Despite my statements last week, I did wind up finishing David Cross’s book ‘I Drink for a Reason’. I finally found a way into it by reading it as an educational study in why “edgy” comedy seems a lot less funny to many people than it used to, and why it’s growing gradually less popular. (I’m sure that comedians like Cross would say that it’s because “society is getting too PC”, but I’m a big believer in the fundamental truth that only assholes use “politically correct” or “politically incorrect” in anything other than an ironic manner.)

The conclusion I’m coming to is that the central joke behind “edgy” comedy is the conflict between the societal expectations for behavior and the way that the comedian treats their open defiance of those societal norms as commonplace and unexceptional. So the humor comes not so much from the fact that they’re being racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, and generally terrible as human beings, but that someone would stand up on a stage and act that way and not expect to be criticized for their horrible behavior.

Example: There’s a photo in the book of two women I don’t recognize, with the caption, “I fucking HATE these two cunts!” The joke is that nobody would simply drop that admission into a random conversation, because nobody is that openly hateful and misogynist.

The problem is, though, the advent of the Internet has given a voice to a number of people who actually would and actually are. You can no longer assume, as an “edgy” comedian, that people can detect the irony in your vicious misogynistic insults, because there’s no difference anymore between what you say as a joke and what Roosh V says every damn day of his life as a serious statement of purpose. You’re essentially trying to argue a form of special pleading, saying, “If you really knew me, you’d understand that this is all deeply ironic,” but you’re saying it to a crowd of strangers who only know you as the fictional persona you present…and who can compare it to any number of real people saying that shit for real.

It’s especially problematic when some…probably a lot, let’s be honest…of these “edgy” comedians are kind of assholes about some things, like, say, women in comedy (they’re generally agin’ it) and who try the Cousin Larry move of giving their honest opinions about some things, their “just kidding” opinions about other things, and waiting to see your reaction before they reveal which is which. ‘I Drink for a Reason’, to once again use the book as my punching bag, has sections where Cross makes fun of anyone who believes in a religion because they’re spending their lives chasing down a delusion about a non-existent god. He also makes fun of Midwesterners for all being crystal meth addicts. And he expects people to just “know” when he’s being ironic, because it’s obvious to him, so why isn’t it obvious to us?

Basically, “edgy” comedy is running into Poe’s Law like it’s a brick wall. How can Daniel Tosh claim that it’s a joke when he says that he hopes someone gets raped when there’s a guy running for city office in New Jersey on the GOP ticket who said the same thing to a reporter writing a story on him? How can David Cross differentiate his smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” from the smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” displayed by an actual major-party Presidential candidate? “Edgy” comedians really need to up their game to stand out from the crowd these days.

It’s not to say that it can’t be done–Sarah Silverman manages it by constantly tip-toeing up to the line of admitting that she’s putting on an act, then undercutting her admissions with a fresh round of absurd and callous ignorance. Colbert in his old Comedy Central days used his material to constantly make himself the butt of his joke. Even Cross and Odenkirk, when they worked together on ‘Mr. Show’, signposted the premise by starting their act with an open admission that they were just doing it to get hate mail. But the days when you could just say something racist and give people an “aw shucks” grin are gone. Don’t blame the PC liberals, though. Blame the guys like Vox Day who never understood that it was a joke in the first place.

I just finished ‘Raising Steam’, the last of the “adult” Discworld novels (although of course, Terry Pratchett famously considered the difference to be nothing more than branding). It’s the saddest of ironies that even though Pratchett’s memory was failing him by then, this is really the most consciously retrospective of his novels; it is, even more than ‘Unseen Academicals’, a deliberate summation of his stories to date written in the fairly certain knowledge that it would be the last time such a summation would be needed. If the Discworld was a thesis statement, this would be its conclusion.

And just as Pratchett intended, it evokes the memories of all that came before it. There are subtle hints and reminiscences that date all the way back to his very first book–not out of simple nostalgia, but in fact to elicit that spirit of which nostalgia is the exact opposite, the realization that things have changed and that change has been for the better. The Ankh-Morpork of ‘Raising Steam’ stands in conscious, deliberate contrast to the Ankh-Morpork of ‘The Colour of Magic’, and that contrast is perhaps Pratchett’s finest achievement as a writer. He delivered over the course of his career an achievement so audacious that it took forty-one novels (and an array of ancillary materials) to finish it up, offering for the first time an alternative to the path that Tolkien’s devotees had stamped into a rut.

