Fables of the reconstruction

See the Change

Pet peeve:

Huge surges among Hispanic populations in the Deep South could mean a political sea change over the next two decades, as immigrants become naturalized and they and their American-born children register to vote. ...

This is the correct usage of the phrase, meaning a slow and complete transformation. It just bugs me when people use it to mean a sudden change.

I-95 2010: May 2

Plan to be there.

I-95 2010: May 2

Save the date.

I-95 2010: May 2

Save the date.

I-95 2010: May 2

Save the date.

Triple Word Score

So, I was playing Scrabble with a friend the other night when she put down the word "ago" in a place that opened up the corner spot to me. I added a D to make "dago" and "dey" in the other direction: 35 points. She challenged, not the somewhat obscure "dey", but "dago" because she knew something I didn't: Sure enough, "dago" is not in the official Scrabble dictionary.

There must be some mistake, I thought. "Dago" is a word, it's not new slang, it has been around for a long time, it's not a proper noun. Turns out that in the 90s Scrabble removed a number of words that are offensive or considered offensive from its dictionary, including "dago". I'm not surprised there are some people (there always are) of a certain age who find such things scandalous. What shocked me was that offensive words were removed from a game the point of which was your knowledge of all the words in English.

Apparently, this is how it happened:

While reading [the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary 2nd. Ed.], Judith Grad found several words she considered to be offensive, including "jew", listed as a verb with the definition "To bargain with - an offensive term". Her initial letters to Merriam-Webster and Milton Bradley requesting removal of the words resulted in politely negative responses. Grad wrote to the National Council of Jewish Women, who began a letter-writing campaign in support of her cause. Publicity in Jewish media led to the Anti-Defamation League writing to Hasbro chairman Alan Hassenfeld, who announced that a third edition would be published with the "offensive" words removed.

How did I miss this cultural landmark? Well, most of my good friends are poor but well-educated. When playing Scrabble in the past, we would use whatever dictionary was handy, usually a well-worn unabridged single volume thing. All of the words are in there, even the naughty ones. But now with the magic of the internet, the official dictionary is online, so we were using it this time.

I wondered which forbidden words were on the list and which weren't. It turns out, there is a lot for me to learn when it comes to offending people. I didn't know a good percentage of these terms. I would have expected all of Carlin's Seven Dirty Words to be on there, but of course "tits" has a perfectly innocuous meaning, so that stays in. If "jew" is out, so are the other antisemitic slurs (kike, hebe, yid, sheenie - that one was new on me), as well as their counterparts (goy, shiksa). I also learned "shegetz", which makes my world so much culturally richer. "Popish" is on there, which conjures up images of 19th-Century Know-Nothing riots. And "jesuitic"? Really, that's an insult?

On race and national origin, we've mainly got you covered. So covered, in fact, that I now know a lot more racial slurs than I did before. Ofay and buckra sound like ingredients on a French bistro menu, but in fact they are both disparaging terms for white person. (I shit you not - of course, "shit" is also on the list, so I really shit you not when Scrabbling.) Nigger, wop, mick, tomming, whitie, darkie, gringo, dago, spic, jigaboo, redskin, honkey, squaw, wetback, of course. "Haole" I only knew because of reading about Hawaii when Obama started his campaign. "Abo" I knew they say in Australia, but I didn't think it was a slur. "Chink" didn't make it, understandably given it's commonly used in an inoffensive way, but where is "gook"? "Coloreds" but not colored is on the list, although the plural also refers to laundry. (Too slangy, I guess.)  Did you know "hunkie" is a disparaging term for a person of Slavic or Hungarian descent? Now you do! I was appalled that "greaser" isn't on there, though; I guess they're thinking it's "a person or thing that greases" instead of a Mexican. I was also distressed to see that neither "towelhead" nor "raghead" made the list - perhaps they're too new. "Haji" is clearly too new in its insulting sense, but I look forward to seeing it on the list as it gets updated. But it turns out that "nitchie" is chiefly Canadian slang for a Native American person. Who knew? And I was pleased as a student of history that "pommy" was on the list - I am sure there are some elderly British immigrants who remember when it was last used in conversation. The list also includes "skimo", but I can't find any reference to it online or in any other dictionary - perhaps it's an insult from another planet?

