

“The fact that the Journal of Medical Ethics published this outrageous and immoral piece of work is even scarier”

(Comments from http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ethicists-argue-in-favor-of-after-birth-abortions-as-newborns-are-not-persons/#comments)

He goes on (and on) but here is the real whopper, folks, when he says this:

What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.

I think it is time for a Rule 5 facepalm:

Now of course one of the comments he quoted above borders on an actual threat, saying “I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution...”  I am not sure that is an actionable threat—and indeed the answer might vary wildly by jurisdiction—but I think perhaps a police officer should go by this person’s house and discuss his or her intent in writing that.

But the other comments?  They are nothing more than citizens expressing their opinions.  And contrary to what Mr. Savulescu says, criticism is not a threat to freedom of speech.  That is indeed, what is supposed to happen in a free society.  When someone says something you don’t like, you don’t threaten them or bomb them, you just counter them with your own speech.

The Journal of Medical Ethics Imitates South Park (By Advocating “After-Birth Abortions”)

I have only started to read the article by Alberto Guibilini and Francesca Minerva, entitled (risibly) After-Birth Abortion: why should the baby live?, but it is so full of evil I am likely to fisk it at a spare moment.  Seriously, it is so bad that it falls into a rare exception to Godwin’s Law.  As you might know, Godwin’s law stands as an injunction against comparing anyone or any policy to Hitler, the Nazis, etc.  But there is an exception: when they actually sound like Nazis.

You know, like this:

Euthanasia in infants has been proposed by philosophers for children with severe abnormalities whose lives can be expected to be not worth living and who are experiencing unbearable suffering....

Although it is reasonable to predict that living with a very severe condition is against the best interest of the newborn, it is hard to find definitive arguments to the effect that life with certain pathologies is not worth living, even when those pathologies would constitute acceptable reasons for abortion. It might be maintained that ‘even allowing for the more optimistic assessments of the potential of Down's syndrome children, this potential cannot be said to be equal to that of a normal child’.  But, in fact, people with Down's syndrome, as well as people affected by many other severe disabilities, are often reported to be happy.

Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least) acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion. Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

So living with a “severe condition” including Down’s Syndrome is not really in the interest of the person with that disability.  But they aren’t willing to endorse killing a full “person” with Down’s but if you can kill a fetus for having Down’s then it is fully justifiable to kill a newborn for the same reason.

See what I mean?  Its evil stuff.

And I actually shivered at the phrase “lives can be expected to be not worth living” given how similar it sounded to the phrase “life unworthy of life” used by the Nazis when justifying first the murder of the handicapped and then later the slaughter of the Jews.

Although to their (limited) credit their use of the term “after birth abortion” is acknowledged to be bull____ designed to make the concept more palatable than the correct term which is infanticide:

In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.

Which is where life truly becomes absurd.  Because did you know that South Park has a parody of this?  Here’s a scene from an unofficial script that lines up with my memory of the episode, when Mrs. Cartman decides to get an abortion:

Liane:              I want to have… an abortion.

Receptionist:   Uoh well, we can do that. This must be a very difficult time for you, Mrs.…

Liane:              Cartman. Yesuh- it's such a hard decision, but I just don't feel I can raise a child in this screwy world.

Receptionist:   Yes, Ms. Cartman-if you don't feel fit to raise a child, then abortion probably is the answer. Do you know the actual time of conception?

Liane:              About - eight years ago.

Receptionist:   [processing] …I sseee, so the fetus is…

Liane:              Eight years old.

Receptionist:   Ms. Cartman, uh- eight years old is a little late to be considering abortion.

Liane:              Really?!

Receptionist:   Yes- this is what we would refer to as the - "fortieth trimester"

Liane:              But I just don't think I'm a fit mother.

Receptionist:   Wuh… But we prefer to abort babies a little- …earlier on; in fact, there's a law against abortions after the second trimester.

Liane:              Well, I think you need to keep your laws off of my body.

Receptionist:   Hmmmmm. Tsk, I'm afraid I can't help you, Ms. Cartman-if you want to change the law, you'll have to speak with your congressman.