I don’t think any of it was intentional at first; I think that when he started, Pratchett simply realized that the tropes of the Tolkien high fantasy had become cliches, and cliches are ripe for skewering with parody. So the first few Discworld novels were exactly that, parodies of epic quest fantasies (with a tourist standing in for the noble hero, and thinly-veiled versions of various fantasy figures guest appearing) and of apocalyptic “final battles” for the fate of the world. He tossed in all sorts of joking, half-thought out explanations of how a fantasy city and a fantasy world might work, with Assassin’s Guilds that actually regulated murder and gods that depended on the survival of their worshipers, but it was all cobbled together in the way that any good writer will do when coming up with those first mad rushes of inspiration.

And then Corporal Carrot showed up. And things began to change.

Because Carrot was the first fantasy cliche to appear in a Discworld novel and refuse to fulfill his function, even in a subversive way. Carrot was the Rightful King, the Aragorn of the Disc whose role in the story was to return and take his place on the throne (overthrowing the tyrant in the process, of course) and usher in the Good Old Days that once were and shall be again, bringing back the traditions that everyone loved and revered and restoring the Old Order that everyone was so happy with. But he didn’t do any of that. In point of fact, he really stopped being important at all after his first couple of appearances, acting more as a catalyst to transform Captain Vimes into the central figure he wound up becoming. Pratchett’s first real step toward his own vision of fantasy was to say, “No more kings.”

If ‘Guards! Guards!’ took a strong step by critically examining the role of the king in fantasy, then ‘Small Gods’ (possibly his best novel) took a giant leap by examining the role of gods. Because while there are thematic resonances underpinning the Rightful King trope, usually involving nostalgia and its ugly cousin, fundamentalism, most of us really have to think much anymore about a strange man riding in on a white horse to restore the monarchy. (Or, depending on the readership, restoring the authority of the monarchy.) Whereas religion is something that real human beings deal with on an everyday basis. With ‘Small Gods’, Pratchett wasn’t just talking about Fantasyland anymore. He was talking about us. Om was a stand-in for any number of real deities, and Pratchett wasn’t just examining the way that gods are used in the genre, he was examining the way that religion changes and is changed by human beings. The result was a genuinely profound book.

But it was with ‘The Truth’ that things really began to change. Because while Pratchett had started to genuinely resist the conservative (in the philosophical sense, not the political one) bent of fantasy as a genre, which generally views change as synonymous with corruption and in which the restoration of the ancient ways is viewed as victory, he had up until that point generally been articulating that more as a theory than as a practice. He’d introduced a few incremental changes, things like an upgraded City Watch and some thoroughly modern witches, but in general, innovation on the Discworld had been seen as a malign influence introduced from the outside. (As in ‘Moving Pictures’ and ‘Soul Music’. The sequence where the Patrician comes into the offices of the first movable press in order to confirm that nobody involved in its creation had found themselves influenced by strange voices that seemed to come from nowhere has to be the best example of lampshading a trope in the history of literature.)

But ‘The Truth’ ended with a real change. The printing press had come to the Discworld, and it had come to stay, changing civilization on a permanent basis. (This was also where Pratchett put aside “overthrowing the Patrician and restoring some older form of government” as a plot device once and for all.) It seems to have had an effect on Pratchett, forcing him to examine some of his own unthinking assumptions about the world he was writing in. ‘The Truth’ marked the point at which he looked at his relatively staid, unchanging fantasy universe and asked, “Why?” Or, if you like, compared it to the constantly changing real world he lived in and asked, “Why not?”

And so things began to change. The changes required a new character, Moist von Lipwig, who ushered in all of these new innovations and forced Pratchett to see all of his existing characters through the eyes of another. Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”

And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.

‘Raising Steam’ completes a great work, one that says that fantasy does not have to be nostalgia. It does not have to be a longing for an imagined past, where the rightful king reigned and everyone knew their place and never dreamed of more. It does not have to involve faceless monsters and outside evils, and it does not have to be cruel. It gives us something to hope for, so long as we don’t treat people like they were things. And it’s a story we all can join in with. That’s the true gift of his achievement–all things strive, as he puts it. We’re all in this together.