I was a bit let down on sexual orientation insults. Fag and faggot aren't on the list, I guess because they have innocent meanings, but who ever uses them in those senses? "Faggotry" is on there, which makes my day. Dyke is not on the list, being an acceptable alternative form of the word meaning levee, but "dykey" is. Lesbo isn't on there, but "lez" and "lezzy" are. "Poofs" and "nancy" made it, which is sweet - I love anachronisms. And where are "homo" and "het"?

I was surprised to find cultural and political insults on the list, although I guess "redneck" and "fatso" were predictable if it had ever occurred to me to give this topic more than five seconds' thought. "Comsymp", though, th' fuck?

Other, more serious players reacted the way I did:

The news was generally not well received by members of the National Scrabble Association, which was not consulted in the decision. After receiving mostly negative feedback from players, including threats to boycott events, NSA president John D. Williams announced a compromise, the result of which was the publication of the unexpurgated Official Tournament and Club Word List.

This comprehensive list is such a well-guarded secret it retails for about $500. Used. For a game that involves knowing things, this doesn't seem like the optimal result.

This situation made me think of this Penny Arcade comic, which is based on the fact that Xbox Live not only bans dirty words, but preemptively bans words that are likely to become dirty:

A year ago, we saw a quiz thing that asked you to determine which of four odd phrases were euphemisms for sexual acts. By the time we had discovered this question, every item on the list had developed a carnal reputation. That is to say, every item. We are fast approaching a point where ordering a sandwich at a deli will land you in prison. While I'm intrigued by the dystopian undertones of this scenario, I don't necessarily want to live under its strictures, not least of which because I tend to frequent delis.

Also, I'm pretty sure that "Dystopian Undertones" is guttermouth for the male testes. Make a note.

Anyhoo, now that I have studied the list, this dago is ready to compete no matter which dictionary we use.

Also, ham doctor.

Local Programming: Zoe Strauss's I-95 Show Sunday 1 p.m.

You should definitely come out tomorrow:

Strauss is self-taught, the first person in her family to graduate from high school. Her work has been compared to that of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, and collected by museums. But her most meaningful show will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. tomorrow under the I-95 overpass at Front and Mifflin, as it has been for the last eight years, 231 new and favorite images affixed to the concrete pillars.

Copies of the photos, as always, are $5 each, one per customer.

This is the penultimate I-95 exhibit. "Ten years, then I think I'll be done," says Strauss, who views the space and the general public's inclusion as integral to the event, the impersonal industrial space juxtaposed with the intimacy of the artist's labor.

CAPTCHA This

I used to be able to ban comment spam by blocking IPs. Typepad took that functionality away for some unknown reason. I am annoyed enough with the spam comments that I have turned on CAPTCHA. If you don't want to deal, you can authenticate with Typekey. If CAPTCHA prevents you from commenting, and you care, email me.

Facebook Tries Again

Terms of Use Update

Today we announced new opportunities for users to play a meaningful role in determining the policies governing our site. We released the first proposals subject to these procedures – The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook’s operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes. We’ve posted the documents in separate groups and invite you to offer comments and suggestions. For more information and links to the two groups, check out the Facebook Blog.

Update: Max Kennerly says the changes are good:

Facebook twice reiterates that their license is "subject to your privacy and application settings," and that deleting either your content or your account terminates the license to that content.

That is exactly how users expect the system to operate. Facebook also omitted the annoying and erroneous "irrevocable" from the license.

There's more which is of interest to litigators but probably not to most users.

Legal Guide for Bloggers

EFF:

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That's why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

Great Minds, and All That

Duncan Black, 11:16 a.m. Monday:

I don't especially like his people punching the dirty fucking hippies under the bed, but on the other hand if they manage to convince people that Obama is a sensible centrist who wants to do sensible centrist things like build SUPERTRAINS, get out of Iraq, not torture people or invade random countries, strengthen labor protections, reduce income inequality, improve education, provide health care for people, and reduce poverty, while those DAMNED DIRTY HIPPIES just won't shut up about their magic ponies, it's fine by me.