Liane:              [rises from the chair] Well, that's exactly what I intend to do! Good day! [exits]

So yeah, they are proposing what South Park already parodied... in 1998.  I mean that episode had Mrs. Cartman sleeping with various politicians in order to lobby them to change the law, including...  President Bill Clinton.  That is how old that parody is.

I think the only thing left to do, is show a South Park facepalm…

Really, words are failing me on this one.

(H/t: Hot Air.)

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

Christina H. Vents on Anti-Asian American Racism

This Cracked article isn’t very funny, but I think for the most part it is pretty insightful: 4 Things the Jeremy Lin Story Reveals About Modern Racism.  Actually I think the title is pretty misleading.  It is really pretty focused on anti-Asian American racism, and I don’t think most of it is highlighted by the Lin story, but it’s still an interesting perspective from someone who grew up facing this crap.

Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from it:

[I]f someone called me a "gook," for example, my immediate gut reaction, before even thinking "racism," would be "THAT'S NOT EVEN THE RIGHT RACE." I know that critiquing the accuracy of a racist joke seems sort of like criticizing the construction quality of a cross being burned on someone's lawn, but in a weird way, someone not even being informed enough about you to use the right slur is a sting in its own right.

You want to annoy a Chinese-American? Make some sushi jokes, or kimchi jokes, or maybe even some sweet and sour pork jokes. Apparently not a lot of people know this, but there's a number of dishes that Chinese people really don't eat a lot of, and they're mainly for appeasing the mostly white clientele of many Chinese restaurants. Sweet and sour pork is one of them.

If you want to do a "This is what Chinese people be like" joke, you probably want to talk about how they can't get enough of the tapioca tea or something. That'll hit a little closer to home.

There is some nits to pick.  For instance in modern taxonomy, the Vietnamese are not a separate race from other Asians, but only a separate ethnicity—although it is worth noting that about a hundred years ago, what we call ethnicities they called “races.”  So they believed there was a “French” race, an “English” race and so on.

And talking about the piece as a whole one of the big things she leaves out is the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, that somehow Asian-Americans, however long they live in America, are assumed to be FOB (Fresh Off the Boat).  And it’s a really big oversight in her article.  For instance, she talks about how sentiment against Asian countries often bleeds into sentiment against Asian Americans.  Which is obviously true, but you can’t really convince people to stop disliking China or something like that.  I mean it is a dictatorship after all, so while this is really pretty clumsy...

…you can’t exactly take criticism of China off the table.  What really has to be done is an uncoupling in our minds between an American and their “mother country.”  I mean I am almost 50% German, and none of my family spent a day in an internment camp.  If memory serves a few Germans and Italians were rounded up, but it was extremely selective, based on things like individualized suspicion and evidence.  You know as opposed to our policy with the Japanese, which was to say “frak it” and round up every man, woman and child.  With Germans and Italians it was generally assumed that they had broken ties with the “mother country” that indeed now America was their “mother country.”  On the other hand, it was assumed that Japanese Americans were still ready to go all kamikaze for their Emperor-God.

So if Sea World is Slavery, Then Isn’t This Genocide?

On petard hoisted:

Documents published online this month show that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization known for its uncompromising animal-rights positions, killed more than 95 percent of the pets in its care in 2011.

The documents, obtained from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, were published online by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit organization that runs online campaigns targeting groups that antagonize food producers.

Fifteen years’ worth of similar records show that since 1998 PETA has killed more than 27,000 animals at its headquarters in Norfolk, VA.

In a February 16 statement, the Center said PETA killed 1,911 cats and dogs last year, finding homes for only 24 pets.

So strap yourself in, because I am going to get a little philosophical again.

Now I confess, normally I wouldn’t care very much about any organization killing lots of animals.  While only finding homes for 24 pets is a pretty pathetically low number I can’t say with any certainty that this is an unavoidable result.

But when an organization gets so high and mighty as to claim in court that being a trained animal at Sea World is a form of slavery, then it becomes relevant.

And it is worth going back to that “Sea World is slavery” argument for a second.  In that suit they were seeking, in part, a release of the orcas from Sea World.  But is that really in the best interest of the orcas?