‘Raising Steam’ is Terry Pratchett’s final word on the matter, but I like to imagine that his influence won’t end for a considerable time to come.

This is a conversation that we’ve been having a lot lately, due to the shootings in Roseburg, but I want to make it clear: It is not only in the context of a mass shooting that I object to journalists describing people as “mentally ill”. In fact, part of the problem is that we only talk about it when we’re discussing something that cannot, under any circumstances, be seen as a sane and rational act. It’s hard to stand here and say that Chris Harper-Mercer should not be described as a mentally ill individual when he did something that seems like it could only have been motivated by suicidal depression combined with a narcissistic demand for attention and a sociopathic disregard for other human lives.

But I can’t say for sure that was the cause. I am not a trained mental health professional. What I did in the previous paragraph? It was an armchair layman’s diagnosis using terms I’ve picked up from reading about the field of psychiatry. Understandably, we all do that to some extent; the jargon of psychiatry has increasingly become part of the language of modern life. But I remain a layman, as do the journalists reporting on Umpqua. Diagnosing someone with a mental illness without proper training and without direct interaction with the patient is always a mistake, and reporting that armchair diagnosis as fact is criminally sloppy reporting.

But most journalists are even sloppier than that. I made a guess that the shooter was depressed because he killed himself; I made a guess that he was narcissistic because he wanted to draw massive amounts of attention to his death. I made a guess that he lacked the ability to empathize with others because he chose a method of drawing attention to his death that hurt others without any apparent regard for their suffering. Again, layman’s guesses, not a diagnosis. But most journalists probably made similar guesses, and what was reported? That the shooter was “mentally ill”.

“Mental illness” is as vague a term as “physical illness”, but the latter is never used in modern journalism. No reporter would ever describe someone in a news story as “physically ill”–they would clearly report that the cause of the symptoms was unknown, and promise clear and specific updates as more information was available. They would then update with the opinion of a medical professional who had studied the specific symptoms and treated the patient (and was able to speak on the record regarding the issue), and from that point on they would refer to the person as “suffering from” the specific condition. Chris Harper-Mercer? He’s “mentally ill”, and that’s all there is to it.

That kind of reporting lumps a sociopathic mass murderer in with a compulsive hand-washer, or an agoraphobic. It contributes directly to the social stigma that people who have a variety of mental health conditions have to deal with on top of their health issues–bad enough that they may have clinical depression, now if they talk about their health it sounds like they’re one bad day away from shooting up a college campus. Mental illness is every bit as common as physical illness, and sometimes just as treatable, but we’ve turned it into something to fear rather than something to treat. It has to stop.

Journalists aren’t the only ones to blame, of course. Part of our problem may be that we only discuss our mental health when something’s wrong with us. (If we get a yearly physical check-up with a physician, why not a yearly mental check-up with a psychiatrist?) But as long as journalists persist in the lazy habit of making armchair diagnoses without consulting with professionals–professionals with knowledge of the specific case history involved–and as long as they continue to treat “mental illness” as a blanket term that can be applied to all diseases equally, the problem can never be fixed. I know I’m not saying anything new, here. Many people reading this will probably be rolling their eyes that it took this long for me to write something this obvious. But I have to say it, because every voice helps.

I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.

It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.

But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.

The neighborhood I live in now is a lot like the one I lived in when I grew up. It’s a little suburb of a big city (Minneapolis now, St Paul then) with rows of little tract houses filled with friendly, happy families. There’s a mall nearby, and although it’s a bit bigger than the mall I grew up near (it’s the Mall of America), it’s not that different. It’s a place where teenagers go to hang out, and parents come to shop. There are good schools, because that’s always been a priority for our state, full of giggling children that get a little bit wiser every year. (We hope.)

There’s a Muslim community center a few blocks away from my house. It’s over by the corner gas station, and on spring mornings you can see them unroll a long prayer mat in the parking lot as they teach a gaggle of energetic kids how to face Mecca. A few doors down, there’s a halal market, and hardly a week goes by that I don’t see a woman wearing a headscarf as she goes to her daily job, or a young girl at the library proudly wearing hers because she thinks it makes her look grown-up.