Marc Ambinder, 1:06 p.m.:

In Steve Hilderband's "trust us" caution today, I see a bit of a genius move: By all means, we must reject all the concerns of the die-hard leftists, and instead, move sharply toward the center of American politics, doing such reasonable, centrist bipartisan things as bringing the troops home from Iraq, making health care affordable, and embarking on a massive public works projects and using government policy to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

The parallels are just an interesting coincidence, I am sure.

The Complete Guide to Blogging

This is a great reaction to an invitation to attend a "blogging expo":

Let me save you the trip to Vegas for this Festival of Nonsense.

Blog. Do it daily. Link to other blogs. Make comments on other blogs that link back to your blog. Ask other bloggers for link exchanges. Write interesting posts that have a unique voice. Don't just be a link farm to a bunch of bullshit that you didn't have anything to do with. Be original. Use technorati or any of the other tag services you prefer. Create interesting titles for your posts. Use pictures - they're fun. Use relevant labels. Don't be a corporate voice. Allow comments. Moderate them when they start to get offensive. (This is the "conversation" part you will hear so much about at your conference.) Try a podcast. Give up on it. Try a webcast. Give up on it. Give up on creating a viral video before you even try it. Viral happens naturally - you don't unleash it with a marketing plan. MySpace is NoPlace for your business and you will gain nothing from it other than people hating you. Same goes for Facebook, Second Life and Livejournal. Twit if you want, but the Twitter backlash is coming. For now, it's a good monitoring tool. Oh, one other thing: Customer Service is not a phrase to be tossed about in your Mission Statement. It's a practice. When you suck at it, expect your business to suck.

You can call yourself a Social Media Guru, New Media Maverick or Thought Leader. You can even print it on your business cards. But I don't need to pay a bunch of money to hear you say in two days what I just said in one minute. It's common sense. It doesn't really need to be an industry.

Oh, I also love that the Twitter backlash is coming.

(Via Ripley at Whiskey Fire.)

Suffer the Freshmen to Come Unto Me

One for the anals of spellcheck history:

QOTD

China Hand at American Footprints:

Thanks to the LA Times for reminding us of the difference between traditional print media and the Internet...

...after all, you can't wipe your ass with a blog.

QOTD: Doing It For Cash

Molière:

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

(Via Darker Me and Boinkology.)

If You're Not Lyin', You're Not Livin'

It's a little jarring to see a very mature, bald Mike Stipe singing about "your teenage station", but it's such a relief to hear REM rock a little after years of their wandering in the jerkoff Desert of Emotion I am willing to cut them a little slack:

If you meet him, ask him about his Krazy Kat tattoo.

Bottles and cans, and just clap your hands.

Fever Blogging: To Be or ... Not

I came down with the flu on Sunday night, while at Obama HQ and most likely because we all share computers in the office. So, I have been home since Monday, and looking at the computer (or even sitting upright) has been mostly intolerable, so instead I am reading Shakespeare until ready to sleep again, which is frequently. I've re-read Richard III, Henry IV, and Hamlet so far. And when I lay down to rest I think about the plays until I drop off, and since I am now sporting a temp of 103.1 F, I figured this is the ideal time for me to spout off about something I have no training in: Shakespearean criticism.

My (lengthy) ravings are after the jump.

Well, Fuck

I'll try harder, promise.

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

(Via the small cock at LG&M.)

Holy Indecencies, Batman, There's a Run in Your Leotards!

Five Upcoming Comic Book Movies That Must Be Stopped, including:

Yes, you've read correctly, Captain Marvel in all of that skin-tight clothing, with his rippled muscles and dangling package is actually a 12-year-old boy who, thanks to a secret magic word he learned only by talking to strangers and following them into abandoned subway tunnels, has the amazing ability to instantly transform into the legal age of consent.

