...Am I dating myself with my cultural references?
moar funny pictures
You lucky duckies! Possibly the funniest thing ever to make it to television, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, is now playing on Adult Swim's website, free, online, right in the comfort of your own home!
Episode One will be up until Saturday, with presumably another episode each week. Get them while you can. You'll be glad you did. If you've ever laughed at a B-movie, if you've ever read a trashy horror novel, if you remember anything about television in the Eighties, Darkplace is tailor-made for you.
Good, wholesome, uplifting folk music from Canada, commemorating that time they totally kicked America's ass when it tried to invade. That second time, actually. The Yankees tried it once before during the Revolution, and that didn't go so well either. But I can't find any songs about it.
Are the Canadians the only people on Earth to have beaten the tar out of a US invasion twice? They're a scrappy bunch. Their obesity rate is only half the US's. When they're all hopped up on maple syrup they have the strength of a hundred beavers and can chew through solid oak. They can regenerate severed limbs using the power of socialism, and their thick, sturdy dollar is bigger than ours. Never underestimate them.
Not every deeply-religious person with political leanings is an insane slavering fascist monster. But no matter how well-intentioned someone is and how leftist and progressive they might otherwise be, every, and I mean every time someone tries to blend religion and politics you end up with insanely stupid juxtapositions like this:
I believe that America is facing a culture crisis. Our national soul has been infected with a virus of selfishness. This selfishness takes on many forms, most commonly greed, extreme materialism, and instant gratification.
So far, so good. But then...
But it is not the obvious individual cases (Tyco’s Kozlowski, Bush’s Executive Privelege, internet pornography) that cause our national ills but rather the fact that they each are outgrowths of a culture that has lost its commitment to the common good.
Ding! That's right. This progressive Democrat just jumped the crazy shark by equating the President's lawbreaking, torture, lies, Constitutional malfeasance, and warmongering with Internet pornography.
And it really is just because he's religious. Because of sin and vice and bullshit like that. He's taken something beautiful and noble like the idea of the common good and ruined it with moralistic scolding.
Censorship may not be a viable or appropriate solution, but do any of us honestly believe that the ready availability of internet porn is not destroying something sacred within us?
Yes. See how he tries to universalise his own personal tastes here? The very wording suggests anyone who doesn't agree with him is likely some kind of Bad Person: they must hate the sacred! A filthy trick, and not one that a rational person who cares about preserving a pluralistic culture with free discourse should embrace.
Study after study shows that porn tends to depict women in violently subjugated positions, and can shift norms of sexual expectations.
Here he conflates two things which he'd like you to believe are the same, but which in fact are very different. It's true that lots of porn depicts situations or acts some might find shocking, and that it can be used to objectify and degrade women. At the same time, however, most people's "sexual expectations" are practically Victorian in their ridiculous prudery, and as a culture we'd be a lot better off if we had fewer hang-ups about sex, were more open about sexuality, and stopped telling people that their natural desires are bad and wrong and shameful and sinful. What could've been a perfectly reasonable statement about porn's negative consequences for women is destroyed by, again, blind obeisance to an outdated and repressive code of personal conduct rooted in religion.
Get a group of liberals in a room and there is little they will not pass judgment on, but when we start to talk about this in our politics, the conversation starts and ends with “So what are you going to do, censor it? Repress people sexually?” This is an irresponsibly false choice. Part of the conviction politics I outlined earlier this week is about calling things as we see it.
This is the real problem with religious politics: "conviction politics". Religious folk are convinced that certain things are true, often with no rational justification. They seek to impose their shining eternal truths on the rest of us in the name of the common good, when their convictions are often, alas, nonsense. Every time we compromise our secularism to make an alliance with the religious, even in a good cause, even to promote ends we can all agree on like less greed and materialism and a greater regard for our fellow people, we give tacit approval to a load of foaming hysterical dribble about private conduct and sky fairies cooked up by a bunch of sandy nomads with heat stroke. It becomes harder to attack that nonsense when the people spouting it are supposed to be your allies. This is how religion works. You give them an opening, and they'll start squeezing in their wedge.