Many of those young girls are at my child’s school. When I go to class presentations, the children form an eclectic mix of racial backgrounds. Some of them are already wearing headscarves even in third grade, and I’m sure the number will only go up as we move from watching elementary school concerts to middle school concerts. They all smile nervously before the program starts, though, and smile much more genuinely once it ends. Their parents all smile back.

Most of those parents have jobs in the area. Some of them work with me in my office; some of them work over at the Mall of America. We all shop at the Mall from time to time, although I’m sure they’d agree with me that it’s mostly for tourists and you can get cheaper prices at the outlet center a few minutes down the highway. But at the end of Ramadan, the Mall fills with happy and excited families, eager to break their fast and celebrate Eid al-Fitr. It’s a little bit hard to find a table on those days, but it’s a lot of fun wishing people “Eid Mubarak” and seeing them smile.

I’ve been told a lot, by a lot of different people, that I should be afraid of the threat of Islam. I’ve heard people saying that Muslims are violent extremists, that they’re a threat to America, and that they take over whole areas and make things unwelcome for people who don’t share their religion. I wish those people could come here, and see my neighborhood, and talk to the people who live there. Because when I see the parents shopping, the teenagers hanging out, the giggling children and the happy families in their little tract houses, all I can think is:

The neighborhood I live in now is a lot like the one I lived in when I grew up.

There’s a lot of stuff flying around the Internet right now about “Gamergate”, a supposed scandal at the supposed heart of supposed gaming that supposed gamers are supposedly crusading against. As you may be able to guess from all the “supposed”s, there’s a lot of bullshit out there. So first, I’ll sum up what “Gamergate” is.

It started with Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer. She had an ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, and the break-up was ugly. Gjoni started airing their dirty laundry online, specifically on 4Chan, starting on a blog he created specifically to do so, posting evidence that she’d cheated on him. Naturally, people were extremely upset that he’d apparently hacked into her private chat logs that she’d cheated on him that she was sleeping with game journalists. Yes, that’s what they’re all upset about! The slight against gaming journalism! Because it’s their ethical responsibility to avoid conflicts of interest because it’s her responsibility to avoid forcing them into conflicts of interest with her sexy ladyparts.

Quinn responded by pointing out that a) her bad break-up is none of the Internet’s business, b) her ex-boyfriend is not an unbiased source for discussions of her behavior, and c) none of the game journalists ever did anything unethical as a result of these relationships. 4Chan responded, as all reasonable Internet gaming enthusiasts do, with doxxing, death threats, and slut shaming. Followed by calling Quinn a liar for accusing them of doxxing, death threats and slut shaming. Oh, and they also insisted that they couldn’t be misogynists, because they prominently backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn (called the Fine Young Capitalists). While discussing on their boards how nobody could accuse them of misogyny if they backed a group of female gaming developers who weren’t Quinn, so they should do it as another way of getting back at her.

The Internet then exploded a bit, with several prominent gaming websites and several celebrities (including Joss Whedon, who gets special mention in all this because Joss Whedon is one of the patron saints of the Internet) pointing out that this is all a huge shitshow that gives gamers a terrible reputation. This led to a bunch of people a) claiming that this wasn’t about feminism and they weren’t misogynists, it was about journalistic ethics and they were merely concerned about the clear ethical issues involved; and b) Quinn was a lying (insert gendered slur here) who had it coming and by the way her lies and sluttiness are also a reason for Anita Sarkeesian to shut up too because they both have ladyparts so they’re in on it together!

This, in turn, led to a lot of people being banned from comments sections as trolls. At which point the cry of “FREEZE PEACH!” went out across the land, and the trolls insisted they weren’t being banned for being trolls, they were being banned because journalists hated being called out on their clear pro-sexy-ladyparts bias. Which led to Kotaku telling their journalists they couldn’t contribute money to games they wanted to see made, because hey sure why not.

At this point, there are a number of people out there saying, “You know what? If this is what being a ‘gamer’ is associated with, fuck gamers everywhere. I’d rather see that particular label die in a fire.” And people coming back with long, defensive posts that can all be tl;dr’d down to “#notallgamers”. Oh, and Anita Sarkeesian had to move out of her home because she’s getting death threats from people who know her address over her latest video about women and video games, which isn’t actually related to any of the stuff with Zoe Quinn but should help you understand why people are calling gamers an entitled culture of creepy fucked up sociopaths right now.