Lots of funny there, even if you don't care about comics or movies.

(Via Gib.)

Blogiversary

This blog is now four years old. And getting older every second.

"Not for the Faint of Heart, and Certainly not for the Thin of Skin"

Phawker responds to Saira Rao's sister:

First I would like to commend you on penning the most posh piece of hate mail we have gotten to date — and there have been some impeccably crafted forked-tongued missives, believe you me. (I was going say “articulate” but that would just open a whole other can of worms.) Second, I would like to make clear that the idea to draw your sister as Shiva (yes, I asked for Shiva, NOT Vishnu) was, for better or worse, mine and mine alone and I take full responsibility. It is my understanding that Shiva is both Destroyer and Benefactor and I thought that was emblematic of your sister’s broad satire of the judiciary.

Funny. Even funnier is that Nita Rao would call a depiction of her sister in the pose of a hindu god a "repellant racist illustration" and "a cheap, bigoted joke" when her sister's novel contains this scene:

In the novel’s climax, the judge’s husband dies after long illness, and the cognitive dissonance of the grotesquery overwhelms the putative narrative. According to Raj, Judge Friedman works all through her husband’s illness, curses out his doctors, then dragoons her clerks into organizing a shivah. The shivah scene itself is a nightmare. The judge reads a prepared speech about her husband’s archaeological work; other relatives manage to soil both themselves and Friedman’s clerks with not one but two forms of bodily waste.

By the end of this abasement, a counter-narrative has all but driven the official one from the stage. A distraught woman screams at her husband’s doctors with hopeless hope to plead for any chance to save him. When he wanders off, naked and disoriented, she is unable to deal with the pain of seeing this brilliant former scholar reduced to such a state. She throws herself into her work but can’t keep the grief from breaking through. Her family, never much given to public displays of affection, struggles awkwardly through the shivah, not knowing what to say. And her clerks are too busy flirting with each other to give the deceased’s sister an honest answer about whether the bread is wheat-free, leading directly to severe digestive trouble.

You know what's "a cheap, bigoted joke"? Making shit and puke jokes about a religious ceremony marking the real-life death of someone's long-time husband. And I forget what it is, but there's a word for people who lampoon Jews and Judaism as a whole. Reading her letter to Phawker, I see Nita Rao's got a good vocabulary; maybe she knows what it is.

?!=#&$

When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio - meaning "question" - at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem - readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q  to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Cool. (From here via here.)

I Learned a New Word Today

Here: chyron.

Is It Just Me, or Is Anyone Else Having Trouble Commenting?

I can't seem to post comments to my own blog. Is anyone else encountering this difficulty? Email me.

Update: I turned off the captcha, and it works. But if I get spammed, it goes back on. But turning it on and off requires republishing the whole frickin' site. So ... yeah.

Hey, remember when bloggered was a verb?

Kurt Vonnegut Dead

Zoe Strauss: In Loving Memory of Kilgore Trout.

Barth, Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon. These are what I grew up on.

Blog, Vlog & Podcast

Brian Flemming, on vlogging:

But I haven't figured out how to do it in a way that would actually be more valuable to the audience. Because you're going to die, and I can't imagine using up more of your precious time than I have to.

One day, I predict, when really high-speed internet is widely available, the internet will become like a million TV channels, which necessarily requires high production values. A lot of blogging will go that way, although not political blogging, I don't think, since it's so newsite and inter-blog link dependent. Plus, yeah, reading text into a camera doesn't seem to add much value.

Podcasting, though, seems viable for people who write short posts and then also read them (with changes to fit the format) in a podcast.  That lets people who want to take their blogs to the gym or in the car figure out what they're interested in, and check the web page for links later.

She's Staying! For Now

Aquagirl has agreed to stay on through April, about which I am very glad, since she brings some class to the joint.

Enough with the ribbons already

I spent a lot of time driving around suburbia today, the outside-the-beltway kind of suburbia, and I saw a lot of yellow "support the troops" magnets.  And I was wondering, do any of those people actually do anything to support the troops?  Or do they just think the power of their brain waves or the magnetic force of their car ribbons makes some kind of psychic difference to the guys in Iraq? 