So now that you know what’s going on, what do I have to say about it? Apart from all the opinions that I not-too-subtly encoded into the above summary, of course. Well…

1) Zoe Quinn is not responsible for this shit. Whatever went on between her and Eron Gjoni is none of my business, your business, or literally anyone’s business in the world except for her, Eron, and the other people directly involved in the break-up. I am not their relationship counselor, and am not going to pass judgment on anything either one did to cause the break-up, because I don’t know about it and neither do you, even if you read Gjoni’s posts on the subject because it is not a particularly great leap of logic to suggest that someone upset enough to hack into other people’s private communications and post them online a) may have some other relationship issues, and b) may not be self-aware enough to admit to them in public.

Either way, Gjoni’s posts are plain and simple an attempt to make his ex’s life miserable by airing dirty laundry online. This is not a “journalistic scandal” that needs to be exposed by public-minded gamers for the good of the industry, it’s an ugly break-up that some assholes have taken as a chance to pile onto a woman they already didn’t like that much due to her twin decisions to make games and be female. You know how you can tell? Simple. The gaming journalists involved are getting a free pass. They made the decision to sleep with someone involved in the industry, despite knowing that this could be viewed as a conflict of interest, and they have not suffered any consequences from their employers or from the gamers involved. If this was anything other than slut-shaming, they’d be getting fired or at the least suspended, and they’re not. Primarily because they didn’t slant their coverage to be pro-Quinn one little bit. If anyone tells you that Quinn’s bad behavior is responsible for her current position, they are either lying to you or to themselves.

2) I don’t believe 4Chan when they say they didn’t do it, and I don’t fucking care. It does need to be mentioned at this point that 4Chan insists that Quinn is faking all the harassment she’s receiving, and using them as a convenient target to make herself look good because she knows that nobody will believe them due to 4Chan’s reputation as a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. To which I point out: Hey, maybe you would be more likely to be believed if you weren’t a hivemind of vicious, unrepentant shitbags who love making people’s lives miserable. It is just as easy to fabricate evidence that other people are fabricating their evidence (“we have undoctored screenshots proving that their screenshots are doctored!”) and 4Chan explaining that they didn’t do anything wrong this time is a bit like the Joker pleading ‘Not Guilty’. (And this also goes for anyone claiming Sarkeesian, or Phil Fish, or anyone else involved is faking evidence of harassment. The claims are weak, and frankly if you default to believing the harassers over the harassed, then that should indicate that you need to sit down and have a long, hard think about what that says about you.)

3) If gamers want people to stop talking about “the death of gamers”, they need to do more than just point to all the people who aren’t harassing women. Look, I like video games as much as the next person. I like games in general as much as the next person. But the fact of the matter is, when someone is getting death threats for suggesting that video games and the people who play them have issues with women, it makes me not want to be associated with public enthusiasm for video games. Because that is the face of the brand right now. “Gamer” = “maladjusted manchild who can’t take criticism and endlessly harasses anyone who disagrees with them”. It is going to take a stronger response than “Hey, I didn’t do that!” to counteract that. It is going to take pushback. It is going to take calling out the bad behavior in no uncertain terms. If you’re concerned that you’re being rude to a fellow gamer, or that you’re not giving a fellow gamer a chance, or that gamers need to stick together? This is a good time to fall for the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. People who do this shit aren’t really gamers. They’re assholes who play video games.

4) The Famous Young Capitalists need to be careful about who they’re getting involved with. On the one hand, I feel tremendous sympathy for them in all this. They’re pretty much just innocent bystanders who are being used as props, and they do seem to have some legitimate beefs with Quinn (that are also not anybody’s business, really, unless you’re interested in the minutiae of professional gaming development). But on the other hand, just like gamers in general, the FYC do need to realize that one of the strategies that unreasonable people use to avoid being called to account for their actions is to count on them being reasonable. They count on people saying, “Well, I believe in the principle of free speech and free association, so I don’t want to flat-out tell these people to fuck off, because shutting down conversation is the kind of thing unreasonable people like them do.” But that’s the whole point–the other side is not arguing in good faith. They are only keeping the lines of communication open to allow them more opportunities to harass. They are using the Fine Young Capitalists to make themselves look reasonable in order to continue making women’s lives miserable through threats and intimidation. And so while I won’t tell the FYC that they have to stop, I will ask them: Do you enjoy being used like that? Is whatever you’re getting out of this in money and publicity worth it?