Mainstream Media My Ass

I subscribe to the Sunday Washington Post and read the daily on-line.  The thing about the Post is, I imagine people still think the WaPo is either trying to be objective or slanted to the left.  Ha.  Every week, the Outlook Section gets me.  This Sunday, I was almost all the way through, and pleasantly surprised that nothing had made me rabid yet, when I hit an editorial entitled Lessons of War.  That sorry-ass apologia was spinning so fast, I had to get out the Sea Bands.

Slate, aka the Washington Post's attempt at entering the 21st centur, is now publishing similar crap, although disguised as actual fact rather than opinion.  Take this article about U.S. infant mortality rates.  The article notes that U.S. infant mortality rates are higher than many other developed countries and that while many (silly!) people argue that this shows a need for better health care, in fact, the high U.S. infant mortality rates result from too much healthcare.  The argument goes that, one, the increases in assisted reproduction have resulted in multiples and multiples are often at-risk preemies.  Plus, the author argues, neonate units are cash cows of some sort, so infants are referred to neonate units willy-nilly, where they are promptly killed.  (Because hospitals with larger NICU units have better results than hospitals with smaller NICU units, but lots of hospitals build NICUs anyway so they can kill babies for profit).

Problem is, the Save the Children report cited in the article clearly states the wickedly unsurprising fact that infant mortality in the U.S. is related to low socioeconomic status, minority background, and low education levels.  These poor, undereducated minorities are not having twins and triplets due to in vitro, sorry.  What they are having is low birth weight babies.  There are a number of factors that contribute to low birth weight in at-risk populations, notably smoking, low maternal weight gain, genital and oral microbial infections, and exposure to violence and environmental toxins such as lead paint.  Meanwhile, I don't think hospitals are getting rich off of the medicare payments, because these women don't typically have private insurance.  But, quick, someone tell them how their babies are dying because of too much health care. 

The WaPo editorial that enraged me argued that George Bush didn't lie about the war, he just cherry-picked and "exaggerated" the evidence*; in other words, he was simply willfully ignorant, not bad.  So I wonder, is this article a pack of lies or is it just willfully ignorant?  More to the point, what the fuck does it matter?  If someone with information manipulates that information in a way to give an impression that lies are truth and truth are lies, do we really need to stop and have a semantic discussion about how the lies weren't really lies, they were just mistruths?  Is there such a thing as the public trust anymore?  Now that "mistakes were made" has become the standard answer, is there such a thing as responsibility, or am I just being silly and old-fashioned?  I can't believe it actually needs to be said but: people and entities in positions of control over information, like, say, the POTUS and the media, are responsible to take care with the information they disseminate and can't just pull pet theories out of their asses and pass them off as fact. 

Why Does This Woman Not Have a Newspaper Column?

Ginmar:

On the lighter side, I did make my neighbors take their stolen shopping cart out of my yard where they deposited it, and put it in their yard. Then Molly skittered out and I had to chase her around in my pink camo socks. I had just been doing some ballet exercises with ankle weights on, which occurred to me probably looked to my neighbors like ankle bracelets of the correctional sort. I can just see that dinner table conversation: "They got TWO bracelets on her, man! Dude down the street say she crazy, too, been in the war and all. What'd she do to get TWO bracelets?"

She's funny, informed, angry, and a vet. Someone call the fucking New York Times, please.

Speaking of hate speech...