5) Joss Whedon is not actually the patron saint of the Internet. I love his work, I think he’s a great guy, and he should legitimately be proud of himself for having spoken up in defense of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, because the people who are being assholes about this are making a good effort to harass and assault everyone who stands up for them in order to isolate them and silence them. (I’ll admit to a tiny, marginal amount of worry about posting this entry. But the more people that speak up, the less time and effort they can devote to any one of us. The remedy to isolation is unity.) But people like Joss Whedon are not the heroes, here. Just being a celebrity who’s willing to call himself a feminist doesn’t make him special. The people who are special are people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian who get motherfucking death threats and go on with it anyway, because they’re not going to be silenced when they’re doing the right thing. They’re the heroes. Joss Whedon is the sidekick.

(UPDATE: Edited to correct a factual error–Gjoni did not go straight to 4Chan, they picked up on it all on their own. This makes him look marginally better and them look marginally worse.)

“See, the thing is, I’m not sexist. I respect women just as much as the next person. But as a male, I have certain basic biological instincts, and it’s not like they can expect me to simply ignore them. That’s setting aside millions of years of evolution.

“I mean, I don’t even think I’m that bad. There are way worse guys than I am. You don’t even want to be in the same room with them, you know? But by the same time, I don’t think I should be blamed for my biology. It’s just the way I’m wired, you know? I’m not going to lock myself away in a little room for the rest of my life just because some chick can’t handle it.

“And it’s not like they don’t have any alternatives. They chose to come here, you know? They had to know there were going to be guys here, but apparently it’s my job to just undo generations of basic urges just because they’re not ‘comfortable’, whatever that means. That’s the problem with feminists, you see. They think that people can somehow be educated to stop being people. But we’re animals at heart, and it’s not like you can just make that all go away, no matter how much you want to. Scientists all agree on that. It’s basic evolutionary psychology.

“And yet, somehow, whenever I shit myself in public and spatter them with human feces, they keep insisting I should be able to just ‘hold it in until I get to the bathroom’. Like I can just choose when my bowels and bladder get full. You know, if she didn’t dress in something so skimpy and difficult to clean, it wouldn’t even be a problem for her! …hey, where are you going?”

Every time I hear about Geraldo Rivera’s comments on the Trayvon Martin shootings, I always picture him talking to the victim’s family. I picture him sitting there, an expression of Sincere Concern on his face (the one he’s practiced over years of TV “journalism”), perhaps putting a hand on one family member’s knee in a sort of “There, there” gesture. And I picture him trying to explain the position he’s apparently decided is the sensitive, honest and concerned stance to take.

“Yes,” he says, “on the one hand, George Zimmerman did hunt down and kill your unarmed son in cold blood after being instructed by police not to follow him. That’s certainly half the problem. But just as importantly, well…your son wasn’t exactly dressed formally, was he? I think we have to place at least as much of the blame on your son’s clothing choices as we do on the decisions of the raving paranoid who followed your son down the street and then shot him in broad daylight. If he hadn’t been so, well…slovenly…then I feel that there was a very good chance that Zimmerman might have decided your child was ‘one of the good ones’, and left him alone. We’ll never know, of course, but I think that if black people don’t follow the unspoken dress code that white people have decided on for you, then any consequences of that are really on your own head. But, you know, I’m not blaming your bad parenting or your son’s sloppy dress choices. You just didn’t know that wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a nice neighborhood was a possible death sentence for a young black man. Now that you’re aware, I’m sure that you and all your kind will remember your place from now on, and unfortunate incidents like this won’t happen again.”

And he wonders why someone hit him in the face with a chair once…

And it probably isn’t the reason you think.

I’m currently temping at a Business Which Shall Not Be Named (Mostly Because It Isn’t Relevant) and they’re nice enough to have a couple of big-screen TVs scattered throughout the building, mainly because the work doesn’t actually engage the brain beyond the simple motor reflexes, and my particular duty stations me right next to one. This means I wind up watching CNN for the better part of eight hours each day while I work. (This may explain why the posts on my own blog have become somewhat more political lately. Sorry, but hearing Governor Walker explain why he raided the pension fund for Wisconsin’s teachers and gave it to his rich buddies, and why this means that he has to take away their right to negotiate contracts…it kinda gets to ya after a while.)