This WaPo article and this Feministe post about the same conduct are absolutely horrifying. It is about a law-school-oriented message board on which guys discuss female law school students by name in vile terms, threaten them with physical and sexual violence, and post photos of them in hotness contests without their consent. Meanwhile, the guys remain anonymous. One of the targeted women in the WaPo article, was concerned that the postings about her may have contributed to her failure to get any offers for summer internships despite some pretty good credentials. I think back to when I was a 24 year old law student and if this kind of stuff was posted about me, I would have been absolutely sick. Juvenile rumors about my sexual orientation I could deal with, but public threats of rape? Law school is stressful enough without having to deal with that. Hey, girls, you can draw attention to yourselves by being outspoken in class or getting good grades or getting on law review, but proceed at your own risk. Success is just an invitation for men to publicly malign you. Really, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Ann Althouse doesn’t see how talking sexual smack about women could possibly hurt their career options. Seriously. Never mind that women have subject to actual and threatened sexual violence and sexual slander as a way of keeping them second-class citizens in all areas of life for millennia. Malicious gossip about women’s sexuality and vulgar and even just plain belittling talk among the guys have been used to define the men as dominant and the women as lesser since women entered the workplace. I believe Mithras can attest to that better than me, because as a guy, he’s heard it. The women only hear it indirectly. If these guys did the same thing within an existing workplace, it would be sexual harassment of a particularly ugly kind. Now please excuse me while I go medieval on Ann Althouse. I am more interested in issues than the people who spout off about them, but Ann Althouse is so self-absorbed, it annihilates her analytical abilities. For example, the really amazing thing about her post is that she goes into how the really bad kind of internet abuse is the kind that she was on the receiving end of. That abuse consisted of, and I kid you not, people on Sadly, No! posting clearly, obviously satiric posts under Ann’s name. And this is what is truly vile, not innocent women (and their prospective employers) having to read graphic posts about how they should be raped and stalked at the gym. In fact, the first category that Ann gave her post? Anti-Althousiana.

Guest Blogger Aquagirl

For the month of March, my friend Aquagirl will join me as a co-blogger.  We met sometime about 50 to 75 years ago, when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed freely, devastating the countryside. One of the sweetest anecdotes about her that I can tell without fearing for my life is seeing her and her friend the Air Force ROTC officer (who - no shit - Clint Eastwood nicknamed "Lieutenant Debbie") lunging viciously at the television to stab their upraised middle fingers at the image of Jerry Falwell. Good times.

We've stayed close lo these many decades, for which I am grateful, because she is simply one of the smartest people I have ever met. She has been a frequent commenter at the Ministry of Offensive Humor, so some time ago I started to encourage her to blog. But unlike rabid obsessives like me, she has a life, so instead I suggested she might enjoy guest blogging, while readers of this site might like a break from the endless stream of profanity and half-baked political criticism. She graciously accepted. Thanks, honey.

I Must Not Say That Naughty Word or A Gentleman Never Gives Offense Unintentionally

I largely agree with Roy about this:

My only answer is this: language is my metier, and I try to use it to my best advantage. One of the best tools toward that end is the unexpected choice. Sometimes I put academic, literary, or other elevated types of language into situations that do not seem to call for them. (George Plimpton was a pro at this schtick. I remember him writing about Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre, and saying of an act that was about to emphatically get the hook, "The crowd desired that he would be silent.")

Sometimes I go another way and use crude language as a crotch-kick against pretension -- as when I called this thick-necked Men's Rights blowhard a pussy. As for "cunt," well, it's just a fun word.

This response also plays to Ilyka's wider theme: the myth of Political Correctness. No normal person gives a rat's ass what any professor, committee, or City Council thinks of the use of any given signifier. At the same time, normal people know what offends and doesn't offend them -- and in many cases, it is not the specific words so much that make the difference as the way they are used.  Consequently, most ordinary folks of all races would be able to understand and accept Lenny Bruce's "I want to introduce you to the niggers in my cabinet" routine, or Blazing Saddles ("Don't move or the nigger gets it!"), but would consider this white jackass, who thinks it's cool to say "I hate niggers" because Chris Rock said it, to be, well, a white jackass.

In general, it goes a long way toward overcoming any language sensitivity issues people might have if you endeavor to talk to them instead to trying to put something over on them. As long as I stick to that program, though I do consider all criticisms seriously, I feel I cannot go too far wrong.