But that’s not what actually depresses me. (Actually, the Egypt stuff was pretty uplifting; it’s sort of how you imagine revolutions happening in the movies, with almost nobody getting hurt and the noble resistance triumphing simply through being Right and having Stick-To-It-Ive-Ness. At any moment, you expected Mubarak to suddenly remember, “Hey, I’ve got guns and tanks and shit!” And he never did.) Certainly, I’m not fond of CNN’s style of reporting, but it’s not so much that I feel like they’ve got a bias as it is that they seem so desperate to prove they don’t have a bias that they never challenge anyone on anything, ever. A CNN interview with Charles Manson would go something like this:

CNN Reporter: “Mr. Manson, your followers murdered seven people, including a woman who was almost nine months pregnant, and planned to murder others. Do you think that maybe this is something you should apologize for?”

Manson: “No.”

CNN Reporter: “I see. Now, regarding your relationship with Brian Wilson…”

But none of that is what depresses me. No, what depresses me are the ads. I’m not sure whether CNN just has unbelievably low standards, or whether the various advertisers have targeted CNN’s demographics with razor-sharp precision and realized that 99% of the people watching CNN at 1 in the afternoon are either gullible elderly folks or people out on workman’s comp, but watching the ads on CNN all day is like a non-stop bath in human misery. Easily half the ads feel like borderline scams (overpriced insurance, dubious financial advice, lawyers explaining to you how you can sue/outwit the IRS/get a free scooter, the occasional right-wing screed) and the rest drop the “borderline” part. One in particular, which apparently warns of the “END OF AMERICA” that this financial genius predicted, feels like it’s the work of someone about two steps ahead of the law.

And what’s most depressing is that all this is showing on a news network. In theory, at least, these people are devoted to the ideals of honesty. They have cultivated a reputation for trustworthiness, and these ads cloak themselves in that reputation in order to seem like they, too, can be trusted. But they so patently and obviously can’t that you find yourself pitying the poor soul who really does believe that they need term life insurance, or that they can make money by investing in gold, or that the Health Care Reform Bill is unconstitutional and Mike Huckabee really needs their help in repealing it before it’s Too Late. Because you know there are people like that out there, people who believe these ads because they’re on CNN and CNN wouldn’t lie to them. And that, my friends, is why I get depressed watching CNN.

Well, that and trying to imagine how inadequate Wolf Blitzer must feel that he needs to name his news show, “THE SITUATION ROOM”.

The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?

Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)

But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?

The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.

You’ll be forgiven if you’ve not heard of An American Carol, David Zucker’s follow-up to Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, set to precede Scary Movie 5 (seriously, there are five of those fucking things). There’s no trailer, and the movie doesn’t even have an official web page. But, oh, you’re missing out on some surefire train wreck gold if you haven’t been keeping up with the project.

An American Carol is basically a Scary Movie-style spoof of American liberal politics, starring every famous conservative entertainer. Which is pretty much just, um, Kelsey Grammar, Jon Voight, James Woods, and Dennis Hopper. Oh, and Kevin Sorbo. Clint Eastwood, apparently, still wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror afterwards. The cast is rounded out with conservative commentators and country music stars like Bill O’Reilly and Trace Adkins. And basically they seem to have just made a movie where they all run around saying liberals are stupid! for an hour and a half. We’ll see how that turns out for them.

The movie stars Chris Farley’s little brother (Larry the Cable Guy was busy, seriously, not a joke) as "Michael Malone", a hefty anti-American documentary filmmaker out to ban the pledge of allegiance, with the help of the dastardly movealong.org. He gets visited by the ghosts of George Washington (Jon Voight), John F Kennedy (some soap star named Chriss Anglin), and General Patton (totally Kelsey Grammar, I’m not even kidding), and they show him the error of his ways. Hence the "Carol" part of the title, I guess. Michael Moore is Scrooge.

See, it’s clever because the names are almost the same as the people they’re parodying, so you don’t have to waste time that could otherwise be spent rollicking in the funny trying to figure out exactly who each of their targets is supposed to be. They’re doing the work for you! Also, Michael Malone lets out a roaring fart within ten minutes of the film opening or I will paypal you £100.