Right. I get offended by the expression of repulsive thoughts, not the words used to express them. Decency, civility and politeness are all different things. You can politely express intolerant, sadistic ideas, or you can rudely express decent, humane ideas. We do the latter all the time here in Left Blogistan because we've been struggling with years of the straight-faced assertion of the truth and goodness of truly barbaric or moronic notions. In fact, it would be indecent to treat contemptible ideas with politeness, because politeness conveys respect. Similarly, I will not shake hands, share alcohol, or have a meal with some people, such as racists, even though these things are polite. If they find it rude, I'm glad.

Politeness is an ideology. It drains language of emotional content. It's that emotion that can be used to break through complacency and indifference. That's why the rightwingers are so focused on the use of naughty words by liberals - if they can get us not to express outrage, they're one more step down the road to winning. But it's not just conservatives who use this tool. People on the left confuse words with meaning, and so create categories of words which may not be used. For example, when people attacked me for writing "If she didn't have tits, [Michelle Malkin would] be stuck writing at Townhall.com", they focused on the use of the word "tits".  If I had said "If she were a white male, she'd be stuck writing at Townhall.com" (because conservatives use her sex and ethnicity as a shield), no one would have blinked, even though it means exactly the same thing. And, unfortunately, there are liberals who latch onto this tool simply to attack others for their language when they can't win a substantive argument.

This is not to say that offensive language can't be used to express hateful ideas. But let's be clear about which is the problem. Being offended by language per se is a lazy, sloppy substitute for parsing meaning.

Watch This Space

There are some very exciting changes coming in the near future to Fables. Very exciting. Changes. They're coming. Real soon. Just you wait. Very exciting.

What? No, I am not going to finally clean up the dead links, they've been dead forever.  That would be like desecration. Are you some kind of ghoul? Do you dig up grandpa and move him every few years, just to keep it interesting? Don't think of them as outdated URLs, think of them as a makeshift memorial to sites no one cares about anymore.

No, I am not going to go back to posting more porn. Shut up.

No more guessing. It'll be exciting. Soon. You'll see.

Kung Fu Monkey Does Honor Among Thieves

John Rogers of Kung Fu Monkey lands a directing gig:

StudioCanal's other trio of remakes are "Honor Among Thieves," based on Alain Delon-starrer "Adieu Lami"; "Max," based on Claude Sautet's "Max et les Ferrailleurs"; and "The Prone Gunman," adapted from a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, which inspired "Le Choc," starring Delon and Catherine Deneuve.

First into production is likely to be "Thieves," a scam-cum-heist story being written by John Rogers ("Transformers") with a view to Rogers helming and [John] Woo mentoring.

Rock on.

Can She Coach a Football Team?

That's the spirit:

Philadelphia is without a doubt the greatest city in the world and is a breeding ground for challenging and beautiful work. Philadelphia is in the vanguard of contemporary art. Dude, we're cooking with nuclear fission, fuck the Manhattan project.

Ask the Laziest Blogger in the World

You know what they need? They need to make my sporadic, half-assed writing easier:

1. Suggested Links. It takes too much goddamn effort to go out and find links to news articles and other blog posts that pertain to whatever subject I am writing about.  When I draft a post, it ought to come up with a list of such links (with an RSS feed so I can find out when new shit appears).

2. Predictions Tracker.  For a political blogger, predictions of future events are pretty common and more commonly forgotten.  If some asshole like me says, "Within 2 Friedmans, Iraqi troops will have Anbar pacified", then that prediction should be tracked automatically - either by the blogging software or by some technorati-type web app or both - so that when time is up, said asshole is publicly embarrassed.

3. Text Boxes. You know those chunks of text that appear in large bold font in the middle of a newspaper story? They're there to keep the reader's attention on a long, potentially boring story.  The parallel to blogging should be obvious. The virtue of this format is ease of reading, and even for someone like me whose average post is very short in length, you want to make it as simple as possible for the reader to determine if she is interested in reading the whole thing.  Making those boxes should be automated. As far as I can tell, right now it's impossible for me to do it at all in typepad.

4. Footnotes. Come on, I'm a geek who thinks historical references, cultural allusions and wacky connections are fun. It's better for everyone if I can drop a footnote automatically so as to get the tangents out of the main flow.

Of course, there may be ways to do all of those things automatically already, but of course, I am too lazy to even go check first. If I had that kind of energy, then I wouldn't be on typepad, now would I?  I would have just completed the latest update of wordpress on a server in my basement, whatever that means. And I think you know what it means. It means please dumb it down for me.

A Subtle Shift in Geek Humor

Driving through Camden toward the New Jersey Turnpike Sunday morning, we got behind a car leaving the Rutgers University campus there.  It had a red bumpersticker that said, "If This Sticker Looks Blue, You're Going Too Fast."

Third Big Whoop

Today's the third anniversary for this blog.  And in that time, not one single goddamn cat picture.

Enjoy

If you've arrived here via Michael Sherer's post on Salon, welcome. Please poke around and check out my archives, there's some good stuff in there every 18th month or so.  Oh, I tend to the rantish and am profane as fuck, and sex links abound among the commentary - fair warning - because this blog represents a slice of my id (political, personal, and sexual, if those are different), but I think I manage to write entertainingly and even well sometimes.  Hope you like it.

"Notification: Loww ratess"

Spam email poem of the day, by Tyrone Jimenez:

Notification: Loww ratess

! convenient be landowner it chemisorption  some sine or stammer  try bovine some automorphism  on pizzeria not commend  try auger see walter  a nectarine on thick  be barlow but taken  it's recurred may lied  , vessel be catalpa  but paramagnetic try juicy  try pigeonberry , mit  a sack try restive  it implicate it carroll  the plummet a roger  try rime some bide  it care try oar  and lillian some cruz  the chestnut in pooch  and sigma in acclaim  but epistemology on broach  it bony may concrete  try guillemot not antigorite  Naw email hier

"Mortagge ratee approvedd"

Spam email poem of the day, by Ophelia Post:

Mortagge ratee approvedd

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Offering Opportunity at low rates

Spam email poem of the day, by Roselyn Ashleigh:

Offering Opportunity at low rates

go did changed clear very planning. thats pay thought number am your.
respect sense my development strange.
taste action along rose wife,
tomorrow i inside trees profession letter, horses proceeded really degree corner progress. very necessary important ought thats seven,
ought calling tomorrow wife disease pay, went need seven black girls likely.

Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Last chance for lower rates [II]"

Last chance for lower rates [II]

or upstand be ceramium and scorecard  see job not transient  try deregulatory in gentian  may rene try drunkard  see andiron and combine  it carolyn the hat  try terminable some corrigenda  and belfast but cannonball  try deduce in pasteur  the ichneumon try malicious  try brazen or decisionmake  may imperil see antecedent  the valedictorian may familiar  but laszlo on emitted  in denton some gaggle  in downtrodden the graft  see dupe and procession  ! suzerainty may millennia  some country the hindrance  or avocet but hereafter  the mow and el  a schweitzer some ranier  Naw email hier

Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Your account #4362290"

Your account #4362290

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Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Pre-approved Application #twrqL41755"

Pre-approved Application #twrqL41755

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Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Ratess approved"

Ratess approved

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Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Last chance for lower rates"

Last chance for lower rates

see egan it sculptor be bentley  but female some maverick  the resplendent the harley  some elysian see mow  a holland may dairylea  not entourage the differentiate  not programmable but convocate  on mannequin ! bach  but deadline in controlling  it's backpack some derogate  ! fondly ! meant  ! blithe or annex  a tarbell see cynthia  the benzedrine a federal  in ineffectual ! astonish  and eight try killjoy  be diatonic a conscientious  it doe be depression  on calibrate or abide  some unction some homomorphism  ! schnabel a stickpin  be always in usc  Naw email hier

"[S]ome derogate  ! fondly ! meant  !"  Indeed.  "[T]he benzedrine a federal  in ineffectual !"  An astute commentary on our drugs policy.   

Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Re-finance at the lowestt ratess"

Re-finance at the lowestt ratess

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Spam Email Poem of the Day: "Ratess will skyrocket soon"

Ratess will skyrocket soon

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