Apparently a writer for The Weekly Standard went out to the set to rally the troops for their Hollywood Takes On The Left cover story. I will no ruin some of the film’s jokes, because it’s surely going to be funnier to read about them than to actually watch. Um, spoilers, I guess.

Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as a judge who defends his courthouse by gunning down ACLU lawyers trying to take down the Ten Commandments.
Because apparently his copy of the Ten Commandments was missing thou shall not kill, or something. See, it’s funny because it’s stupid to have to win arguments when you have guns!

David Alan Grier plays a slave in a scene designed to show Malone what might have happened if the United States had not fought the Civil War. As Patton explains to a dumbfounded Malone that the plantation they are visiting is his own, Grier thanks the documentarian for being such a humane owner. As they leave, another slave, played by Gary Coleman, finishes polishing a car and yells "Hey, Barack!" before tossing the sponge to someone off-camera.
Wait, this movie has Gary Coleman in it? Playing a slave? And Obama jokes? I take it back, this does sound edgy and hilarious. I like to hope that the scene ends with Chuck Norris kicking Barack’s head off.

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O’Connell makes an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O’Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport–as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video–before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Get it, because Christians would never do anything violent. All those abortion doctors just blew up spontaneously.

And finally, if you were wondering the philosophy governing Zucker’s entire career, it’s summed up succinctly in the article:

"Why be original?" Zucker asks. "I’ve done that. It doesn’t work, like BASEketball."

I’m sure this’ll be a gem. Watch for a huge push from nuttier conservative groups to drive it to the top of the weekend box office, so they can prove that America really loves this stuff, and then for it to flop harder than Battlefield: Earth. At which point they’ll blame the puny man-animal liberals for stifling their expression.

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

A Moroccan-born Muslim woman, married to a French man, living in the east of Paris, with three French children, lost her appeal for citizenship on the grounds that she has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes. And, I mean, she does wear a burqa, and the balance of gender roles in her home sounds like it’s fucked-up. But if France is going to start declaring that it’s unFrench to act in opposition to the principle of equality of the sexes, there are an awful lot of citizenships they’ll need to revoke.

You could start with pretty much every major political figure who endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy over Segolene Royal in 2007 because she was too inexperienced, despite having almost the exact same resume– three ministerial posts, having served as a deputy to the National Assembly, and a former head of a regional government. That includes members of her own party who endorsed the male candidate over her. It’d definitely include the fellow Socialist senator who chose to endorse a right-wing dude because, while Royale may be pretty, the presidential election is not a beauty contest. And there’s no question that you’d have to deport the UMP minister who explained that her best chance of winning would come if her looks could help hide the fact that she’s a bitch.

You might have to start plucking random French citizens and inquiring why only 18% of the parliament is made up of women– behind such noted stalwarts of the principle of equality of the sexes as the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. You could inquire as to why 60% of the unemployed in France are women, and 75% of part-time workers. Why, there are all sorts of things that might need to be cleared up if upholding the principle of equality of the sexes is now one of the major determinants in defining Frenchness.

Over and over again, people assert that they haven’t got a problem with Muslims at all, no, that’s not it- it’s just that they’re so unenlightened toward women! It’s a classic attempt to do some rhetorical judo- instead of saying we just don’t want those people here and looking like bigots, instead they get to play the grand feminists. And if they’re so concerned about women’s rights that they’ll, you know, deny them citizenship for wearing a burqa, then surely we can forgive them if they haven’t quite overcome the whole problem with equal pay, dismissing female politicians as unserious, keeping them at under 20% of business executives (or should it be "exec-cute-ives"?), dropping those power words like bitch whenever threatened, and so on… At least they’re paying lip service to invented obstacles toward an equal society, after all.

And I don’t mean to pick on the French. I like them! But you’ll see this attitude throughout the Western world. You’ll see it in new London mayor Boris Johnson, decrying the way women are treated in Afghanistan on one hand, while his chief of staff defends the fact that he fired the five top-ranked women in city hall on the grounds that women just aren’t as qualified. You’ll see it in every American preacher who weeps for women’s rights in the Muslim world but thinks that their American counterparts are baby factories. And if it bums you out and you’re hoping to find a place to get away from it, don’t count on the pony rides and free health care of France as a safe haven.

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)